Lecturer Deborah Farris sits in her soon-to-be former office as she is brought to tears expressing her anger, sadness and anxiety about not being offered classes to teach next semester at San Francisco State University. 

Farris is just one of the lecturers in the College of Liberal and Creative Arts who won’t be returning to SFSU next semester.

“I worked in mortgage banking. I got laid off with the recession in 2008,” Farris said. “I went back to school, took seven years to get all the education and did six years waiting and being stressed out, waiting and kept being told, ‘Well, once you have your three-year contract, you know you’ll be secure.’” 

Farris, who teaches in the Communication Studies department, has been working at the university for nearly eight years and is overcome with emotion as she thinks about how much losing this job will affect her going forward. 

“It’s going to be catastrophic financially. I’m losing two-thirds of my income and my medical [benefits] and I’m almost 60 years old,” Farris said. “I’m angry. I’m heartbroken and I feel like I’ve been tricked. I did what was asked of me to do and here I am now again, at 57 years old, trying to find work so I could pay my mortgage.” 

Amidst the ongoing budget crisis, several lecturers have decided to not totally give up on getting their message out to the SFSU community. 

On Monday and Tuesday, the English department hosted a two-day event on campus in an effort to help those who will not be returning next semester cope with the sudden job loss. 

English Department Chair Maricel Santos helped coordinate the event and says that with collaborative efforts between faculty, this will be solved. 

“We will work together to solve this but what’s particularly sad for us is many of the lecturer faculty who will not have job offers in the spring have been with us for 20 to 30 years, and that’s a kind of institutional memory you can’t hire quickly and recapture,” Santos said. 

Christy Shick, a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, will also not be returning in Spring 2025 and has been at SFSU for 12 years.

“I think the way this is being handled is incompetent and irresponsible and it’s having a great impact on me and my life and the life of my colleagues,” Shick said. “I stayed with this job, which I love, turning down other offers despite the lower income because I had job security, I thought, and would retire in about 13 or 14 years with a pension that I could live on.” 

Now at 52 years old, she finds herself unsure of what her next move is professionally, with the possibility of never retiring looming over her. 

“I have housing insecurity. I have a son in college who’s dependent on my benefits,” Shick said. “I have to decide if I, at my age, am willing to leave my home and my community to start over in a whole new city to get a tenure track position with my expertise, that’s maybe what I have to do, or do I want to substitute teach in Berkeley and work at Trader Joe’s.” 

There are some lecturers who, with just two weeks left in the semester, don’t know if they’ll have a job at the start of next year. 

Currently, English lecturer Doreen Deicke is on the schedule for the next semester but her class is under-enrolled, leaving her future uncertain if she will join her other colleagues who won’t be returning to work in the spring. 

“I’ve been back and forth with, ‘Oh, should I prepare?’ ‘Oh, why should I bother to prepare?’ And I keep bouncing back and forth,” said Deicke, who has been at SFSU for 35 years. “So far, I haven’t prepared at all because I don’t know if I’m gonna have a job in the spring. So I haven’t prepared for the spring semester at all, and it’s difficult to prepare if one doesn’t know if one has a job.”

If Deicke is let go, she’d be forced to retire early in order to keep her medical benefits. This decision will lower her pension and Deicke’s teaching career at the institution will be over prematurely. 

“I’m somewhat lucky to be in that situation because I’m over 50 years old. I have colleagues who have worked here for 10, 20 years, and they’re in their 30s and 40s,” Deicke said. “One of my colleagues is 49 and you can’t retire till you’re 50, and if she doesn’t get a class, then she gets nothing. She gets no pension.” 

According to Kent Bravo, SFSU media relations specialist, the exact number of lecturers being let go by the university is unclear.  

“We don’t know how many fewer lecturer faculty will be hired in the spring because the course schedule is not finalized until January,” Bravo wrote in an email statement to Golden Gate Xpress. “Some course sections may be added based on student demand up until the beginning of the semester.” 

With the semester coming to an end, faculty will host a “Funeral March” to commemorate those who will not return on Dec. 11 on 19th and Holloway. 

“I just hope the students that are here get what they need so they can get their degrees and move on. [If] you don’t give students classes they can’t graduate,” Farris said. “This is not supposed to be a place to make revenue. This is supposed to be a place of learning. This is supposed to be the people’s University.”