SF State Lecturers Rattled by Looming Job Cuts as Enrollment Slides

In more than a decade as a San Francisco State University lecturer, Christy Shick has taught a steady stream of first-year students fulfilling their mandatory writing requirements and dedicated English majors enrolled in upper-division electives.

Her long career at SF State has perks. Shick now works toward a pension, has built up the credit to warrant longer contracts and said she’s entitled to a more consistent workload — important benefits for lecturers, who lack the tenure track and job security of professors.

But this spring, all of that could go away.

“I have chosen to stay with this career at SF State because of the job security I thought I had,” Shick told KQED. “I’ve spent decades becoming, I think, highly expert at what I do. To suddenly have to change that, of course, is hard for me.”

Shick is one of an unknown number of lecturers who won’t be rehired next semester. She said she hasn’t been assigned courses despite being entitled to four because of her long-running employment status with SF State, where she has worked since 2012.

The lecturer cuts are due to declining enrollment and follow similar reductions in recent semesters, according to University President Lynn Mahoney. SF State’s student body has been decreasing since the fall of 2019, and this year, its freshman class was 20% to 25% smaller than anticipated.

Shick and her colleagues worry that the Department of English Language and Literature will be hit especially hard by this round of cuts. Some reports have estimated that six lecturers could be dropped ahead of the spring semester, and there will be 19 fewer introductory writing courses than in the fall.

On top of the lecturer cuts, the university declared a fiscal emergency last month. Mahoney has maintained that the declaration was just a matter of language in a school policy that allows her to initiate a review of programs with low enrollment.

“Outside of that policy, I have not declared a financial emergency,” she told KQED. “It’s actually just the language that I had to use based on a very old [Academic] Senate policy.”

Still, the budget situation at the university isn’t good as enrollment falls, forcing lecturer cuts and other budget reductions to bring costs in line with revenues.

Enrollment hovered around 30,000 throughout much of the 2010s, but since the fall of 2019, it has been declining quickly. This semester, SF State has just over 22,300 registered students.

Funding for the university comes from two primary sources: tuition revenue, which is dwindling, and state dollars, which are also down after the California State University system reallocated some funds away from campuses, including SF State, that haven’t met enrollment goals. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget for the next fiscal year, due in January, is expected to reduce overall CSU funding altogether by nearly 8%.

The university has made $40 million worth of budget reductions and is predicting it will need $25 million or so more to get back on track. That doesn’t factor in budget constraints if enrollment continues to decline at its current rate, which hasn’t shown signs of slowing yet.

While lecturers worry about their job security, they’re also advocating for the university to retain courses that cater specifically to freshmen. While 30 lecturers taught 90 sections of a required first-year writing course this fall, only 11 are expected to teach 34 sections in the spring. Last spring, 23 lecturers taught 90 sections.

“By gutting first your experience courses, by piling too many students into these classrooms, by having faculty who are not trained teach them, there’s going to be a legacy of an incredible decline in graduation rates,” Shick told KQED. “The school is going to be so much less appealing to students because a lot of the reason students come here is for these programs that have been built over decades to make them feel heard, to give them voices.”

She said that cuts to administrative roles and wages would have much less of an effect on students.

“If there’s been that much of a decrease, why do we need the same number of administrators?” Shick asked.

Mahoney said the university was curtailing the hiring of both staff and administrators. After one of her office’s vice presidents left their role last year, their work was divided up among other VPs instead of hiring a replacement. Mahoney’s salary, which is nearly half a million dollars, hasn’t been affected.

“It’s just very sad for a university that’s been built on decades of a reputation of inclusivity and diversity and opportunity for all students … be mishandled and downsized so swiftly,” Shick told KQED. “My students are wondering if they should transfer somewhere else. They’re not even sure they want to stay here anymore.”

KQED’s Sara Hossaini contributed to this report.