Highlights
The Directive Memo has a clear impact on our collectively bargained CBA. The SFSU administration however did not bother to bargain with the union.
We see the Directive Memo as allowing for sweeping and permanent change in the way the university is run.
It is effectively using the pandemic and the economic crisis that it has led to permanently undermine faculty governance in favor of full administrative control.
The sweeping changes contemplated to faculty workload, program development, teaching conditions, class size and other matters is a violation of the contract.
Article 3.1 of the CBA states:
This Agreement constitutes the entire Agreement of the Trustees and the CFA, arrived at as a result of meeting and conferring. The terms and conditions may be altered, changed, added to, deleted from, or modified only through the voluntary and mutual consent of the parties in an expressed written amendment to the Agreement. This Agreement supersedes all previous agreements, understandings, policies, and prior practices directly related to matters included within this Agreement."
In other words, changes that affect our working conditions, the conditions laid down in the contract, cannot be summarily imposed on the faculty but must be negotiated through the collective bargaining process. The changes proposed in terms of workload, course sizes, the planning of programs and other issues set out in the Directive Memo therefore exceed and violate this mandate.
Article 3.2 further states that:
Except as provided elsewhere in this Agreement, the CSU and the CFA, for the life of this Agreement, each voluntarily and unqualifiedly waives the right, and each agrees that the other shall not be obligated to bargain collectively with respect to any subject or matter referred to or covered in this Agreement, or with respect to any subject or matter not specifically referred to or covered in this Agreement, even though such subjects or matters may not have been within the knowledge of the parties at the time that they negotiated or signed this Agreement.
Article 8, Faculty Participation, sets out the rules by which the CFA is to be regularly consulted with for matters that affect working conditions. While we have recently once again begun to meet regularly with the president and provost and labor management meetings are held once a month, there was no serious negotiation about the basis for the Directive Memo.
We have already asked for a meet and confer on this matter and are considering filing an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge with the PERB (Public Employees Relations Board). Having now filed a request for a "Meet and Confer" on February 5th 2021. Our letter states: “it appears that implementation is proceeding without regard to our rights under HEERA and the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The policy will affect faculty in the areas of workload, academic freedom, and shared governance. Please cease implementation until we have had time to meet and confer over this policy change.”
We further note that Article 4.2 says:
No later than sixty (60) days after a written request by either party to meet and confer, negotiations regarding a substitute provision(s) for the invalidated provision(s) shall commence."
In other words, nothing in the Directive Memo can be put into effect without meeting and conferring with the CFA.
The memo itself would institute new rules that strip faculty of their shared governance power under CSU and AAUP policy.
4-4 Teaching load
Many of the proposals in the administration's Directive Memo constitute changes to established senate policy. One example of this is the move to allow for a 4-4 teaching load for certain faculty under certain conditions. The Directive Memo intends to revise the workload policy and establish a new system of “accountability” and “clear expectations for achievement” in order to qualify for the fourth course equivalent release, so that “post-tenure faculty members may teach a fourth course in lieu of research, scholarship, and/or creative activity.”
Shared governance rules assign to faculty the primacy in evaluating research through the system of peer-review. The Directive Memo is proposing an infringement on the current practice by introducing administrative criteria and oversight in the current system through a new process “that will be determined by Academic Senate policy and is expected to involve college deans, Faculty Affairs, and the programs themselves.”
The process to establish those expectations and norms already exists: it is in the existing RTP criteria for Tenure and Promotion for every department which are re-evaluated every 5 years. Deans and Academic Affairs should not be involved in that process of establishing new criteria, and the existing process already allows for the “accounting” of these 3 WTU. As the move to a 3-3 teaching load came from the senate itself, such a move amounts to overwriting the senate's own policies with administrative fiat.
Course Management
According to the directive memo, many issues such as the determination of course caps is to be vested exclusively in the dean's office of our various colleges. The memo says that:
"Caps will be raised wherever possible, especially when doing so will allow us to offer fewer, but larger, sections of the same course. Deans will determine appropriate enrollment caps for their colleges before submitting their 2020-21 budget proposals, which may include TAs for larger classes.”
This means that faculty will have no say in determining their own class sizes. This means that pedagogical considerations about class size will be eliminated in favor of a top down approach. Similarly, class minimums are to be enforced through the dean's office.
This same logic applies to scheduling and determining who teaches which classes. The Directive Memo states that:
"“As chairs plan their programs’ Fall 2021 schedules, they are expected to manage instructional costs by placing tenured and tenure-track faculty in areas of high student need and impact, reducing the number of sections for multi-section courses, and minimizing non-required courses and electives.”
That is a decision that pertains to the faculty of the department, who are the experts on academic matters, and who usually decide on the best course offering for students, not the Dean or the Provost. According to the Directive Memo, schedules will be made by administrators with a new set of imposed criteria. Scheduling should be a faculty decision.
Program Planning
The Directive Memo again erases the faculty as the key decision-makers of Programs and Degrees.:
“Long-term academic program planning will help San Francisco State build enrollment and establish sustainability by aligning its academic program mix with the needs of students and their future employers and communities. Beginning in the Academic Year 2021-22, colleges will develop long- term academic program plans in light of student enrollment projections, program review findings, and regional workforce needs as determined by data and market analyses. Plans for future tenure-track hiring and program development, revision, or discontinuance should be integrated with these plans. As well as focusing at the college level, long-term academic program plans should involve and inform university-level academic planning in collaboration with the Academic Senate.”
It sets new directives and criteria to be implemented “in collaboration with the Academic Senate”, modifying the established process by which the existing academic units and the Academic Senate decide on program and degree matters.
Academic Freedom
Finally, the Directive Memo also threatens the academic freedom of faculty. It proposes that the curriculum and Programs taught at SFSU are determined by “regional and workforce needs”, “student enrollment projections” and “market analysis”, and not through a faculty peer-reviewed process. All of this, needless to say, will be entirely determined and directed by the administration with minimal, if any faculty consultation.