Members of the California Faculty Association (CFA) met Wednesday to present President Sheley with a petition to shift funding back to California State University, Stanislaus faculty.
“Members of the campus community should feel that they can put important issues on the table,” said Tim Lynch, Associate Vice President for Communications & Public Affairs. “That is what happened during this visit. The presentation occurred in a manner that says much about the distance that relationships on this campus have come.”
Several members from the CSU Stanislaus CFA chapter met in the lobby of the Mary Stuart Rogers building with the universal goal of bringing the issue of faculty salaries directly to President Sheley’s desk. Their petition to redirect funding for campus faculty has been in circulation since Sept. 15.
“First, we want President Sheley to address problems with salaries on our campus,” Chris Nagel, Lecture Representative, said. “Second, we want President Sheley to acknowledge the campus’s responsibility for budgeting faculty salary increases appropriately and to bring our concerns to the attention of Chancellor White.”
CSU Stanislaus has been surging up overall ratings charts for universities in both California and the country. Time Magazine rated CSU Stanislaus 28 out of 2,500 universities nationwide. Forbes rated CSU Stanislaus 88 in the western region of the country.
Even with the staggering success of the university, CSU Stanislaus’ faculty members are some of the lowest paid in the CSU system.
“The faculty of the CSU have very low salaries,” John Sarraille, CFA President at CSU Stanislaus, said. “They have received no cost of living increases or experience-based raises for seven years, and before that they were neglected, too.”
President Sheley has been hearing the CFA’s demands not only from Stanislaus but from across the state. While accepting the petition from Sarraille, Sheley praised the way in which the Stanislaus branch chose to bring up this pressing issue to his attention.
“I know this is a presentation being made relatively simultaneously throughout the CSU and I just want you [members of CFA] to know I appreciate the manner in which you did it,” Sheley said. “It says a lot about where we are as a campus that we can have a meeting like this in the best of terms.”
