With declining enrollment and further budget cuts impending, San Francisco State University will have professors teach in departments other than their own starting in the Fall 2025 semester. The idea of it has drawn mixed reactions from faculty.

SFSU is developing a system on campus where faculty who cannot fill their classes because of shrinking student enrollments are stepping up to teach in other departments that have robust ones but not enough tenure-track faculty to teach all of their students, according to Carleen Mandolfo, an associate provost.

“We need tenure-track faculty to be as fully employed as possible,” Mandolfo said. “They are our base faculty. We have a commitment to them and we pay them no matter what.”

According to an email obtained by Golden Gate Xpress, the spreadsheet lists 57 classes under departments such as journalism, women and gender studies, liberal studies, creative writing, communication studies, broadcast and electronic communication arts, theater arts, English, design, modern languages and literatures and museum studies, which have openings that need to be filled. 

Per Mandolfo, this idea was first hinted at last semester as a process where tenured faculty are swapped into different departments as a means of providing proper education while under a reduced budget.

These potential partnerships between different departments are created via spreadsheets, titled “Labor Exchange Sections,” where department chairs can indicate holes in tenured/tenure-track faculty schedules.

“It isn’t mandated,” said Mandolfo. “We aren’t forcing people to sign the spreadsheet, but I am heartened to see departments now starting to reach out to each other, to work together on this and to help us with our enrollment and budget challenges.”

For faculty like Rebecca Eissler, an associate professor of political science, teaching outside their domain is not impossible, as in some cases it would only take a few changes to the curriculum. Eissler currently teaches quantitative research methods and statistics classes within the political science department.

“If I were asked to teach a quantitative statistics class in a psychology department, it wouldn’t be super different. I’d tailor it a little, I’d change a little bit, but it’d be stuff I know. I’d be comfortable doing that,” Eissler said. “I want this University to succeed. I want students to get a good education. So if that means teaching a class outside of my department here or there, I don’t love it, but it’s not the end of the world.” 

One partnership between departments that has developed thus far is faculty in the journalism department preparing to teach psychology graduate writing assessment requirement classes. 

“We just started it, and really only psychology and journalism have really started actively figuring out who from journalism can teach core courses in psychology,” Mandolfo said. “I wasn’t even in the room when they got together to have that conversation. So it really is, at this point, voluntary partnerships that are emerging, which is great. I hope to see you know many more of them where it makes sense.” 

But psychology students, like Adam Suri, are concerned about potential journalism and psychology partnerships. Suri said outside lecturers without knowledge of a certain subject would be a “weird combination.”

“As a psychology student, you would want your professors to be psychology-related because they can also give you connections to other fields outside of academia,” Suri said. “If a person from the journalism department were to do that, it would be really awkward because they wouldn’t know how to direct students from that field into something a psychology major would be interested in.” 

Carmen Domingo is the dean of the College of Science and Engineering, which the psychology department is housed under. She feels like the exchange plan won’t be much of an issue.

“Someone who understands how to write well and can teach writing, especially in journalism, can help psychology majors or science majors translate the work that they do to the general public,” Domingo said. “They’re not asking them to weigh in on areas of psychology. They’re asking them to help with their writing skills so I think they’re very qualified. And as journalists, you end up writing about all kinds of things that aren’t necessarily your area of expertise.” 

Although the plan won’t affect every educational department, SFSU’s current standing with low enrollment, resulting in lower state funding, may change the trajectory of instructor employment and the quality of student learning opportunities.

Amy Kilgard, the communications department chair, said student enrollment is a key criterion for receiving California State University allocations. 

“The CSU funds each of the CSU campuses at their target level,” Kilgard said. “So we get a funding per student based on our target. But when we’re below target, they change that amount to below what we were promised,” Kilgard said.

Brad Erickson, a liberal arts lecturer and the California Faculty Association chapter president, calls the exchange a “clearing of house.”

“It’s quite dehumanizing,” Erickson said. “Kind of makes us feel like products on a shelf and that we are interchangeable.”

Erickson explained that faculty employment protection is based on a hierarchy of contracts depending on the amount of time one has taught and the number of classes one is teaching in a semester.

Faculty who are retired but continue to work part-time or on occasion and lecturer faculty are most vulnerable to job loss, the latter of which Erickson said “don’t actually have to be laid off because you’re not human enough.”

Erickson said his place falls next on the totem pole, contract lecture faculty, which must be laid off if there is not enough full-time work because of an “unconditional appointment” with the university.

“Already 300 faculty have been put in the dumpster,” Erickson said. “And this points to the just despicable nature of the two-tier faculty labor system in which over half the faculty are treated as literally disposable. You don’t even have to lay them off. You just say, ‘Well, we just don’t have to put you in the schedule where there’s nothing you can do.’”

Last year, Erickson lost a course to a tenured faculty member because that individual had classes canceled. He said this is a common pattern where “a number of lecture faculty without full-time contracts were just not given their entitlements” and causes a halt to proper preparation for courses, which also affects students.

“I had to teach something I hadn’t taught before, and the person had to teach something they hadn’t taught before and get ready two weeks before the semester started,” Erickson said. “So I think that this is not good service for students. Even though some of us are pretty quick on our feet and can adapt quickly.”

The displacement of faculty is one part of the larger issue relating to CSU-wide budget cuts. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed a 7.95% state funding cut that will hit all 23 CSU campuses. 

Although Dr. Lionell “Badu” Smith, assistant professor of critical communication pedagogy, said the circumstances may be unfair, he also sees these faculty exchanges as opportunities across the board of SFSU departments.

“It provides an opportunity to imagine something new,” Smith said. “And I kind of take that approach for it. There’s so many moving parts to this conversation, but I think that it’s an opportunity for some collective imagining, some collective dreaming to imagine something different, a new way forward. And perhaps at the forefront of that is our students to think about  how we can maybe reimagine what we’re doing in our departments.”