Tag Archives: War on ethnic studies

EO1100: A perspective from Gender and Women’s Studies

 

Here’s a powerful piece from the Chair of our Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

EO 1100 and the Downfall of CSUN Faculty

By Breny Mendoza, Ph.D., Chair of the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies

The stunning announcement of the Executive Order 1100 just two days before classes started which mutilated Comparative Cultural Studies GE requirements at CSUN with absolutely no faculty consultation revealed at least three sets of issues: 1) faculty governance is dead, faculty disenfranchisement has come full-circle and administrator rule is modeled after authoritarian forms of government 2) ethnic studies and gender & women’s studies departments can disappear with just a stroke of a pen at the whim of administrators with flawed conceptions of the humanities and are negotiable in exchange for a few concessions 3) faculty acquiescence and fatigue are part of the problem.

None of these revelations should come as a surprise. The US American university has been undergoing deep transformations since the late 70s which is when neoliberalism began its march through the institutions. By now dozens of books have been written about the privatization and corporatization of the university. Private and public universities all have come under the aegis of administrators and staffers that have no respect or understand the value of research and education. They serve only the interests of trustees, presidents, provosts, and deans. Most of us are aware that there is such a thing as administrator bloat in our universities. They by far outnumber and outearn the faculty now. A new report shows that the CSU system has hired administrators at twice the rate of faculty. Contingency faculty or so-called part-time faculty (an ironic name to call faculty who are teaching at least 5 courses a semester to stay afloat) now compose 75% of the faculty at US American universities. Many of them are on welfare. There should be no doubt in our minds that the profession has lost its power and prestige. It is at the verge of extinction and losing its last vestiges of dignity.

The degradation of the faculty at a so-called Hispanic-serving institution like CSUN and the evisceration of its ethnic studies and gender & women’s studies departments has its own particularities. Their students belong to the most marginalized sectors of US society and many of their faculty share their status. Disenfranchising faculty that are already socially disenfranchised because they belong to the wrong gender, race, ethnicity, national origin or perhaps are not even US citizens is a no-brainer. Dumbing down the mission of the Hispanic-serving university and the mission of these disciplines comes easy to administrators that have never understood the purpose of gender and women’s departments and ethnic studies nor have held high expectations of the students they serve nor the faculty they hire.

The purpose of EO 1100 was never to improve the undergraduate education of underserved students by enlarging the number and variety of courses that can address emerging fields and new concepts in the humanities that can make a difference in their lives. Curricular needs are largely unknown to administrators, boards of trustees and legislators. EO 1100 is a top-down intervention that with surgical precision removes the most important advances in the humanities and the social sciences from the curriculum. Portability of GE courses across campuses is a pretext of administrators to gain even more control of the curriculum. They are not interested in curriculum content (how can they?), they are only interested in bringing the numbers down, not of their salaries, but of the number of students that are unable to graduate because of the especially difficult circumstances in which they acquire a degree. The goal is a profound reorganization of the CSU that begins with the drastic reduction of the number of students, faculty and the debasement of academic life. Under the cover of student success, a complete reorganization of the GE requirements is now being imposed on the faculty that never had a say in it. An already embattled faculty with an excessive work load now have with lightning speed to comply with a GE reform that is against the interests of their departments and their students.

The combination of decades of erosion of faculty governance, the social fascism that neoliberalism has produced and the rise of an authoritarian regime based on an ideology of white male supremacy conspire against a revolt of the faculty. For too long faculty have been spectators of their own demise. Today we either dig in our heels or dig our own graves. What shall we choose? Wake up CSUN!

EO1100: Alternatives

We will probably need to be able to offer alternatives to the revised EO1100.

Update: Our task in (2) will be helped if we can proffer potential compromises which promote the CO’s desire for uniformity. I will try to capture these here:

For example, the CSU Ethnic Studies Task Force acknowledged CSUN’s leadership in institutionalizing support for ethnic studies. Thus a plausible alternative would build CSUN’s model into the systemwide requirements.

 

Executive Order 1100: Not just us

I circulated the earlier post on Executive Order 1100 to my statewide colleagues. I’ll be cataloging some of the impacts they are feeling on their campuses here.

Please keep in mind that campuses are all getting our heads around the implications —today seems filled with emergency meetings with Provosts. I will update these as things change

CSU Monterrey Bay

At CSUMB, faculty are shocked and dismayed at the implications of the EO1100 revisions – most of our queer studies, women’s studies, cultural studies courses will be cut, since they are 4 unit classes.

Lecturers and dept chairs have asked me what this means for our curricula and for their workloads – and for our underrepresented students, most of all.

Just one example:
One lecturer, who teaches most of our queer studies classes, has informed me his 4-unit GE classes will now be downsized to 3 units, and he will lose nearly half his workload, since there are no other classes available to fulfill his 3-year entitlement.

Not only this, but he will be tasked with the unpaid work (no small task) of redesigning his curricula for the new 3-unit GE classes. In short: a significant loss of work (and salary) in tandem with a concomitant workload increase (unpaid) in course reconfiguration.

Fresno

Fresno State has the same problem. We required 3 additional upper level units on diversity and multiculturalism, and those have now been effectively abolished. Even our administration here did not seem to know this was coming. Wild.

Basically everyone else

The imposed timeline is highly problematic if not impossible. At several campuses, high priority curricular reforms, program development, and student success initiatives will take a backseat to complying with EO1100.

Executive Order 1100 undermines cultural competency education at CSUN

The Chancellors Office has ordered changes to general education which eviscerate ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, queer studies, and others at CSUN.

In an attempt to standardize general education across the CSU and prevent students who transfer between campuses from having to take extra units, Loren Blanchard has mandated changes in how many units may be in each area of GE (and the distribution of units between upper and lower division). This will harm our students and have far reaching effects on our curriculum. One of the most egregious is that while CSUN has been unique in the CSU by requiring cultural studies as part of GE (part F) for ~12 years, that is no longer allowed.

I will use this space for further explanations and updates. There will likely be many. I expect that Executive Order 1100 will eat up all the time, energy, and goodwill that would’ve been devoted to the Graduation Initiative 2025.

For now, we have three tasks before us:

(1) Figuring out how to minimize the harm in implementing this travesty

(2) Fighting political battles to have the order reversed or revised.

(3) Ensuring that Chancellor Timothy White, Executive Vice Chancellor Loren Blanchard, and Strategist James T. Minor never escape the stain of the losses they have inflicted on the future students of CSUN, their communities, and their employers.

In service of (3), let me close by sharing the brief note I sent to Loren Blanchard last night.

To: Loren Blanchard, Executive Vice Chancellor
CC: Tim White, Chancellor

Dear Loren,

The revisions to EO 1100 eviscerate CSUN’s ethnic studies departments.

I leave it to my administrative colleagues to demonstrate this.

After working throughout the day to understand the implications and the options, I am embarrassed that I can contribute only what, through the shock, is, I suppose, a broken heart.

I will do my utmost to stanch the bleeding. But please know that my task is to find a way to preserve within an already crowded structure that which was won inch by inch.

Thank you,

Adam

—
Adam Swenson, Ph.D.
Faculty President

 

======

Update: I will try to keep track of what I hear from other campuses here: https://blogs.csun.edu/facultypresident/2017/08/25/executive-order-1100-not-just-us/

=======
Update [30 August]: It appears President Harrison and Provost Li have worked out an agreement with the Chancellor’s Office which remedies the horrible implications of EO1100 for the affected departments. https://blogs.csun.edu/facultypresident/2017/08/31/eo1100-update/