End of the Year Celebration; Negotiating your pay workshop; Asian & Asian American Studies Statement on CSU Divestment; CFA Statement on Academic Freedom
Please join us for the final chapter events of the academic year.
We have reached the end of the academic year, and we would like to invite all CFA-LA members for a joint celebration with the CSUEU (CSU staff union) on Friday, 5/24/2024, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM at the El Sereno Community Garden (5466 Huntington Dr N., Los Angeles 90032).
This past year, we have been met with many challenges and have worked as a campus community like never before - including our Labor Council Practice Pickets, 2 Strikes at Cal State LA, the campaign for King Hall, tuition increases, changes to Cal-GETC, budget/course cuts (and then restorations), supporting student organizing, a new interim president, a new campus president, and so much more on top of your regular campus responsibilities. The tireless work of faculty and staff for our student and campus community call for celebration and reflection!
Please join us on Friday. A main course will be provided by CFA & CSUEU. Drinks and snacks are potluck style - bring something to share! This is a members only event. This is a family friendly celebration - bring the kids!
You must RSVP: https://tinyurl.com/EOYcfacsueu
Faculty Rights Workshop: Tips & Tricks on Negotiating your Pay
Congratulations to everyone receiving re-appointments, promotions, tenure, range elevation, sabbaticals, exceptional service awards, and more! This has been a long and difficult year, so it is great that we are able to celebrate all the faculty being recognized for your hard work.
Our CFA-LA chapter will be hosting a workshop on how to negotiate your salary. All members are invited to participate. This will be a general workshop that will share tips and recommendations. Faculty can negotiate their salary per the Collective Bargaining Agreement, Article 31.5 or Article 12.11 respectively. The CBA currently guarantees that all tenure-line faculty receiving promotion will receive at least 9% raises and Lecturers receiving range elevation will receive 5% raises. However, these are only the base line raises. You can negotiate for more especially if your salary has been compressed or inverted.
In addition, as we remind you each academic year, if there is anything that needs to be addressed in your files, we encourage you to write a rebuttal that will be kept in your file. Rebuttals must be submitted no later than 10 days after receiving a decision. For more tips on how to write your rebuttal, visit: https://www.calfac.org/faculty-rights-tip-writing-rebuttals-to-evaluations-2/.
Register for the zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/CFALAnegotiate
Asian & Asian American Studies Department Statement on CSU Divestment
The Asian and Asian American Studies Department at Cal State LA joins our students in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in steadfast solidarity with the Palestinian people. We strongly oppose the violent forced removal and genocide of Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli military, which is funded in part by CSU investments. We call on Cal State LA to disclose all business and institutional ties to entities that aid or profit from the state-sponsored genocide being committed by the Israeli government. We demand that Cal State LA cut these ties.
We recognize the relational contexts that link past and ongoing Asian and Asian American movements for decolonization to the current struggle for self-determination, liberation, and life in Palestine. People across the Asian continent have long experienced colonialism and settler colonialism carried out by Western and Asian countries. Whether from racist colonial policies that upheld white supremacy, extractive economic systems that caused millions to perish from famines or massacres of hundreds of thousands of locals who rose to challenge colonial oppression, colonialism has resulted in mass suffering and death across Asia.
Specifically, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the United States expanded its military, economic, and technological power when it invaded the Philippines in 1898, sponsored the military coups in Iran in 1953 and Indonesia in 1965, and waged war in Vietnam from 1964 to 1973. In each instance, US imperialism weaponized ideology, military arms, and capital to assert hegemonic control over local and Indigenous peoples. We see these similar processes happening in Palestine right now, as the United States supplies Israel with billions of dollars in military aid.
The Asian and Asian American Studies Department joins the thousands of courageous students in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on our campus and across the country in calling for an end to the US-funded oppression of the Palestinian people. We join in solidarity with all the individual faculty members who have experienced unjustified and malignant attacks for trying to raise the issues of injustice in Palestine and student encampment in their Departments and Colleges. We also join 143 of the 193 United Nations General Assembly member nations in last week’s historic vote to support Palestinian statehood and membership in the United Nations. We call on Cal State LA to immediately disclose and divest from all entities that abet and profit from the genocidal occupation of Palestine.
CFA Statement on Free Speech, Academic Freedom
Members of the California Faculty Association support faculty and students’ rights to protest free from brutal aggression by militarized police, free from academic retaliation and repression by university officials, and without being confined into artificially constructed “free speech areas.” The entire university is a free speech area.
CFA members are committed to defending the health, safety, and academic freedom of students, faculty, staff, and community members in the CSU advocating for justice in Palestine.
We demand of all administrators in the California State University system:
protection of students’ rights to walkout of classes, rally, protest, hold teach-ins and other protected free-speech activities;
offer immediate sanctuary (i.e., spaces free from harassment and detention on campus) to all Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) members in the CSU, as well as to any other students, faculty, staff, and community members who speak or act in solidarity with Palestine, or against the ongoing criminalization of Palestine advocacy;
clearly reaffirm CSU management’s commitment to enforcing the principles of academic freedom for those teaching on Palestine and Israel and/or for those using the principles of anti-racism and social justice, as laid out in the CFA-CSU Collective Bargaining Agreement and the Academic Senate of the CSU Academic Freedom Policy (2017);
proactively counter any intimidation or doxxing campaigns against any student, faculty, or staff member, by mobilizing the CSU’s legal resources to protect them;
provide the necessary university support and resources to protect faculty, staff, students, and community members who show up against the genocide of Palestinians, as well as faculty, students, and staff whose families and communities are directly impacted by the siege on Gaza; the university will do this irrespective of donor-driven pressures and the corporatization of public institutions.
Academic freedom is under attack in our nation. We are witness to the criminalization of feminist, queer, trans, and critical race scholarship and of reproductive health. In the CSU, we are witness to repression against members of our campus communities who are protesting for human rights.
We take this opportunity to proclaim again that academic freedom must be the cornerstone of the university. As educators, we recognize now, as ever, the critical need for us to defend this imperative right. Our students, our faculty, and our communities cannot function under the repression and brutality we are witnessing at places of learning across California and the nation.
Statement can be found: https://www.calfac.org/cfa-statement-on-free-speech-academic-freedom/
Related reading: Protecting Free Speech & Academic Freedom on Our Campuses: https://www.calfac.org/protecting-free-speech-and-academic-freedom-on-our-campuses/