Restructuring the CSU: In their own words
a sampling of quotes from the CSU administration
“It will be necessary to change radically business processes and service delivery systems…Campuses will need to collaborate and work together to reduce unnecessary duplication so f effort and create synergies to leverage strengths and minimize weaknesses. … budget reduction strategies must yield a fundamental transformation of the ways we meet the needs of our students, faculty, and staff”
-Benjamin Quillian, CSU Chief Financial Officer
(Memo on Budget Reduction Plans, 10/2/09)
“There isn’t any money in Sacramento” so CSU will have to find money by becoming more entrepreneurial, more creative, and more efficient, “If people taught one more class a semester, the efficiency of that is tremendous.”
-CSU Chancellor Reed, remarks to higher education leaders forum
(Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/5/09)
“The time has come for creative reconstruction. We must summon the courage and will to re-engineer education.”
-President Hamid Shirvani, CSU Stanislaus
(Commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/18/09)
“We are being forced to ration educational opportunity … At some point I’ve got to place my bet on the student that’s most likely to be able to succeed and graduate.”
-President Stephen Weber, San Diego State University, explaining his new admissions policy that revokes guaranteed admission to qualified, local-area students
(San Diego Union Tribune, 10/15/09)
“we must use these trying times to push for changes that will shape our institutions and the academy … We must be willing to look at successful academic models different from our own. Why is it that so many students of color and low-income students are turning to for-profit institutions? … Why not examine these models. We need to learn how to become entrepreneurial… ”
-President Mildred Garcia, CSU Dominguez Hills
(remarks to the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, Sept. 2009)
“These are going to be, at the end of the day, qualitative judgments.”
-Provost Martin DenBoer, Cal Poly Pomona,
explaining how decisions about program cuts will be made
(San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 11/1/09)
“we should view the privilege of a higher education much as we did the privileges that we enjoyed as children. We knew we couldn’t get ice cream if we didn’t help wash the dishes … special activities were available to us, but we did not enjoy them as a “right.”
-President Hamid Shirvani, CSU Stanislaus, arguing everyone is not entitled to higher education
(Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/18/09)
“with the reduction in the student body, we have empty beds on campus. Well empty beds … is not a problem that one would care about except that we have a debt service of $6.4 million that must be paid.”
– President Stephen Weber, San Diego State University explaining why students are now required to live in the university dorms
(interview on KPBS News, 10/22/09,)
“We simply to not have the time for the exhaustive review of program futures that has been the practice in the past” [sic]
– President Rollin Richmond, Humboldt State University
(email message, 10/30/09)
“The tsunami that hit us was much larger than anyone could have predicted. It is going to make us less of an institution, but it’s necessary given the budget we find ourselves in.”
It is a chance to do something new and cost-efficient, “an opportunity we have to handle very carefully…”
-Provost Martin DenBoer, Cal Poly Pomona discussing program elimination
(San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 11/1/09)
"Restructuring" the CSU or Wrecking It? 