The financial crisis at San Francisco State University has exposed a widening schism between faculty and administrators, as professors at the school grow increasingly panicked that they or their colleagues will lose their jobs by summer.
The tension has been simmering for at least a couple years at SFSU’s College of Liberal and Creative Arts, or LCA, home to about two dozen departments, including English Language and Literature, International Relations, and Theater and Dance. Five LCA chairs and professors of various college departments, who spoke to Gazetteer SF on condition of anonymity because they’re afraid for their jobs, said as many as 100 tenured faculty are at risk of being laid off.
The faculty members expressed sharp criticism of Dean Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, and her boss, Provost Amy Sueyoshi. SFSU’s biggest problem is declining enrollment, caused by various factors, and which can’t be pinned on any single person or group of administrators, faculty members said.
SFSU’s enrollment has declined 5.3 percent since last spring to below 21,000 students. Even so, faculty members argue, the university’s struggles aren’t new or unexpected, and Nwanko’s and Sueyoshi’s inaction has left LCA flat-footed and ill-positioned to resist or deal with budgetary cutbacks.
“We need a strong advocate, and at the same time, somebody to make some really hard choices,” one chair said. “And right now we have a person at the helm who refuses to make decisions.” Dean Nwankwo “is not advocating for the college at a time when it is desperately, desperately needed.”
In December, SFSU President Lynn Mahoney announced the university’s “financial emergency,” requiring it to slash programs, courses and non-tenured faculty. It is bracing for a nearly 8 percent budget cut across the California State University system, resulting in at least a $20 million reduction in funds for SFSU. Tenured professors are being asked to teach in departments outside their own, a development some described as “dehumanizing” in a news story reported by SFSU’s own students.
Even more drastic cuts at Sonoma State University, requiring it to eliminate its NCAA athletics program entirely, cast a long shadow over SFSU. As one of 23 campuses in the public California State University system, SFSU occupies an important place in San Francisco’s identity. Its professors proudly refer to it as the “people’s college,” a dramatically less expensive alternative to private schools like the University of San Francisco, or more prestigious state schools like the University of California at Berkeley.
As SFSU attempts to avoid Sonoma State’s fate, professors interviewed for this story said Dean Nwankwo and Provost Sueyoshi have resisted merging or consolidating departments that serve a shrinking number of students. One professor pointed to the Department of Jewish Studies, which the faculty member said serves just three enrolled students. Nwankwo has insisted that any efforts to consolidate programs should come from department chairs and professors, and not in a top-down approach from administrators, professors said.
In a telephone interview, Dean Nwanko rejected claims that she hasn’t listened to suggestions from faculty, and that she has dragged her feet. “My door is always open,” she said, adding that she had just finished speaking with a department chair. LCA’s financial problems, she said, are “system wide,” affecting everyone across 23 campuses, she said. The Dean referred further questions to SFSU spokesperson Bobby King.
“This is only Dean Nwankwo’s second year on campus,” King said in an email, adding that she heads the college “that has been hit hardest by declining enrollment.” A faculty committee is weighing merging LCA programs, King said.
“I assume she is the target of criticism for the decline in enrollment, which she can’t directly control in a significant way,” King said. Such declines are a national trend, he said, “even though many states and universities across the country dealt with it sooner.”
That’s exactly what Dean Nwankwo could’ve done, one chair said – taken action earlier – by following her own plan to create interdisciplinary “working groups” of professors to collaborate on “specific problem areas.” The effort might have allowed LCA to foresee and navigate some of its financial difficulties, the chair said, describing her lack of follow-through as “demoralizing.”
Nwankwo “came in and interviewed with some pretty ambitious plans, and sort of a framework of how she would lead,” the chair said. “A lot of the things that we heard when she interviewed, we just haven’t really seen in practice.”
The same chair added that Nwankwo was also likely not given “full visibility into what was coming down the pipe from the university.” The Dean is facing unprecedented deficits that will be difficult if not impossible to close, the chair said.
“You don’t get there by trimming the grass, you get there by cutting down trees,” the chair said. “And that’s going to be very uncomfortable and unpopular.”
One such example, at least from Dean Nwankwo’s perspective, might have been her decision to lay off Alyscia Richards, a SFSU graduate who worked as an untenured faculty member before getting a job as a chief of staff at LCA. A department chair described Nwankwo’s email announcing the layoff as curt and insensitive.
“As a courtesy, I write to inform you that Alyscia Richards, MPP College Personnel Officer, is no longer with the College” Nwankwo wrote in the July 2, 2024 email, viewed by Gazetteer SF. “If you have any specific questions related to your staff, please reach out directly to me then I will reach out to HR.”
According to the chair, Richards’s firing was followed about two weeks later by an expensive and superfluous retreat at Half Moon Bay – two “wasted days,” the chair said, that was at odds with the budgetary constraints used to justify the layoff. King said SFSU declined to comment on “personnel issues.”
The most forceful criticism of Sueyoshi is that she has brushed off faculty criticism of Nwankwo. Sueyoshi, who serves as provost for all of SFSU, is “an extremely well-respected member of not just the university’s cabinet, but across the CSU and in the community,” King said in an email. Sueyoshi didn’t respond to an email and phone call seeking comment.
Numerous faculty interviewed for this story described a longing for SFSU that just a few years ago was, as one chair put it, a “lovely place,” and one of few campuses nationally operating under a shared governance. The budget crisis along with a culture transformed by “distrust and discontent” is taking hold, the chair said.
Some faculty fear it may be too late. SFSU continues to suffer from the “shithole narrative” of San Francisco promulgated by national and conservative media, one faculty member said, scaring prospective students away. They fear SFSU has been pulled into a dangerous spiral where fewer students means more classes cut, making it harder to fulfill required course work to graduate, which in turn deters still more students from enrolling. To turn the tide, they said, administrators need to step up.
“You want somebody at the top of your college who will fight for what can be saved,” one of the LCA chairs said. “And sadly understand that they’re going to have to take responsibility for letting some things go.”
