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The Student Voice of California State University, Fullerton
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Volume 112 Issue 15
Applications for funding create barriers for campus programs FERRY BAYLON Staff Writer
Campus activities face increasing financial difficulties as funding has become clogged in bureaucracy, several faculty members told a university committee on Friday. Cal State Fullerton's Instructionally Related Activities fund, known as IRA, was established by state law to provide financial support for CSU students to experience educational activities related to courses and programs offered at the university. At CSUF, the fund is supervised by a joint student-faculty committee and the money is held by Associated Students. ASI is paid about $250,000 from IRA funds per year as a management fee. In the meeting with the university’s planning resource budget committee, faculty members cited the multitude of paperwork and the IRA's unclear structure as reasons for concern. All full and part-time CSUF students pay more than $40 per semester into the IRA fund. The Athletics Department received 36% of the IRA money, which is worth about $1 million, while all other programs received between $3,000 to $120,000 this year. Applicants must reapply to receive funds each year. Erika Thomas, co-director of forensics and associate professor in the Human Communication Studies Department, emphasized the difficulty and amount of extra work
NAVTEJ HUNDAL / DAILY TITAN
Forward Garrison Wade dunks the ball against Pepperdine University on Nov. 11 at Titan Gym. The Athletics Department receives over $1 million from Instructional Related Activities funding.
put on the staff in order to apply for IRA funding. "The application process has become just so much more arduous and long. It's very difficult, especially in the time they are now asking for us to turn over that proposal for the following year is getting moved up earlier and earlier," Thomas said. Since she started dealing with IRA in 2010, Thomas said the amount of paperwork required to receive funds has tripled. She finds
this situation problematic, especially for a program like CSUF's forensic team, which has been around for over 60 years. "I feel like at this rate, a program like ours is likely to almost eventually give up because it's so difficult just to do the high-impact practice we are meant to do with the students," Thomas said. Thomas said one of the challenges with IRA funding is that it has become all about the numbers, not the student activities.
“Our campus preaches and supports high-impact practices, but all of this red tape and paperwork is creating a hurdle for our students to get the opportunities that the university seems most proud of; that's what bothers me,” Thomas said. ASI holds the money while the IRA committee accepts funding proposals from departments and colleges. The IRA committee then submits a proposed budget to the university president, the vice president of academic affairs and the
vice president of student affairs for approval. The director of CSUF's school of music, Randall Goldberg, said he is grateful that IRA exists because he can offer students essential experiential opportunities through their funds. However, one major drawback he mentioned to the committee is how vendors are compensated for their services through IRA funding. Goldberg said several artists from the spring 2022 semester still need to be paid. "Guest artists who had filled out paperwork in the spring did not get paid. They still weren't paid come August, September, October, and so we started to receive increasingly frustrated correspondence from artists," Goldberg said. Some artists threatened to file lawsuits and told Goldberg that they would never work with the university again. Planning, Resource, and Budget committee chair Jon Bruschke said that this is a major concern for the university, and that the lack of jurisdictional oversight contributes significantly to the issue. "There's so many moving parts and so many other parts of the campus that need to be in touch with us to figure out who the central entity is that should be trying to make sure that it's working smoothly," Bruschke said. Moving forward, the Planning, Resource, and Budget committee hopes to invite ASI and its executive director Dave Edwards, who was not present at the meeting, to discuss the issues raised by the faculty. Edwards did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Opinion: Black faculty shortchanged by CSU ANNISA CHARLES VANESSA SIGUENZA Asst. Editors
JOSHUA JURADO KIRSTEN MAGLUNOG Staff Writers
Black faculty are heavily underrepresented at Cal State Fullerton and the CSUs, despite plans to initiate changes to hire and retain more faculty of color. In spring 2022, CSUF had 39 Black professors of all ranks out of 826 fulland part-time professors, associate professors and assistant professors. Only one was part-time. An additional 46 of 1,313 full- and part-time lecturers identified as Black, according to university data. “It’s very clear that the CSU is underrepresented with Black faculty and Fullerton suffers the same problem,” VISIT US AT: DAILYTITAN.COM
said Gregory Brown, associate professor of criminal justice. He added that even when Black faculty are hired, the CSUs and CSUF have trouble retaining them due to hostility on campus and lack of support systems. David Forgues, vice president of Human Resources, said recruiting Black faculty is challenging for CSUF due to Orange County’s demographics. Only 2.2% of people in Orange County identify as Black, according to July 2021 U.S. Census data. In California’s total population, 6.5% identify as Black. Neither of these numbers includes people who identify as mixed-race. Irene Matz, a Human Communications professor and a former chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee, has overseen hiring in the past for the
College of Communications. “I realized hiring diverse faculty is just not that easy,” Matz said. “Some of the solutions to that diversity hire is ensuring that you get that higher announcement out to the right groups and populations, the universities where diverse people are graduating that might be interested in teaching.” Matz said recruiting and retaining diverse staff is a nationwide challenge to make CSU students of color feel represented. These challenges in recruiting and retaining a diverse staff ultimately affect students. “I'm just thinking about the students and how they can feel isolated and alienated from their own SEE STAFF
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ANNISA CHARLES / DAILY TITAN
Mei-Ling Malone, a lecturer in the African American Studies department, said that underrepresentation of Black faculty hinders students' success.
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