Dear Chancellor Reed - Or the slow death of the CSU

Dear Chancellor Reed,

I am writing to explain my very reluctant decision to begin seeking employment elsewhere, outside of the CSU.  I have been a faculty member at CSU East Bay for 12 years.  I have loved my job, I love teaching students, am extremely well respected by my colleagues and adored by my students. I was in fact voted Outstanding Professor in my department by the undergraduate students last year, and I have students who come back after graduation and ask to sit in on my classes or to get copies of the podcasts I make of my lectures.  I make a difference in the lives of students every day. 

But I can no longer afford to work at the CSU.  I certainly did not get into education because I wished to be wealthy (I would have stayed an accounting major if money was my primary concern).  However, I simply cannot afford to support my family on my income.  I made $55,000 last year, with teaching summer.  That amounts to less than $4,000 a month take home pay.  I am a widowed mom of two children.  My husband was also a CSU faculty member and died leaving me with his retirement and a small life insurance.  5 years later, that money is gone.  My house, which was a reasonable mortgage for the Bay Area, was $3,000 a month.  Though I did the best I could to keep it going, I lost my house this summer and am now sharing a house with a friend.  (I realize that $55,000 may sound like an adequate salary to some – however in the Bay Area, everything is so much more expensive from gasoline to housing, that either I would have to commute the 3 hours a day from the Central Valley to the Bay Area, and lose that time with my kids, or the cost of living is so prohibitive that I cannot afford a place of my own).   My children draw social security from my late husband.  That is money I should be able to put away so that maybe I might be able to afford to send my kids to college.  However, I had been unable to do so until I let my house go – not through being extravagant, but simply paying for groceries, heat, gas and maintenance for the car, clothing, insurance, child care and other basic necessities.

I work hard and I love my job.  But I was hired too late into the CSU.  I suspect in contract negotiations, when you look at the average CSU faculty salary, you only see the average.  That average reflects the people who have worked at the CSU for decades, during a period with consistent yearly step increases, merit pay increases, and cost of living increases that have some older faculty making $100,000 a year.  But any of us hired into the system in the last 12-15 years are stuck – especially given rumors that in contract negotiations that you have stated that we should expect a pay cut rather than an increase in the next few years.  There is no hope of ever drawing a living wage.  We are highly trained, hard working professionals who cannot afford basics like heat (one faculty member in our department did not heat their house last winter – it was a trade-off between their child playing baseball, and the cost of running their furnace).

I have started applying to the community college system in California.  They are hiring instructors in my field at a considerably higher salary that I make now (for example, current job advertisement for Diablo Valley College lists as their hiring salary a scale that goes from $55,000 to $83,000 depending on education and experience.  As I have a Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley and have been teaching college level for 12 years, I estimate I would likely be hired at $70,000 – a good $15,000 a year more than I made last year).  This is far more than the current job advertised in my department at CSU East Bay will pay.  What does that tell you that a new job hire at a community college would make far more than a new hire at the CSU?  There is something very wrong here.  In fact, during a recent job interview, when a candidate asked what an ideal candidate for the position would look like, one of the current faculty members joked that they would have an independently wealthy spouse. 

I would really do anything to stay.  I love my job and I do not want to leave.  But I do not know how to make the money work.  I did not get into education to become wealthy, but neither did I imagine I would be treated so poorly: being disrespected by the upper administration as a lazy, greedy faculty member in public.  In contract negotiations simply being dismissed as unimportant and told there simply is no money while at the same time watching administrators continue to get more.  I did not imagine that ‘attracting and keeping good people’ for upper administration was a higher priority than keeping the people in the classroom who are doing the actual job of this university system – educating students.  I am not the only faculty member who has reached their breaking point of needing to walk away.  How will the CSU stay as a strong educational system if you lose all of the energetic, enthusiastic, young instructors?  We cannot afford this job.

Sincerely,

Widowed Mom