I just noticed that I haven’t posted anything since the October Senate meeting. My apologies for the silence. Things were moving quickly and a lot was happening behind the scenes. Thus let me provide a brief recap of what’s happened concerning Executive Orders 1100 (revised) and 1110. I’ll start with where we are now. For those who are interested, I’ll then rewind back to the October Senate and November Board of Trustees meetings.

Where we are now

EO1100 The Chancellor relented on the elimination of CSUN’s Section F. Here is the letter from EVC Blanchard to President Harrison setting out the terms of the extension:  17-11-21 LJB to Harrison EO 1100 Response v3 . Basically, we have to make some administrative changes to how Section F courses are coded for transfers to other campuses and formalize what we were already doing to ensure we do not violate state law by requiring transfer students to take more units than students who enter as freshmen.

The Chancellor’s Office still expects CSUN to comply with the rest of the revisions to EO1100. The two major issues are requiring students to take 3 units of upper division B (natural sciences) and the loss of upper division section E (lifelong learning). Both sets of changes involve a lot of enrollment (IIRC, there are ~1,500 / year FTES in upper division E; many more will need classes which do not yet exist in upper division B). While the requirements are supposed to be in place by Fall 18, the changes in enrollment patterns will phase in over a few years since they only concern upper-division GE. The Senate decided not to reconsider the decision not to participate in the implementation of the Executive Orders. Thus any of these required changes to our GE program could not be carried out through the normal curricular review process. President Harrison has created a task force of faculty, staff, and students to make recommendations to her on the necessary policy changes.

EO1110 The Chancellor’s Office still expects CSUN to implement the changes mandated by EO1110 (to developmental math and writing) on the original timeline. While that recklessly hasty timeline is likely to cause significant problems on other campuses, CSUN’s faculty had already been undertaking improvements to these programs before the order was issued. The fact that they now coincide with mandated changes in the EO cannot be a reason for preventing these faculty-originated curricular improvements from proceeding through the regular curricular processes. Thus it is likely that we will be compliant with EO1110 on the requisite timeline without ever formally taking action to implement the executive order.

That’s where we are now. Here’s some of what’s happened since my last blog post.

October Senate meeting

The Faculty Senate meeting on 26th October was attended by several hundred students and faculty who passionately demonstrated in support of Section F and urged the Senate not to reconsider its decision not to participate in implementation. If you’re wondering how that many people fit in the usual library basement room, they didn’t: After conversations with the police chief the night before about the unprecedented size of the student protests in the week leading up to the meeting, I decided to move the meeting from the library to the Northridge Center —the largest available venue on campus. I don’t know of any official estimate of the attendance, but the main room was full and the balcony was ~50% occupied. We were also joined by Chris Miller, Chair of the ASCSU.

At the beginning of the meeting, President Harrison announced that Chancellor White had, at the last minute, agreed to allow CSUN to keep section F. After a long and impassioned session of public comment, the Senate voted not to reconsider its decision to not participate in implementation. The Senate then passed this resolution which sets out our grounds for this refusal.

Board of Trustees meeting

Several CSUN faculty members along with several dedicated students traveled to Long Beach for the November Board of Trustees meeting. While they were allowed only a few minutes during the public comment sessions, they were nonetheless forceful advocates for CSUN’s students and values. We should all be proud to have them as colleagues and students.

Here are some of the relevant portions of the meetings:

During the public comment section at the beginning of the Committee on Educational Policy, here are Rosa RiVera-Furumoto (Chicana/o Studies) and Gina Masequesmay (Asian American Studies), Kate Stevenson (Developmental math), and Jennifer Eagan (CFA President and CSUEB Philosophy Professor).