Here we are again. The end of the Spring 2026 semester at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Students will be receiving grades and graduating. Sadly, it’s a fraud.
At the end of last semester (Fall 2025), when grading was about to happen, our provost posted a dispatch for our faculty to reflect on. She didn’t want students to fail…administratively. Give them all passing grades was the clear message. Regardless of the quality of student work, move them on so that the schools metrics could look good.
I was horrified…and I’m not even faculty. Everyone that I talked to read this post the same way. What is it we are doing here if the provost is looking for the students to artificially succeed? What is a diploma or certification if it is fraud?
I couldn’t stand it any longer and was forced to write a letter (again) and schedule another meeting with her to deliver it, which I did.
Below is that letter. It’s painful. It’s cruel. It’s also accurate and honest. I was open to feedback from her following our talk but she decided to run, avoiding any response. Thus, I’ve given 3.5 months for any attempt. Time’s up.
Amy Sueyoshi – Provost SFSU, 2026-01-28
Thank you for agreeing to meet with me again. I know that I’m not making it easy for you to do so. I don’t believe that the topics we are discussing lend themselves to ‘ease’.
It was fall of 2023 that we initially met ( https://www.peterverdone.com/how-to-fix-a-failed-school/ ). I attempted to share ideas and solutions that seemed clear to me at the time. Now, just over two years later, little has changed but worsening of the problems, so we get to have another try.
I don’t want you to think that I can’t put myself in your situation. The job that you are tasked with is not simple: maximize enrollment AND increase graduation rates. Decreasing budgets, faculty and staff unions, shared governance, and rising tuition create quite a challenge for that. Moreover, it’s hard to change things while changing nothing at all.
Demographic collapse could almost be blamed for all this if we didn’t know the real problem.
There was a wise man named Charlie Munger. He talked a lot about incentives, “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome”. I’m fascinated by this. That we can (almost) predict the future if we understand the incentives at play.
Incentives. I look around at SFSU and I see so many at work. Administration has them. Faculty and staff have them. Students have them. Even you and I have them.
I mentioned your incentivized goals: maximize enrollment AND increase graduation rates. You and the rest of the administration are highly incentivized to make that happen. Your political future depends on this. Sadly, the perversion of the outcomes is what is killing us. Standards are lowered to comical levels and failing students advance to graduation. The messaging from your office begs for this and it’s insane.
To quote your recent email (On Grading, Renewal, and Our Shared Work Ahead, 2025-12-22), (again) pushing faculty to elevate failing grades, “Realizing the power and purpose of grades as not just an evaluation of work done, but also as an impetus to inspire students in future work, can be a challenging balancing act. I say all this to underscore the importance of creating an environment that advances student success even as we evaluate whether students have succeeded in our courses.” Wow! Everyone that has read that email understood exactly what was being said: pass failing students.
Earlier this year, I visited the SFSU Career & Leadership Development Office and obtained their data from 2018 to 2024 for the department I work in, as well as electrical and mechanical engineering. I was shocked to find just 92 data points from 7 years. Worse, just 34 had any employment lined up, even non-professional work. Two of the unemployed were stated to be continuing their education. There was almost nothing there.
I don’t know how much statistics folks must study on the other side of the campus, but this is telling us a few things.
- SFSU doesn’t care what happens to students once they graduate. There is no follow up. It is obvious that there was no serious attempt at learning this.
- There is no statement that can be made about cohort success given such scant data. 13 points per year from what should be many hundred.
- The University has NO IDEA if it’s doing anything of value. Future quality didn’t seem to be a function at all. Everything is FANTASY.
I like talking with students about the McNamara Fallacy. It’s quite a delightful tale. It states, if you can’t measure what’s important, make important what you can measure. The only thing that we deem measurable is enrollment and graduation rates. Incentives at work! We are not measuring teaching, learning, or value. Our metrics destroy what is important.
Back to incentives, about a decade ago, I realized the wildest thing. There exist no incentives at SFSU to hire good teachers. There are no incentives for teachers to improve the quality of teaching. There is no quality control at all to this end. That’s when I realized what’s going on here. That’s when I realized that the incentives were SOLELY to maximize enrollment and increase graduation rates. Administration talks about this all the time. They make it obvious, but I hadn’t seen it yet.
As I’ve stated, the answer to every problem at SFSU is always the same, “We’re doing everything right. Send more money.” It’s made it a waste of my time to attempt to contribute to any working group targeting reform. I tried to explain this to Jackson Wilson when he was recruiting for the Institutional Review Committee. He wasn’t interested and the committee acted just as I described.
Recently, Senate Bill 640 (SB 640) was made law. It establishes a California State University (CSU) Direct Admission Program. Any student with a minimum 2.5 GPA can enroll at CSU. This means that we have become part of the TK-16+ system. The failed K-12 system has now merged with the failed 13-16+ system. Another lowering of the bar. What are we even doing here?!
At the start of this letter, I said that demographic collapse isn’t the problem. What is? Students aren’t enrolling or are leaving SFSU because they understand that it is valueless. It’s a stupid waste of effort, time, and money. A degree from SFSU is not scarce or meritorious. More, mortgaging $60k and 5 years enslaves a student for over 25 years. Students are starting to refuse to do this.
Story telling is at the heart of humanity. SFSU is telling a terrible story. One of failure. That story needs to be changed. Our product must be value and luck. We need to tell that story.
It didn’t escape my notice that the new (2026) CSU Forward plan has 3 primary goals, each of which can be achieved simply by lowering standards and graduating failing students.
- First-Time Freshmen: Increase the four-year graduation rate to 40% and the six-year rate to 70%.
- Transfer Students: Increase the two-year graduation rate to 45% and the four-year rate to 85%.
- Equity Gaps: Completely eliminate the achievement gaps for underrepresented minorities, low-income (Pell-eligible) students, and first-generation students.
Because you’ve been a beneficiary of almost everything wrong at institutions like ours, I don’t believe that you are able to comprehend the fundamental problems that we are facing here. Defining the problems precisely and implementing the necessary solutions work against everything that you believe and rely on.
As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
You and I are very lucky. In a few years, we will be retired. Hopefully, living comfortably enough from a lifetime of earning, investing, and a pension. We’ll be doing fine when the CSU closes the San Francisco State University campus. We’ll laugh. We could have done the difficult work to fix the problems, but we will have chosen to do the easy things and just pass the buck. It’ll be funny. Knowing that we could have done something. That we might have had a chance to succeed rather than ensure the certainty of failure.
I wasn’t a big fan of Charlie Kirk, who visited this campus several times and just 4 months before being killed. Many of his positions and views I vehemently disagree with. I do, however, have a bit of respect for one part of his project. He sat down at a table. Among people that disagreed with him. And challenged them to change his mind. Amy, change my mind.
-Peter Verdone, Staff SFSU
P.S. Last Friday, we had a visit from Katie Lynch of the schools marketing department during our college meeting. I was shocked by how clueless and out of touch she was of the current era and the needs of new students. Other than elaborately detailing that SFSU was going to ‘market their way out of a product problem’, she must have mentioned DEI and ‘social justice’ about 30 times. This is exactly what we have wrong. Students and faculty don’t want, like, or need the indoctrinational garbage this school compels them to perform. The university needs to eliminate this inauthentic nonsense that is obviously not what we do.