The California Faculty Association members approved the tentative agreement with the California State University system, with 97 percent of those who voted in favor of the deal.
The ballot was held online April 22–29. Of the 23,000 CFA members, 63 percent voted.
“The [CSU] is pleased the [CFA] Board of Directors and membership have ratified the Tentative Agreement,” the CSU said in a statement.
While not lauded as a perfect contract, many faculty said they were surprised by what was accomplished. Still, some said they wanted an outcome that had more of a widespread impact.
“Ultimately, a real win would be a change of culture among CSU administrators — rejecting a corporate model for the university and reinstating a more humane model of what higher education can and should be,” Kimberly Walters, an international studies professor, said after the deal was announced last month.
Others viewed avoiding the strike as a win in itself, saying that a strike has the potential for lasting incriminations.
“A strike is only a tool,” CFA Chapter President, Doug Domingo-Foraste, said. “If you don’t need a sledgehammer, you don’t use [one].”
The agreement includes a 5 percent general salary increase that will go into effect June 30; a 2 percent GSI on July 1; and a 3.5 percent GSI on July 1, 2017. The CFA also secured a 2.65 percent service salary increase for eligible faculty, a 9 percent minimum salary increase for tenure-line faculty and a “commitment to reform range elevation for lecturer faculty,” according to a CFA press release.
However, the deal is not retroactive. Retiring faculty will not see a raise unless they choose to postpone retirement another year in hopes of acquiring a 7 percent raise. The SSIs cap out at a certain level, leaving many faculty in the business and engineering department without that 2.65 percent increase due to the department’s higher market value being situated almost directly below that cap.
It also does not solve inversion—an issue that many faculty regularly confront in the face of inflation. Because of escalating market value, newly hired faculty can make more than professors with more experience and, sometimes, even more than those who hold a higher rank.
This sort of inequality can be demoralizing and affect how faculty operate, especially when many professors exceed the required workload with extra attention to students’ needs, according to associate professor of biology, Ashley Carter.
Carter said that professors value their positions as educators and strive to provide an enriching education for their students.
“But it’s hard to measure morale and all these others things professors do,” Carter said. “It’s easy to measure salary, number of classes taught and so on.”
He said that it would be very easy to change the current salary system and that inversion wouldn’t exist if annual salaries were higher than that of the starting salary for that academic year.
In addition to inversion, Domingo-Foraste said the CFA has intentions of helping students with tuition hikes and provide more equity to African-American students on campus.
The ratified agreement will go before the CSU Board of Trustees during the May 24-25 meeting.