CFA Updates Our Way Forward for a Better, Bolder CSU

For CSU students, faculty, and staff to secure a more just future, a fair successor faculty contract is one step.

Another step is to visualize a way forward for all parties of the CSU to push past the barriers of systemic racism to confront white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in order to better protect, serve, and educate students and faculty. This plan must also serve as a guideline to ensure that faculty and students have the right to a working/learning environment where their safety is a top priority, and they are treated with dignity and respect during and after pandemics.

With that, CFA member leaders announce the release of the second edition of Our Way Forward for a better, bolder tomorrow for CSU faculty, staff, and students.

Member leaders began this work with last year’s edition, Our Way Forward: A Union Guideline for Fall 2020 and Beyond.

The long-term roadmap was initially planned as a guideline to defend quality higher education and a potential return to campus amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A year later, CFA leaders release Volume II as both a health and safety doctrine for repopulation during and after this pandemic and to reimagine a more inclusive 21st century campus amidst the corporatization of higher education and continued pandemic of systemic and structural racism plaguing our society.

“We must acknowledge the harm systemic racism on our campuses has caused to our past and present students and faculty, and designate alternatives to sole reliance on campus police,” CFA President Charles Toombs said during his CFA State of the CSU in September. “We must expand leave for our parenting and caregiving faculty, create clear pathways to move qualified contingent faculty to the tenure-track, increase temporary contracts to five years, and address bias in student opinions about teaching effectiveness.

“I want all of us to work together for a better now and a new tomorrow. Not a bolder CSU, but a more socially just CSU.”

This document includes bargaining proposals from the ongoing CFA 2020-21 bargaining campaign, and expands on ideas first proposed last summer in our union’s anti-Black racism demands.

Within the document, CFA leaders wrote the following sections to better serve their colleagues and students: (1) healthy and safe campuses, classrooms, and learning spaces; (2) technological resources to address the digital divide and assist faculty and students in an ever-increasing virtual world; (3) workload and job accommodations that would compensate faculty for preparation, dismantling the current structure of cultural taxation and working more for less; (4) addressing bias in the age of COVID-19; (5) pursuing institutional and structural changes at the CSU; and (6) protecting faculty and fighting for equity.

This is a working document and updates will be made throughout the year as CFA’s Council for Racial and Social Justice caucuses provide and work on sets of demands that confronts structural racism and intersectional barriers.

Universities are places where we come together from disparate backgrounds to exchange and contest ideas, and to create and deconstruct knowledge and its applications. When operating at its best, a campus is designed as a community, a community that serves as an extended family for students, faculty, and staff.

CFA wants to encourage members to connect with their local chapter to join CFA’s efforts in the rebuilding with which we all must engage. If you are not a member, please join our union.