During the week of March 8th, CFA will be holding an online referendum open to ALL faculty on two important questions:
Question #1: Do you agree with the proposed actions in the Provost Directive Memo of January 28th?
Question #2: Should faculty, staff and students be able to participate meaningfully in the budget process?
How the vote will happen:
How do I vote? CFA will email all faculty members with a link to the secure union website to vote on March 8th. Alternatively you can go to the CFA-SFSU union website starting March 8th and vote there.
Do I need to be a union member to vote? No, the vote is open to ALL faculty.
Is the vote secure? Yes, your name and your vote will be separated by election staff. Any duplicate votes will be eliminated. Then the anonymized voting results will be sent to the Elections Committee for counting and verification.
How will the votes be counted? We will use our existing trusted and transparent system of union elections. The CFA Elections Committee will count ballots starting March 15, and send results to the CFA Executive Board who will publish them.
What your vote means:
If you vote NO on Question #1, it means you OBJECT to:
Permanent changes being proposed to overcome a temporary crisis;
The process by which we are asked to work more, with fewer colleagues;
A weakening of the 3/3 teaching load for tenure/tenure track faculty;
Claims of structural deficit without clear evidence that such a deficit exists;
“Budget realignment” that does nothing to limit the number or wages of administrators;
Discontinuance of academic programs based solely on enrollments;
A hiring freeze for T/TT faculty and letting go of lecturers while still hiring administrators;
Permanent surrender of faculty self governance over issues like course caps, program development, and minimum class sizes.
If you vote YES on Question #2, it means that you SUPPORT:
Total transparency in the budgeting process including how external monies are spent, budget priorities, number of administrators and how they are remunerated, platforms used for various administration functions, and much more;
Faculty self-governance and a reversal of years of increasing administrative power and control of every facet of academic life;
The refusal of divide and conquer strategies that set faculty against staff, T/TT faculty against lecturer faculty, etc...;
A university where faculty, staff, and students are prioritized and have meaningful and ongoing access to critical information about budgets and enrollment as well as actual power in making decisions on how monies are distributed and prioritized (as opposed to cursory "consultation").
On other pages of this site you’ll find a summary of our own University budget research, and our explanation and vision for true shared governance at SF State.
Background:
On January 28th, 2021, the Provost released a set of directives that would result in drastic changes to instructional activities with the ultimate result of disenfranchising lecturer and T/TT faculty as well as the students we serve. As a result of our collective mobilization and organizing to make faculty voices heard, the Provost has put the memo on a “pause.” But we are not done.
Why vote?
Because we want to show that we not only reject the premises upon which the directives were based but also that we reject each policy that the administration has sought to advance.
VOTE NO on Question 1 to REJECT THE MEMO!
VOTE YES on Question 2 to BUILD AN EQUITABLE BUDGET!