“Higher education is facing a demographic cliff. We probably have far too many private and public universities than students can absorb.'
USF part-time faculty demonstrate for better working conditions at the Lone Mountain Campus on March 2. As they become more expensive to operate, and as demographics and the pandemic squeeze enrollment, labor strife between administrators, faculty and staff are becoming more frequent. It’s a conflict that is playing out in San Francisco, where three institutions of higher education have been entangled in strikes or labor disputes.
While City College administrators scramble to change their fortunes, faculty and staff are fighting for their jobs. Last month, the Board of Trustees approved layoffs for 50 full-time faculty members in 18 departments and five administrators for the 2022-23 academic year. Before this can happen, more than 300 instructors will have to be laid off as labor regulations require part-time faculty to be let go before full-time layoffs can take place.
“Their response has been to try and squeeze costs in other areas, including labor costs, wages for adjunct faculty and things like that,” said John Logan, a labor and employment studies professor at San Francisco State University. In addition, USF bumped up tuition for the 2022-23 academic year by 3.5%, with a traditional undergraduate comprehensive fee costing roughly $72,000. An email sent in December had USF President Paul Fitzgerald citing “high rates of inflation for goods and services required to operate the university” as reasoning for the move.
“The number of tenure-track positions open every year sort of declines year in, year out but the number of PhDs continues at a sort of fairly high number,” said Logan. “There’s a tremendous privilege in talking with young people about their deepest values at the moment in their lives when they’re trying to figure out what those are. That is an extraordinary privilege but the fact that I regarded it as a privilege doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be compensated for it,” said Rebecca Gordon, a USF adjunct philosophy professor and PTFA policy board member.
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