By Howard Stahl

    Everyone associated with SMC likes to think of our college as the best community college in the state.  We believe we serve our students well, having many transferring successfully to four-year institutions.  Even in these hard budget times, we are all striving to maintain our excellence, each and every day.

    But unfortunately, at SMC the budgetary commitment to fund faculty positions is far from excellent.  As the attached chart shows, there has been a long-standing, lack of commitment to hire full-time faculty positions at levels the Chancellors Office deems sufficient.  In fact, SMC ranks in the bottom 10% of Community Colleges in its commitment to meet the Chancellor’s Office hiring mandate, year-after-year.

    In contrast to SMC, the average district is able to exceed the Chancellor’s hiring requirement; some districts do it by as much as 98%!  To become even “average”, SMC would need to hire an additional 81 faculty positions.  Imagine if your department had an additional 4 full-time faculty.  Imagine the new courses and new areas the school could grow with these new positions.  Our hard-working part-time faculty deserve the chance to get a full-time position here at SMC.

    When the President talks about “regrowing” the school, we need to focus the attention where it is sorely needed: to improve the faculty headcount that our state budget dollars support.

1 - Data provided by the Chancellor's Office Of California Community Colleges
   
2 - No actual headcount data was provided for Fall, 2002 for the campuses:

Compton, Fremont-Newark, Lassen, Merced, San Jose and Shasta

3 - SMC Headcount reflects the most recent Fall, 2003 projection