The California Faculty Association (CFA) is fighting for more pay raises and is now playing the race card to get them.
In 2016, the faculty union threatened to strike during its so-called “Fight for Five,” during which time they demanded a five percent General Salary Increase (GSI) for all faculty. The demand wasn’t entirely outrageous, but when they didn’t get what they asked for, they resorted to racial politics.
This month, CFA released a 22-page report detailing how funding for the 23-campus California State University (CSU) system has decreased over the last 30 years while “the number of students of color has increased.”
Or, as Dr. Cecil Canton, CFA Associate Vice President of Affirmative Action and the CFA’s answer to Rev. Jesse Jackson, puts it: “As the student body of the CSU became darker, funding became lighter.” Dr. Canton identifies the core problem as “structural racism” in the CSU system.
The report analyzes this “structural racism” and concludes that California is stacking the cards against diverse students.
“Today’s more diverse students are being cheated out of the education that they deserve and that their predecessors of 30 years ago enjoyed,” the report argues. “We offer today’s students ‘education on the cheap,’ one that may be considered ‘good enough’ for them but that is decidedly less rich than the educational experience the whiter, more privileged CSU students of the past enjoyed.”
The authors highlight California’s demographic trends, and how the CSU has successfully matched up with it, enrolling more students of color than privileged white kids. It notes that “in 1985, 63% of the CSU student body identified as white, and only 27% identified with another ethnic group…[B]y 2015, that pattern had essentially reversed, with 26% of students identifying as white and 62% of students identifying themselves as belonging to another ethnic group.”
Finally, the report predicts that “if people who come from backgrounds like those of CSU students do not do well in the future, it is hard to imagine how the state can.”
With this report to back them up, CFA leaders are accusing California legislators of being racist toward CSU students of color to guilt-trip them into increasing the CSU budget.
“The CSU administration has failed to grasp the devastation that structural racism, white supremacy and implicit bias have wrought on the life chances of our students and their families,” Dr. Canton likewise claimed in his testimony on CSU Faculty Diversity to California State Assembly Committee on Higher Education and Assembly Budget, adding, “And even on the CSU system itself!”
Interestingly enough, it’s Democrats who are the so-called racists controlling the California State Legislature and funding the CSU system. Liberal Democrats have had a majority for many years now, and during the 2016 election, the Democrats clinched a two-thirds supermajority in both houses of the California legislature.
Meanwhile, student groups like the Cal Poly Students for Quality Education, have taken the fight to social media, posting flyers like this on their Facebook page:
In reality, California is plagued with liberal special interests, and has chosen to fund pet programs over increasing CSU funding. In addition, “about 4 million more people are enrolled in the state’s low-income health care plan, Medi-Cal, as compared with 2012,” and President Obama’s executive order to spare some illegal immigrants from deportation made hundreds of thousands of low-income illegal immigrants eligible for Medi-Cal. Funding cuts have hurt all CSU students, not just those of color. Nationwide, 42 percent of all 18- to 29-year olds are saddled with college debt.
Of course, facts aren’t relevant to the CFA, and in the world of politics, they aren’t as powerful as race-baiting.
