- By Allyson Aleksey | Examiner staff writer
- Dec 11, 2024 Updated 20 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
San Francisco State University lecturers and faculty held a New Orleans-style funeral march on campus Wednesday afternoon to call attention to colleagues who were laid off or face layoffs due to the university’s planned budget cuts.
Demonstrating faculty said the budget cuts are due to administrative mismanagement, while school officials say class cuts and layoffs are necessary as the university looks to reduce its spending by $25 million.
SF State President Lynn Mahoney announced to faculty Dec. 5 that the school was in a “financial emergency.” It followed efforts to improve the university’s financial outlook by e cutting courses, increasing class sizes and reducing staff numbers in recent years.
“Every unit across the university will be making hard reductions for 2025-26,” Mahoney wrote in email to faculty last week, adding that some programs will be “reduced, phased out, reorganized or discontinued.”
Mahoney tied the school’s financial crisis to enrollment declines. SF State’s enrollment has been steadily declining each year since 2015. The California State University system recorded an enrollment decline of 6.5% between 2019 and 2022, while SF State experienced a 26% decrease in freshman enrollment between 2017 and 2021.
But faculty who attended the Wednesday protest said many classes are at capacity, including those in the humanities and social sciences, which were hit hardest by the cuts.
English Professor David Gill said his department “has been especially hard-hit” by both course cuts and faculty layoffs.
The university eliminated some English courses that serve as prerequisites for undergraduate degrees, including “English 114 and 101, the basic class that every freshman takes no matter their [major or] concentration,” Gill told The Examiner.
“The university also raised class capacity limits [from 20 students to 25], which makes it harder to give individualized attention to students,” Gill said. “And there’s no increase in compensation, despite the fact that we’re grading a fifth-more [students].”
While university officials blame declining enrollment for the cuts, Sociology lecturer Ryan Moore, who helped organize the protest, said that’s a “half truth.”
“It’s true that enrollment has declined, but the response could have been much, much different,” he said. “It could have been much more humane.”
The university’s solution to cut classes and reduce staff harms students the most, Gill said.
“Many students are here because of financial need. Many of our students are commuters, or they’re English-learners,” he said. “What we’re seeing from our administration is a slashing of resources, the resources we need to help these students.”
Faculty hosted a one-day strike late last year to protest class cuts and a tuition increase approved by the CSU Board of Trustees in September 2023. The tuition hike raises the cost of attendance 6% per year for five years — or roughly $342 per student each academic year — and went into effect this year.
Ali Noorzad, a history major and SF State student union member, said he and other students are asking Mahoney and school officials to be more transparent around the reductions, especially given the tuition hike.
“They’re saying this is all tied to enrollment declines, but what I’m seeing is full classes. The sense I get is that [the university] isn’t handling the money well,” he told The Examiner. “We want answers.”
Noorzad said he was personally affected by the budget cuts. Courses that are core requirements for his major had sections eliminated due to layoffs, he said, which subsequently filled up and generated a waitlist.
“It’s already gotten to the point where people are having to take more than four years [of coursework] to graduate,” he said.
A petition Noorzad circulated with the student union to roll back faculty layoffs and reinstate courses garnered over 400 signatures, he said.
