I work at a failed school. San Francisco State University. It’s a terrible place if you are looking for a quality education. A good student can find opportunities anywhere but any of our students that go on to succeed in life do that in spite of us, not because of us.
These are strong words. But they are words backed up by 20 years experience working as a staff member on the STEM side of campus; watching, listening, and pushing to get something meaningful done to fix the problems that are clear and obvious. All levels of management has resisted this.
At this institution, only incompetents get advanced to executive positions. They can’t understand the problems and are totally ill-equipped to do much about them. More, they have a fantasy about what they are doing that is totally misaligned with reality. Talking to them is like stepping a century back in time. They believe that they are heroes while they are the opposite. They have no idea what is of value or use in the world and work to indoctrinate students in ideas that are either useless or damaging.
Their answer to every problem has always been the same, “We’re doing everything right, send more money.”
Back in late 2023, a typical bullshit email that come from the provost and president of the University shows up in my mailbox. This one was titled ‘Serving our Students’ (2023-10-05). To (sarcastically) paraphrase the email, it said that ‘leadership’ ‘might’ start thinking about an enrollment problem that had been sensibly predicted a decade and a half prior and had been proving true for the last 5 years. That this would decimate our budgets.
I emailed a harsh response; “We fail to do our jobs and this is the reward. As long as folks in ‘leadership’ remain totally clueless, we will lose again and again.”
To her credit, Amy Sueyoshi (the provost) responded to that blast and politely invited my well thought out comments. I took that challenge and offered to meet her in person to discuss. We met a few weeks later in her office where I delivered the following letter (I actually emailed it to her in advance).
Just one month later, on December 5, 2023, three university presidents testified before congress and put the failure of universities on display for all to see. There was no mistaking that those that run the schools have no idea what they are doing.
That federal committee hearing was the first that most people in the United States had seen of the people running the top schools, moreover being challenged. Suddenly, they saw what I have seen for decades. INCOMPETENCE! The people understood, it must only be worse at lower performing schools…and it is.
Since then, UPenn’s Elizabeth Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay have been forced to resign in disgrace for this performance and other malfeasance.
It is now more than a year and a half from when I delivered that letter to the Provost and we saw that hearing. What has changed? Very little. The Romberg Tiburon campus is closing down and the baseball team played it’s last season. Close to 100 lecturers had their contracts terminated. We are in a spending freeze for everyday items (but not for multi-million dollar ventures). That’s about it.
What’s been added? Another bullshit indoctrination requirement; specifically Environmental Sustainability and Climate Action (ESCA). The list of these performative and indoctrinational requirements keep growing regardless of the obvious institutional challenges and compel students to think fraudulently and stupidly.
As I say in the letter below, I’m not against general education or even partisan electives. General education and electives are critical to an academic experience. What I am against is stealing effort and time from every student that could be spent studying something of genuine interest and replacing it with lame social programing. That’s just evil.
Cheating among students and faculty is rampant. ‘Artificial intelligence’ is doing much of student work. Class grades continue to fall onto a prescribed distribution (think about what I’m saying here). Graduation rates only go up.
I’ve also learned of truly disturbing problem on campus that I didn’t know about or has been growing since, faculty cancelling class to encourage and giving class credit for students to attend political demonstrations that they (the faculty) agree with. Class credit…in a Philosophy of Animals (PHIL 392) class. Don’t believe me, start listing at 2:24:25 in my interview with Zack Davis. I’ve been hearing this from many sources in many classes. This is utterly insane and criminal. This is just indoctrination.
The crazy thing is, this isn’t just a problem at my university. It’s everywhere. That, in no way, makes it right. That does not give us a pass. What it means is that if you look closely at your local university, you’ll see much of this type of problem. Take off the blinders and look.
What are my goals here? I want actual leadership and the hard decisions to be made. Meetings are neither. Listening to all possible views is neither. Performance art that masquerades as either is neither. Any functioning adult would look at what goes on at my campus as insane.
I don’t know exactly how we are going to make this happen. How do you fix a school? What is a school? This is a complex problem and the answers won’t be what we entirely expect. What I do know is that to get to that point, we are going to have to DO FUCKING SOMETHING. We have to (just) try! Doing next to nothing without any new thinking is what got us here and that took many decades. Pretending that there is no problem won’t do it.
I know that we are going to have to move mountains and that takes hard work and good management over time. I see none of that. Still.
Fix this! START RIGHT NOW! This is important.
My letter is reproduced below. There are some edits that should have been done that were seen in later readings but I left it as it was sent.
2023-11-08
Provost Amy Sueyoshi,
Thank you for taking the time to hear from me. I realize that this a special opportunity as staff input is typically ignored by management at SFSU.
I want to improve the value and meaning that our students can receive here. My goal in delivering this letter is vocalize some of the major problems and changes that need to be made to make us a better university (as I see them). Where we should cut, where we should advance, and what we should change. Mostly, though, it’s about changing our method to a student value focused university rather than a political/administration based university.
Because what I want to discuss is such a wide ranging and complex topic, I’m hoping that you’ll be able to bear with my difficulties in communicating it. Tentacles of this go in many directions.
I prefer to speak in generalities and use hyperbole. You will easily produce evidence of outliers and anecdotal examples that will argue my points, but the broad truth will remain.
I could be totally wrong about many of things I say here. This is a large and broad institution and what I see and know will be different from what others do. Still, my eyes are open and I’m capable of basic observation and understanding. If just half of what I say is correct, that’s damning and should provide plenty to work from.
The entire education industry is changing rapidly, much of this change is more than 30 years overdue. Institutional change needs to be constant, especially in this space, but it’s been stagnant. All institutions, even the best and well-funded, are going to have to make significant changes in the next few years. SFSU has failed to face basic change with adaptation and improvements for the last several decades. So compounding environmental shifts, there are already fundamental institutional problems and they need to be addressed that way.
I’m not convinced that SFSU will or should exist 10-15 years from now. But that’s the choice of SFSU ‘leadership’.
SFSU is going to have to adapt to reduced student enrollment and much lower budgets. I’m encourage administrators to take cost-cutting measures that will benefit students rather than harm them. I will document my concerns with the universities current direction and then also offer some alternative solutions.
Value – SFSU is not providing real value or meaning to its students. A student spending 4 (5?) years at SFSU accepts a huge monetary and opportunity cost and little can be said to show for it. Leaving SFSU $60-70k in debt is a prison sentence for most at the bottom of the employment spectrum, especially for the most economically and intellectually disadvantaged. This is at the core of our problem. An institution that provided real value and meaning, that was a true investment, that was better than other options would not have an enrollment problem!
Many people have said and will repeat that a college education is a key to increasing lifetime earnings. That is actually a mis-representation of facts. Rather, a college diploma improves opportunities for lifetime earnings. That is a very different concept. Historically, workers in industry have been prevented from taking better paying jobs, not because they weren’t smart or capable but because they didn’t possess a college diploma. The ‘paper ceiling’ as it’s called. This is the fact, the value provided by this institution is the diploma, not the education. Due to the low quality of our graduates, this diploma carries very little weight in the market.
You will provide many examples of students that have attended SFSU and achieved great success in the world. I would argue that they did this despite us, and not because of us. It may even be that our ineptitude motivated them to just do it on their own. Or, they just got lucky. This is also going to be a tiny percentage of our annual graduating population. Our scrap rate is terrible. I know some of these people in my life outside of this school, a diploma from SFSU, and they are totally useless to the world.
Competency – Most students I interact with at SFSU seem to have little capacity for the basics of writing, speaking, practical math, framing history, civics, manipulating images, and using common computer applications. They have no concept of organizational effectiveness and productive systems much less household and personal finance. All of these are critical in the world and most of our students seem to be working at a rudimentary level. While classes seem to be in place for some of these topics, it’s hard to see that they have much effect. A renewed devotion to these topics would be of real value for students and society.
We simply can’t produce real expertise in our students. We’re ‘trying’ to compete with Harvard and Stanford, a game that we will always lose. The low quality of our students and instructors along with our slim budget ensures that. Instead, a focus on meaningful competency could be achieved. We could win that game. Competency is quite scarce in the current market, just ask anyone in industry. Hiring at any level means sorting through hundreds of ‘credentialed’ candidates with zero competency. That could be our value proposition. To do this we need to take a chainsaw to the patient (SFSU). Complete departmental overhauls need to happen…but with vision.
A college or university diploma is a certification. What does certification here mean? Attendance? Payment? Adhering to a speech code? It certainly have anything to do with academic competency. A certification (diploma) is supposed to mean something. It’s supposed to mean that you passed muster, passed the bar, competency. It should not mean that you fell on a particular side of a population distribution. This is a core problem. We are operating a diploma mill.
In confidence, I’ve asked several of our professors, “How many of your students would pass your class if you didn’t curve the grade?” About 30% in a 200 level class was the answer. That’s terrible. Of course, the university has given the instructor every incentive to adjust scores to reflect a particular distribution NOT merit. They would be insane to report accurate grades as they would be the ones punished. They may not be the best faculty but they aren’t totally stupid.
This problem compounds. I’ve listened to many other faculty members complain that they (continually) get students in their classes that have little or no understanding of basic mathematical or physics prerequisites stated for the class that is being taught. The students show records that they have passed the prerequisite courses but there is no competency or performable evidence of this. We know what happens here. The professor is encouraged to curve their grades and move forward another group. This goes on and on. Another proud graduate!
Perpetuating Students that lack actual skills, curiosity, and creativity – At the student level, we are a vocational institution. We are not an academic institution. If I were to ask 100 students at random “Why are you here?”, I would get “to get a good paying job” as an answer from over 90 of them. But we don’t offer real vocational training (outside of very few departments). Students leave here with no actual skills or ability that generate value in the market. They don’t have a way of thinking that provides any benefit to the tribe. This is atrocious. Of course there are academic components to any vocational understanding but if that isn’t put into a meaningful framework and shown to be of value, does it even belong?
The problem for students goes deeper. I often talk to students about their goals; what they are interested in, their hobbies, and what they actually do with themselves outside of coursework. The answers are terrifying. NOTHING. That’s the most common answer. They don’t seem to have any reason or meaning behind any of this…and I’m in COSE. More, I’m generally found in a productive machine shop, designing and making very cool science things, with a door open to an active hallway full of engineering and science majors. How many of the thousands of students that pass by each week look in and are curious enough to ask? One or two a semester. These are not minds that are exploring the world. They are not learners. Remember, these students have never seen a machine shop before, never made anything, their lives have been spent behind a school desk doing pedantic classroom assignments. The lack of curiosity is astounding and infuriating….and that’s OUR fault. Even if they come to us that way, it’s our fault for not fixing it right away.
Our students are starving for meaning and they don’t even know it. All of the messaging coming from their schools and instructors is fraudulent, performative, and inauthentic. They get marketing, not wisdom. They know they are being sold to, but don’t see how pervasive it is. I have a small poster on my door, “Integrity is what you do when nobody is watching. Authenticity is what you do when everybody is watching.” Seriously, I don’t think that many of the students have any understanding of this. Their trained responses about ‘saving the world’ are hollow and dead. Authenticity is absolutely forbidden in their world. But of course, their best and only friend is a tiny device in their hand.
We need to change this. We must. The students and the kind of education we are providing them to make them more skilled, curious, and engaged learners…that have value to the tribe.
A mismatch between mission and reality – The stated mission of the university is a farce: “San Francisco State University educates and equips students to thrive in a global society. We deliver academic excellence by pursuing knowledge, inspiring creativity, supporting our diverse community and advancing social justice and positive change in the world.” Our students don’t thrive. We don’t believe in academic excellence. We don’t pursue knowledge. Creativity doesn’t exist here. We damage under-served communities. We make the world a worse place. This needs to be re-written by someone that cares about what our students are paying for with their money, time, and efforts.
A system teaching is valueless – This school and the CSU system does not value teaching. They simply don’t. I’ve talked to many faculty members over the years and directly asked “What incentives exist to make you a better teacher?” The answer is that there are none. “What system is in place to evaluate your teaching manner and methods?” Again, none. If faculty don’t know of an incentive, then there is no reason for them to improve or fix problems. Even if they have the best of intentions, without a system of evaluation and critique, it would be almost impossible for them to know what areas are effective and where the problems are. Faith is all we have that ‘good teaching’ happens here. That’s stupid. That’s religious. That’s childish.
The message of the University has been made clear to all – maximize graduation rates at all costs.
To be honest, in my 18 years working here, I’ve learned that there is zero incentive to improve what I do or how I do it…and that real disincentives exist to doing so. That’s how staff feel. I won’t be compensated better. I won’t get better opportunities. I will, though, get a lot of heat from ‘management’ to keep quiet and out of the way. For this reason, most staff that I encounter are extremely low quality and generally are capable of little, but we could say that for all SFSU employees.
Crises are not leveraged or learned from – COVID-19 and the cascading effects that resulted from it were an opportunity for us and we completely blew it. Winston Churchill is often cited for saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” I’ve seen two real crises at the university in my 18 years here, the 2008 Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 Pandemic. The University and CSU came from each of those having suffered considerable pain…with nothing to show for it. Any competent executive would have found a way to fundamentally re-develop the institution under them to be lighter, more capable, and more competent. No. Here in 2023, post-COVID, everything is back to worse than normal. We’ve got everything as it was before the pandemic, just worse. Every effort was made to put it back as it was before, even though that wasn’t working at all. THAT IS UTTERLY CRAZY. This is how imbeciles behave. We spent the better part of two years with the world upended and we learned NOTHING from that?! We’ve gone right back to instructing students just like it was in 1978. I seriously question if folks here know what a school is.
This is a total failure of leadership and imagination. It is a very, very, very rare occasion when I meet an administrator, manager, or executive at this University that has any idea of what they’re doing. Putting an academic in management positions is generally suicide and that’s made even worse when they were a marginal academic to begin with. Executives are paid to do one thing: make good decisions on how an institution operates and changes. We don’t have that here. I don’t see the result of real decision making around me. I see only ‘staying the course’ and ‘kill it in committee’. If the only thing that I’ve noticed in the last 18 years is the general decay of operations and a steep rise of racist/victim-mindset programming, that’s a serious problem. The president of this university is paid a bit over $473,000 per year. Most of the executives below her are paid a very high fraction of that. Why is it that we get next to nothing outside what a quasi-capable lower level manager could perform? This is serious and has had massive and detrimental effects, producing a low quality, passionless, performative joke of a school.
Solutions to improve education quality:
Compete with online learning – The new competitor in our space, online universities, provide a huge amount of value to the student. Obtaining the economically obligatory checked-box (diploma) is made cheaper, more convenient, easier, done from anywhere, done at any time, and conforms to work or child care schedules. It is also a cheaper option for universities than in-person classes and could be a win-win for students and administrators. We simply can’t compete with online on those fronts. We have to compete elsewhere. That must provide a different and greater kind of value to the student. I posit that that would be actual and competitive graduate competency backed by institutional reputation. Sadly, our current reputation as a diploma mill is going to have to take a bit of work to recover from. In 5-10 years, we could be a name to be reckoned with… but that’s going to take actual change to produce that value….and we have little time.
Master the media – ALL SFSU LECTURES NEED TO BE VIDEO RECORDED AND FREELY DISTRIBUTED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AFTER THEY ARE MADE. It’s 2023. This has been possible, easy, and obvious for the last 20 years. (Look to Jeffrey Kaplan and John Vervaeke for examples) Most basically, a student can ‘re-attend’ a lecture that confused them. More, a prospective student would be able to evaluate an instructor by viewing past lectures before they sign up for a class. Even more important, good lecturers can quickly be separated from terrible lecturers by their peers. Again, this has been possible, easy, and obvious for the last 20 years.
Trimester system – Moving to a trimester system is an obvious cost savings for students. If we can reduce the opportunity cost for students who attend SFSU, that would help significantly. There are 52 weeks in a year. We could have 3 full 15 week trimesters with 2 weeks break between each and save students a year of time in pursuit of a diploma. This could shave more than a year from current enrollment times or provide more flexibility and options for student’s and lecturer needs.
Fail them fast – From an economic perspective, one of the very worst things a college student can do is pay to attend a college or university and not attain a diploma. The incurred debt without the ability to gain higher paying work is crushing to their future. A school that understands this would try to minimize the damage by identifying the students who need (low cost) remediation to succeed and move them into a different system quickly. I’ve seen no attempts for this. Postponing that is predatory. Participation is not success. The goal is clear; the university makes more money (numbers).
Stop grade curving – This is the instructor and university cheating. It doesn’t matter that the university encourages it, it is wrong. Grades in courses should be a measure of merit and performance. They should represent competency. They should be their own certificate.
Exit exams – If a college diploma is to have any meaning, a (real) exit exam should be required. Otherwise, it’s just a collection of corrupted checked boxes that doesn’t show real competency.
Eliminate colleges and departments on campus – Eliminate the College of Ethnic Studies. While there was an imperative for this school’s founding, it no longer has meaning and is simply a money and authenticity pit. The subject matter that is taught there belongs within other colleges. Eliminating this would have no real effect on interested students and would reduce university bloat. Of course, this was attempted by former President Wong’s administration but he was too much of a coward to get it done.
Eliminate the sports programs on campus and the resources spent on them. We need to be serious and clear about what we are trying to do and the handicap that we have as a commuter school. It’s not just cost but space and attention that go into these that take away from other programs. As long as we have these, we show that we just don’t care about the costs we pass on to students. Just some silly traditions that were fun for the very wealthy at the turn of the last century.
That Cinema and Broadcast & Electronic Communication Arts are separate departments is a mystery of the ages. Adding to that that one department got a whole new building full of new toys while the other didn’t. I’m sure that it doesn’t serve our students well and it is very expensive. (That new building should be busy 24 hours every day in todays market, but it is a crypt. This is failure.)
That goes for many other departments and subjects on campus. We need to kill off majors and schools that don’t align with a new vision for the university. Add value! Get lean and produce students capable and eager to conquer their futures.
Eliminate lame general education requirements – The general education requirements of A3, Area E, Area F, AERM, ES, GP, SJ should be eradicated. Period. (A3 was included as these courses, sadly, tend to do the opposite of what their name implies) This is approximately 12+ credit hours of compelled trivial indoctrination that every one of our students has to take to be ‘certified’. Courses in these areas may be fine for those that are drawn to them but they take time and attention away from most students that should be investigating topics that are authentic, fascinating, or valuable for them. This is encouraging a lifetime of fakery and fraud. Worse, this is a predatory $12,000+ (much more if housing and opportunity costs are applied) expenditure being forced on very poor and not very competitive students for what has next to no marketable or personal value. This is what exploitation looks like. Mirrors can teach us a lot about oppression.
Student internships – Internships, internship, internships… with real quality companies. Our location in San Francisco is a vital asset that has been squandered entirely. Most schools would die for a spot proximate to many of the top financial, creative, and technology industries in the world. Our students need to get into those companies to build networks and gain critical experience and understandings…. STARTING IN THEIR FRESHMAN YEAR! Then continue this throughout their years at SFSU. The lack of any real world understanding that most of our student body has is a major problem for them, worse, they could have learned from the best.
Often, students graduate valueless to the economy but also with degrees that they shouldn’t have pursued. If a student can discover in their freshman year that they actually don’t want to be an engineer but rather, an accountant, then delivering that realization to them is the most life changing event that could have been. We could do that, and early.
Students would also get the opportunity to find out that academics are not industry professionals. Academics can teach subjects but they know little about actual industry, whatever it is. Students that learn this can be more strategic about their directions and who they are listening to about what.
Performance evaluations for management – There is no system of evaluations that pursues real input from ME about the work of my Chair, Dean, Provost, or President. It’s unclear who is evaluating their performance but the ones that suffer beneath them haven’t been asked.
Break the silos – The problem with siloing of resources and facilities at SFSU is unbelievably bad. The monetary waste is nothing compared to the educational waste. This needs to be broken down to make us an actual team. Now we just have feudal warlords and waste.
Centralize workshops– In my area of expertise, practical engineering and production, I am dumfounded by how this university organizes it’s workshops. I am the only staff machinist and welder on campus. Few have the experience that I do modeling or making. But there are 4+ workshops. Those staffed by former students that failed to launch. This is so absurdly inefficient and means that outside my shop, students are being ‘taught’ and ‘supervised’ by recent students that don’t know what they are teaching and certainly don’t understand real safety protocol. We could instead have one large workshop, expertly staffed and supervised, with modern functional tools…with less staff members, at a lower cost, better results, and real education.
Romberg Tiburon Campus and Sierra Nevada Field Campus– These aren’t utilized in any meaningful or productive way. Change that. Make these produce value to as many students as possible. Partner with industry or other schools. Do SOMETHING to make these spaces return the value they hold. The Sierra campus has special value as it can serve as a true mind changing bootcamp.
Terminate commencements – Commencement ceremonies are a layover from old wealthy schools that can afford silly extravagance. Let’s be more serious. Stop this waste.
Stop being fake – Public communications by the Chancellor, President, Provost, and Deans comprise of complete bullshit and fake performance. Move to having real discussions about real topics that aren’t fed through a marketing or corporate mayonnaise machine. If something real can’t be said well, concisely, in common language, then maybe these folks are in the wrong job.
This letter is quite incomplete. It contains only a few of the more obvious and readily discussable issues. There are many more problems and possible (painful) solutions that I’m not knowledgeable about or able to easily describe. Real experts should be able to delve much deeper into this but they would need to be intellectually honest in the face of their own community and political pressures.
In the next few years, this university is going to be forced to make changes. Enrollment is down and will stay down. Budgets are getting cut and will stay cut. Much has to change to adapt to this, even without addressing our poor quality. Based on all past experience, this will end up being across the board budget cuts, the tool of terrible management, at the expense of education quality. I expect this and it will only exacerbate why we are in this position.
As a stakeholder here, I want to know how these points are being addressed?
Peter Verdone
Machinist, Fabricator, & Engineer Physics & Astronomy
COSE pverdone@sfsu.edu
415-686-0257
www.peterverdone.com