On Wednesday, Dec. 11, students and faculty members at San Francisco State University gathered at the corner of 19th and Holloway Avenues for a New Orleans-style funeral march to support the faculty members who are being “exited.”
Participants displayed three coffins and played jazz songs as they marched toward the Cesar Chavez Student Center. Approximately 150 people attended the march to show their frustration and support for faculty members in their final days of the semester, including business student Bella Butcher.
Not only did she discuss the negative aspects for lecturer faculty but Butcher also brought up the issues that students are going through as they struggle to register for classes for the spring semester.
“The professors are losing their livelihoods like they don’t have healthcare, they can’t pay rent in this area that they moved to specifically to teach here and they’re having to just completely start over,” Butcher said. “Faculty and students are the lifeblood of any campus. SF State is nothing without the teachers and learners.”
Third-year industrial design student Ruth Sarasohn is taking action by handing out fliers for attendees to sign the petition after the march.
“I’m really against the budget cuts that are happening,” Sarasohn said. “I feel like admin is just continuing to make more money while the faculty and students are really suffering.”
Sarasohn is mostly upset because she feels for the faculty members who provide such knowledge to students so when they get “exited,” their “power is lost or that information is lost.”
The march, which started at noon, continued for an hour and a half as attendees gave their speeches expressing their frustrations in a circle of people holding up signs such as “Where are my colleagues?” and “RIP the soul of SF State.”
Arturo Arrieta, a history lecturer, is a part of the unknown number of faculty members being “exited” from the university. He says he is frustrated with how lecturer faculty don’t have secure positions like tenured faculty members.
“The soul of our university, which is the lecturer faculty and those who have most contact with our students in the classroom and the lecturer classes — that faculty is being lost,” he said. “To know that you can be on the firing line or just the fact that you can be a lecturer with no security, have no contract, that’s what I feel.”
Eventually, the march moved to the administration building to present the petition to SFSU Provost Amy Sueyoshi and other university officials. At that point, the petition included over 400 signatures and people who attended the funeral march continued to sign.
Kieth Farris, a retired artist who decided to support the march, says that the students can try to turn around the damage that has been done to the faculty members but they have to stick to it.
“Basic education, which is in the humanities, philosophy, psychology — that’s being eliminated here; sounds like the administration is trying to turn this into a business college or something, which it is not and never was so I think that’s really a disaster for the community,” Farris said.
