Faculty across the 23- campus CSU system voted during July 2009 to take a 9.23% salary reduction by going on unpaid furloughs. They did this to reduce the negative impact of a $584 million budget cut to the CSU for this academic year. The vote for furlough was designed to mitigate the layoff of faculty and the canceling of classes. Furloughs mean that each faculty member must take nine academic days off per semester. This will result in fewer class meetings per course, reduced office hours and access to professors, and canceled events, even though student tuition was increased 30%. You can start to prevent this from happening again next year by logging on to http://savethecsu.com and getting involved in campus actions against further budget cuts.
Please note that budget cuts will completely close the CSULB campus on September 8th, October 9th and November 2nd. In addition, there will be days when staff are furloughed that will result in closed offices.
A list of when the History Department will be closed is available here. Please note that other campus services will be periodically unavailable to you throughout the semester because of budget cuts. My additional “faculty choice” furlough days can be found here.
