CSUN INSTRUCTORS JOIN PROTEST.

Byline: Mariel Garza Staff Writer

NORTHRIDGE - Faculty members at California State University, Northridge, will join a statewide protest today when they hold a teach-in to draw attention to overcrowded classrooms, heavy faculty workloads and inadequate facilities.

Today's event, sponsored by the California Faculty Association, is one in a series of protests to be held at each of the system's 23 campuses. State Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, and Susan Meisenhelder, statewide faculty union president, are scheduled to speak at Oviatt Library from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m.

``There are a number of demonstrable trends that are at work at the CSU that, from our point of view, are a serious threat to quality education,'' Meisenhelder said.

Contract negotiations, which began this past summer, are stalled. The main sticking points are salary, workload, job security for part-time lecturers, year-round operations and the administration's management of faculty grievances.

CSU officials said they are trying to work toward a compromise.

``We are absolutely trying to fill full-time positions,'' said CSU spokeswoman Colleen Bentley-Adler, adding that administrators conduct between 700 and 1,000 searches for full-time faculty members each year and have hired more than 3,000 full-time instructors in the past six years.

But union leaders contend that while enrollment is booming at the nation's largest public university system, few full-time faculty members have been hired. Instead, they said, the administration has increasingly relied on part-time instructors who lack the qualifications and commitment of tenured-track faculty members.

``They don't have the requirement to do advising,'' said Michael Reagan, CSUN faculty union president. ``They're not involved in long-term planning for curriculum. They are not involved in governance.''

Meisenhelder said more than half of the CSU faculty members are temporary - a figure CSU officials dispute. They said temporary instructors comprise 46 percent of all faculty members. That figure is even higher at CSUN, where about 1,000 part-time instructors are employed compared with 715 permanent faculty members, Reagan said.

Since the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, CSUN's student body has grown 23 percent to about 30,000 while the number of tenure-track faculty members has risen just 3.3 percent during the same period, Reagan said. Systemwide, similar growth in enrollment and full-time instructors has occurred.

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CSUN Faculty Union President Michael Reagan believes more full-time faculty positions need to be filled to help long-term planning for curriculum

Tom Mendoza/Staff Photographer