Sonoma State faculty to go on strike Monday, joining historic statewide walkout by CSU’s professors

Faculty members picketing at Sonoma State University on Monday will find themselves opposed by both the management of the 23-member California State University System, and the weather.

There are showers in the forecast, and that’s fine by the faculty, according to Napoleon Reyes, a professor in the university’s department of criminology and criminal justice studies.

“We have ponchos we’ll be handing out to our members,” said Reyes, president of Sonoma State’s chapter of the California Faculty Association. “We’re ready for the rain.”

Its negotiations with CSU management stalled, the CFA called for a five-day strike starting Jan. 22, the first day of the spring semester. This will be the first such strike at Sonoma State since it opened in 1961, Reyes noted, and the first systemwide strike in the CSU’s 63-year history.

The CSU system, the nation’s largest four-year public college network, employs some 29,000 faculty, 600 of whom work at Sonoma State, according to SSU spokesperson Jeffrey Keating, who said that number includes adjunct faculty, tenure-track faculty, coaches, counselors and librarians.

The percentage of Sonoma State faculty participating in the strike is expected to be “close to 100%,” said Reyes on Sunday.

“We’re had a very strong response from our faculty.”

The percentage of faculty expected to join the picket lines on the Rohnert Park campus this week will be slightly lower — closer to 90%, he said.

Sonoma State officials have emphasized since the strike was announced on Jan. 10 that the campus will be “open and operational” during the planned work stoppage.

“We expect students back on campus,” wrote Keating, the campus spokesman, in a Friday email. “Many of them already have returned and are back in campus housing.”

The CSU is “not canceling classes,” said Christina Checel, CSU associate vice chancellor for labor and employee relations, in a Friday press conference. “Individual faculty members who decide to strike will cancel their own classes.”

Even if they have no classes to attend, students across the CSU system will have access to “the usual services,” said Checel, including libraries, cafeterias, student unions, financial aid advising and gyms.

“My colleagues in the faculty are very comfortable communicating their ideas in classrooms, meeting rooms and conferences,” said Reyes. Taking to the streets to get their message across “isn’t really their cup of tea.” But they’re willing to do it, in the rain, if necessary, “to make their voices heard by management.”

Foremost among the faculty union’s requests are higher pay, more reasonable workloads, improved parental leave and more counselors on campus.

The CFA is requesting a 12% raise this fiscal year, following raises of 4% and 3% the previous two years. Negotiations ended abruptly on Jan. 9, when CSU negotiators walked out of a bargaining session after just 20 minutes, canceling the remaining four days of talks.

By terminating negotiations, CSU management was permitted to impose its final offer for faculty — a 5% pay increase. University officials have said repeatedly that the union’s salary demands were not financially viable and would have necessitated layoffs and other cuts.

While 12% looks like a big number, Reyes has allowed, that increase would account for money the union contends is owed faculty following the pandemic, and two years of “historic” inflation.

“Unquestionably, (faculty) deserve an increase,” said CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia at Friday’s press conference. “We are committed to compensating employees fairly, but we must be equally committed to the long-term stability and success of CSU, which means we must be fiscally prudent.”

The CFA negotiating team argues that the CSU’s finances are robust, pointing to the system’s reserves, which were roughly $8 billion in 2022. In that year alone, according to a study conducted for the CFA by Eastern Michigan University accounting professor Howard Bunsis, the system’s surplus cash flow was roughly $2 billion.

Their requested salary increase could be covered by the CSU’s annual operating cash flow surpluses, the CFA argues.

That analysis is “flawed,” said Steve Relyea, the CSU’s executive vice chancellor and chief financial officer, during the Friday press conference.

Much of that money constitutes “one-time funds” that can’t be used to pay ongoing obligations, such as salaries, Relyea said.

To do so would be “reckless” and would “put the institution and our students at risk.”

In September, CSU’s trustees imposed a 34% tuition hike over five years, starting next fall. That vote followed the board’s decision to award pay raises ranging from 14% to 29% to 14 campus presidents.

For those administrators to then describe the faculty’s request for a 12% pay hike this year as “unreasonable” and “impractical” said Damien Wilson, the Hamel Family Chair in Wine Business with Sonoma State’s Wine Business Institute, “is ignorant at best, and hypocritical at worst.”

Recently appearing on the CSU website was a link enabling students to report the names of professors who canceled classes while on strike.

There were reports over the weekend that those forms had been heavily spammed, diminishing their usefulness.

An ostensible student named Peter Parker, for instance, used the form to complain that a certain “Dr. Octavius” had been “rambling about spiders” and canceled “the mechanical engineering lab section on robot arms” — references to the comic book hero Spider-Man.

The forms, said CSU associate vice chancellor Checel, are “a way for students who want to share information to do so.”

Information gleaned from them will be used to “gauge” how “students have been impacted by the strike.”

Reyes speculated those forms were part of a management effort to “drive a wedge” between faculty and students.

“I think are our students are intelligent enough” to realize that, he said.

“We’re anticipating a large number of students to join us on the picket line.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.