Union mem­bers are work­ing under a col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ment that was rat­i­fied in Novem­ber 2014. CFA and CSU man­age­ment came to an agree­ment for 2014 – 15 salary increas­es but left terms for sub­se­quent years open for future talks. CFA is now billing its demands as the ​“Fight for 5,” call­ing for a 5 per­cent pay bump dur­ing the 2015 – 2016 school year.

Fac­ul­ty across the 23 cam­pus­es of the Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty (CSU) sys­tem will be vot­ing on strike autho­riza­tion Octo­ber 19 – 28. Should the 23,000 work­ers, most­ly instruc­tion­al employ­ees, orga­nized as the Cal­i­for­nia Fac­ul­ty Asso­ci­a­tion (CFA) vote in favor of autho­riza­tion, CFA lead­ers will be able to call a work stop­page if they can­not reach a set­tle­ment with the CSU system’s over­seers, the Board of Trustees, over salary negotiations

Jen­nifer Eagan, a CSU East Bay pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy and Pub­lic Affairs & Admin­is­tra­tion who was recent­ly elect­ed CFA pres­i­dent in April, says this will be the first step in rebal­anc­ing ​“mis­placed pri­or­i­ties” at CSU cam­pus­es through­out the state. ​“After years of lit­er­al­ly zero salary increas­es, fac­ul­ty is less timid about talk­ing about their salaries and talk­ing about how and why what their salary is mat­ters to students.”

Home to over 400,000 stu­dents, CSU is the largest sys­tem of high­er edu­ca­tion in the coun­try. Despite stu­dent body growth of 24 per­cent since 2004 and an increase of approx­i­mate­ly $1 bil­lion in tuition and fees gen­er­at­ed dur­ing that same time, salary increas­es in the sys­tem have gone almost exclu­sive­ly to uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors like cam­pus pres­i­dents and man­age­ment, its so-called ​“one percent.”

“Their empha­sis on exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion … shows a sense of cor­po­rate val­ues that are inap­pro­pri­ate for a pub­lic agency that sup­pos­ed­ly has a mis­sion for the pub­lic good,” Egan tells In These Times. ​“I think that some of the cam­pus pres­i­dents and chan­cel­lors think of them­selves as CEOs rather than heads of aca­d­e­m­ic institutions.”

Using data sup­plied by the Board of Trustees, CFA con­tend­ed in a March 2015 study that between 2004 and 2013, CSU full-time instruc­tion­al fac­ul­ty lost an aver­age of about $9,000 in pur­chas­ing pow­er. CSU cam­pus pres­i­dents, by con­trast, gained an aver­age of $22,000, with salaries rang­ing from $250,000 and $400,000. The Board of Trustees has offered instruc­tion­al fac­ul­ty a 2 per­cent raise at the bar­gain­ing table, the same amount that CSU cam­pus pres­i­dents received this June.

Beyond the bal­loon­ing pay scale at the top of the hier­ar­chy, the past decade has seen a pro­lif­er­a­tion of new man­age­r­i­al posi­tions in the CSU sys­tem and at uni­ver­si­ties around the coun­try. Ben­jamin Gins­berg, a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins and author of The Fall of the Fac­ul­ty, describes this nation­al phenomenon:

Every year, hosts of admin­is­tra­tors and staffers are added to col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty pay­rolls, even as schools claim to be bat­tling bud­get crises that are forc­ing them to reduce the size of their full-time fac­ul­ties. As a result, uni­ver­si­ties are now filled with armies of func­tionar­ies — vice pres­i­dents, asso­ciate vice pres­i­dents, assis­tant vice pres­i­dents, provosts, asso­ciate provosts, vice provosts, assis­tant provosts, deans, dean­lets, and dean­lings, all of whom com­mand staffers and assis­tants — who, more and more, direct the oper­a­tions of every school.