Following 2008-2009 fund negotiations, professors at Cal State Fullerton will not be receiving a salary increase as they have in the past in light of budget cuts the Cal State University system has been forced to make in the past year. Even though it is now 2010, collective bargaining is an ongoing process in which an agreement for 2008-2009 has not yet been reached, said Erik Fallis, media relations specialist in Public Affairs at the CSU Chancellor's Office.

According to accounting professor and California faculty Association rights representative for CSUF Mahamood Hassan, there are four types of salary increases - a general salary increase, which goes to everyone, an service salary increase, which is given each year a professor's performance is satisfactory, an equity-based increase, and a post promotion increase, which is only given to full professors at the top of their scale. The PPI salary increase was given out, Hassan said, because the contract written up for it did not make this increase subject to budget cuts.

The CFA had been negotiating with the CSU system for a few months before a fact-finder was called in to hear the issue and advise what should be done due to the current state of the school system's budget, according to linguistics professor and the communications director for the CSUF chapter for the CFA, Robert Angus The fact-finder, San Francisco attorney John Kagel, reviewed the situation and determined that no SSIs (except “in cases in which the SSI would address salary inversion and compaction”) or GSIs were merited in the current economy, according to the fact-finding report that is available on CFA's website.

Also on the document is that the CSU claimed that the money generally set aside for salary increases is important for "other priorities."

The "other priorities," according to a mass e-mail sent out to faculty by the acting associate vice president at academic affairs at CSUF, James Dietz, are "access to courses
for students, access to financial aid, (to) preserve as many jobs as possible, (and to) maintain the financial and fiscal integrity of the university."

"The administration makes vague claims about serving students and maintaining classes, but it is very difficult to get an accounting of where the money available actually went. One priority involved a new data system, at a cost of more than $800 million. Meanwhile, sections were canceled and classes grew larger while students paid much more," Angus said.

According to Fallis, the CSU proposed that $1.7 million in unspent rollover funds from the 2007-2008 salary increases would go to equity-based salary increases in 2008-2009.

"Rather than impact other priorities, such as financial aid for students, CSU had proposed to distribute these existing funds to target these deserving faculty."
Equity-based salary increases, according to Hassan, is "for everybody who is an assistant, associate, or even a full professor who are not at the top of the scale yet."

The information given by Fallis disputes information given by John Travis, chair of the CFA Bargaining Team. "One million dollars was left over from the first year of the equity program which was to be added to the equity program for 2008-2009, $700,000 was from another program.

That money, by the contract, was intended to go to general salary increases. It could mean something like a $20 or $30 increase for the faculty," Travis said. According to him, this money never went out - though the CFA is still trying to get the money for faculty.

"I do recall that at the time the GSI and SSI were agreed to, CSU management had just awarded itself a 23 percent across-the-board raise," Angus said. "Evidently, it is a priority to maintain the salary schedule of administrators. The assertion of other priorities is a generic assertion that avoids accountability - if the administration claimed no money but it were discovered through some process that it in fact had money, legal problems would ensue.”