There are plenty of reasons for anxiety and perhaps even unrest at California State University-Stanislaus. The campus is coping this year with a $13.5-million budget cut, which has led to furloughs, reduced enrollment, and the elimination of a winter term. But when faculty critics explain why they voted no confidence last week in the university’s president, Hamid Shirvani, Exhibit A is a commentary he wrote for The Chronicle.
The no-confidence resolution passed with the support of 91 percent of those eligible to vote, including professors, coaches, librarians, and academic administrators. Faculty leaders said Mr. Shirvani has led a sustained attack on shared governance, is responsible for high administrative turnover, has mismanaged finances, and has made several public gaffes.
But while the votes were being counted last week, professors singled out in particular the commentary, as did the systemwide faculty union.
In a news release distributed on Thursday, the California Faculty Association said it would soon publish a white paper alleging that the system’s leaders were attempting to make radical changes at the university under the cover of a money crisis. The chief example mentioned in the news release is Mr. Shirvani’s essay, which union leaders said was evidence that he views budget cuts as an opportunity to “re-engineer education” in a way that reduces Californians’ sense of “entitlement” to a college education.
No Regrets
The essay in question was published on October 18 with the headline “Will a Culture of Entitlement Bankrupt Higher Education?” In it Mr. Shirvani makes a broad-ranging plea for what he sees as pragmatic solutions to the economic challenges faced by colleges and universities across the nation.
Mr. Shirvani wrote that governments and taxpayers must be reminded of their shared responsibility for public education, but that the only way universities can “persuade them to invest in higher education is to demonstrate our commitment to efficiency, openness, and accountability.”
Mr. Shirvani says the sense of entitlement has led to “country-club-quality recreational facilities and multitudes of majors and minors,” as well as the rankings-driven obsession with status. He does not argue for less access to higher education, but says that students and their families will have to pay more for it.
In an interview on Friday, before the votes had been tallied, Mr. Shirvani said that he did not regret writing the opinion piece, and that he had considered writing again for the newspaper.
“What I said in the article is my conviction,” he said, adding that the approach described in the essay had driven his strategic decision making as president. Perhaps the most high-profile and controversial of those decisions was the elimination of the university’s four-week winter term. That move, announced in October and effective next year, means the university’s fall and spring semesters will be lengthened by two weeks.
Mr. Shirvani said only 5 percent of full-time faculty members teach during the winter term. The change will result in more availability, and more work weeks, for professors. But faculty leaders questioned Mr. Shirvani’s claim that the new academic schedule would save $2-million. They also said he ignored faculty and student input over the term’s future—one of several cases they cited of Mr. Shirvani’s allegedly top-down management style.
Difficult Times
The university, like the rest of the 23-campus California State University system, must deal with severe budget gaps. The system’s state contribution was cut by $564-million this year. Cal State’s leaders are trimming overall enrollment by 40,000. Stanislaus, one of the system’s smallest campuses, is located in California’s agrarian Central Valley. The university’s enrollment is 6,800, down 500 from last year, and will be reduced by 250 more students next year.
About $4.5-million of the university’s $13.5-million budget hole was covered with savings from furloughs of two days per month for all employees, with some flexibility for department heads. That works out to pay cuts of approximately 10 percent, said Russell Giambelluca, the university’s vice president for business and finance. Mr. Giambelluca said a handful of administrators, but no faculty members, had been laid off.
“It saved us a lot of jobs,” he said of the furloughs. Mr. Giambelluca was reached on Friday at his home because he, like most university administrators and staff members, was taking a furlough day.
Mr. Shirvani, who was in his office, defended his relationship with professors. He said that the fracture began with the money woes of the last two years and that his most vocal critics were a small group. The president, who is an architect and urban planner, does have his fans. The California State Student Association has named him the system’s “president of the year” for two of the last three years.
Faculty leaders, however, have stressed that their complaints about Mr. Shirvani are not related to anxiety over budgets. In a written statement supporting the no-confidence measure, members of the Academic Senate wrote that the president “has acted with intemperate haste and lack of adequate forethought.”
“His reckless behavior and erratic decision making,” they wrote, “imperil the academic standing of the university.”
The no-confidence vote is the fourth such faculty rebuke of a university leader in the California State University system over the last three years, including one passed in July by the California Faculty Association over the leadership of Charles B. Reed, the system’s chancellor.
“It will take some time to redevelop trust and good faith in the office of the president,” said John A. García, a professor of social work on the Stanislaus campus, in a written statement. “We await his efforts in that direction.”
A spokeswoman in the system office said Mr. Reed and the system’s governing board have full confidence in Mr. Shirvani.
While Mr. Shirvani said he was not surprised that his essay had rankled some people on the campus, he said he did not think professors would take his points personally. For example, he said that he had aimed comments about productivity at a national audience, rather than specifically at his university, and that no plans to systemically increase faculty teaching were in the works.
But he said he understood that many professors were upset about the difficult times at the university.
“We have to try to do things differently,” Mr. Shirvani said. “Faculty in the university have to understand that they’re not immune from the changes and adjustments that the society is going through.”
