CFA Members and Students for Quality Education Protest Board of Trustees Meeting

Chants of “Your time is up! Your time is up!” rang out of the mouths of more than a hundred CFA members and Students for Quality Education (SQE) as they gathered outside the Chancellor’s Office in November to protest the CSU Board of Trustees meeting. Their message, directed at Chancellor García and the CSU trustees, was unmistakable: they are unfit to lead the CSU.

“The Chancellor and the Board of Trustees are in those positions because we are here, not because they are there,” declared CFA Vice President Margarita Berta- Ávila. “We tried their structure. We tried to go through their processes by going to the Board of Trustees meetings, by speaking for one minute before being cut off. It might not seem symbolic at all, but it is symbolic, because it represents the dismissiveness and the disrespect that we are all dealing with every single day.”

Instead of offering public comment at the meeting, faculty, students, and staff took to the area outside, staging a powerful protest in defiance of their refusal to acknowledge our concerns.

The only time a CFA member entered the meeting was to present the trustees with a set of initial bargaining proposals for a successor faculty contract. We expressed our intent to bargain with CSU management over improved salaries that address inequities correlated with race, gender, and other identities. Furthermore, we plan to provide more stability for faculty with temporary and permanent appointments and assignments. Among additional concerns, we also aim to establish a clearer definition of workload based on pedagogically appropriate class sizes, as well as adequate counselor to student ratios.

At the rally, faculty, staff, and students took turns addressing their shared concerns about the rising cost of student tuition and fees, the stifling of free speech and academic freedom, the misallocation of funds, and a complete absence of consultation and shared governance with the real stakeholders of the university. CFA members also read letters of support from the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the Orange County Labor Federation, underscoring the solidarity of the labor movement.

Addressing workload concerns, Aimee Escalante, CFA Monterey Bay Faculty Rights Chair and CSU Monterey Bay Lecturer, spoke to the crowd, “They’re cutting sections of classes, and they’re doubling the size of some classes. My class that I teach, there’s a waitlist of nine students already, and they’re all trying to find out how they can get in the class because they need to graduate. I have to tell them no, because if I let them in, the university will say, ‘Oh! Now your class can be double in size. We’ll keep that going moving forward.’ ”

“The Chancellor’s Office and the Board of Trustees are showing no leadership,”

– CFA President Charles Toombs.

For Michelle Ramos Pellicia, CFA Associate Vice President, South, what troubles her most is management’s disregard for the liberal arts. With the CSU trustees’ decision to approve the California General Education Transfer Curriculum (Cal-GETC), liberal arts courses will be further diminished. “I know firsthand the transformative effect of the humanities in our lives. Without the humanities, we’re spitting out product. With the humanities, we’re cultivating our minds, to understand different ways of being, different ways of thinking… our own history. We should all be multilingual. We should all be experts not only in US history, but Chicanx, Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Native American history. This is who we are,” said Ramos Pellicia, CSU San Marcos Professor.

The lawn outside the Chancellor’s Office were lined with signs from CFA Sacramento’s informational art installation titled “Free Speech Doesn’t Need Permission” to remind management that their Interim Time, Place, and Manner policy was furthering oppressing people in historically marginalized communities.

“The Chancellor’s Office and the Board of Trustees are showing no leadership,” said CFA President Charles Toombs. “They’re threatening to take our jobs, particularly from our lecturer faculty. During the September Board of Trustees meeting, they wouldn’t even let us use the restroom or drink from the water fountain. We’re a security threat to them.”

These exclusionary acts continued into November’s Board of Trustees meeting, as CFA members – apart from a couple of faculty and students in wheelchairs or religious reasons – were still denied access to facilities inside the publicly funded office. When asked why, members were given varying reasons before being directed to use the portable toilets outside.

Lieutenant Governor Tony Thurmond, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, and Speaker of the California Assembly Robert Rivas were all made aware of the issue. Despite their efforts to reach Chancellor García to address this injustice, she disregarded them and failed to return their calls.

Halfway through the protest, CFA members and staff, joined by SQE, staged a playfully pointed guerilla theater performance that underscored management’s apathy to the suffering of the CSU’s stakeholders. In an all-too-real moment, the mock Chancellor dramatically cut through signs with a large pair of scissors that read “lecturers,” “anything decent that serves our students at all,” and “free speech,” symbolizing the cutting of these fundamental pillars of public higher education. Boos and jeers were thrown at the mock Chancellor, while the pretend trustee member, Wall Street executive, and “finance bro” remained indifferent or too busy to care.

In the skit’s finale, audience members shouted, “Your time is up!” at the mock Chancellor, as she cowered in fear behind the mock Wall Street executive before dashing off. Meanwhile, CFA members and students cheered as she departed, reclaiming the people’s university through collective action.

SQE intern Michael Lee-Chang delivered a powerful speech that reminded us of the urgency of our work. “This is not a funding crisis. This is a moral crisis!” said Lee-Chang. “The CSU is complicit in not just suppressing dissent, but the deportation of possible students. We are endangering all students, especially undocumented students. This system has traded transparency for secrecy, accountability for mismanagement, public trust for private interest. We are here to reclaim the CSU system, because this is not a business. This is not a tool for their political interest or their resume.”