The administration greeted more than 70 staff members on Monday morning with news that they won’t be working as much in the coming year. One or two months are being cut from their positions and most of the cuts will take place when university attendance is at its lowest in June and July.
The president’s office decided to slash staff hours to help ease budget woes in a year when HSU has had to deal with a 12 percent (or $12 million) budget cut.
The cuts will affect 52 staff members, 17 student workers, five faculty positions and will save $750,000 in salaries and benefits. The five faculty are all librarians. Most of the staff work for Student Services in clerical positions or as technicians.
The cuts come on top of furloughs this fall and spring semesters. The president of the local chapter of the CSU Employees’ Union Steve Mottaz lamented the cuts. He said that state leaders have squandered numerous chances to fix the budget, and that people in less prestigious positions end up paying the price. Mottaz said, “Staff are generally the people going out the door.”
Academic Senate President Saeed Mortazavi was more blunt. At Tuesday’s Academic Senate meeting he said, “It was a Black Monday for HSU.”
Administrators’ hours will not be cut. Provost Robert Snyder dismissed the apparent disparity. “It doesn’t make much sense to say that because we don’t have the art department open 12 months a year, that we don’t have to have the dean’s office open all year.” Snyder said that the university could not function without its administrators working year-round.
He said compared to other CSU’s, HSU actually has a low number of administrators. He cited data from a report by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which shows that HSU has about 10 fewer administrators than the comparison group median.
Mortazavi disagrees. He said that it doesn’t make sense to compare HSU to larger CSU campuses regarding the number of administrators. He believes that HSU could fulfill its administrative functions with fewer, and lower ranking administrators.
There are four vice presidents at HSU, which has slightly over 7,000 students. The four vice presidents at CSU San Diego are responsible for over 34,000 students.
Mortazavi added that administration did not consult the Academic Senate in the decision to make the cuts. “This is the administrative prerogative. I personally told the provost more than a few times [that] I hoped he would reduce his budget by reducing deans and assistant deans to 11 months, and he said he could not do that,” said Mortazavi.
Snyder said the reduced hours are the result of an internal assessment. Programs that are open for summer classes will need to operate on a skeleton crew, which Snyder said is because of low summer enrollment. Only 500 students will attend summer classes this year. That is half as many as last summer. HSU is required to reduce enrollment by six percent as part of an overall enrollment reduction in the CSU system.
Administrators asked librarian Shanon Chadwick to attend a private meeting on Monday. They told her that her pay will be cut by about 13 percent in the coming year, and that she will not be able to work in the library over the summer. It wasn’t totally unexpected. The provost had been evaluating librarian positions for a while, but Chadwick said that it was still hard hearing that the cuts were official. She does not expect to have to find another job but anticipates some hard times. “I’ll just have to make do with less.”
Be the first to comment on this article!