By Gov. Jerry Brown appointed a faculty trustee to the Cal State University Board of Trustees Friday after more than five months of leaving the position vacant.
Cal State Northridge’s computer science department Chair Steven Stepanek was appointed to the Board, but Stepanek was unavailable to comment on whether or not he will accept the position.
According to Brown’s appointment notice, Stepanek serves as faculty president and campus senate chair at CSUN and a member of the CSU Academic Senate.
CSU Spokesman Mike Uhlenkamp could not confirm whether Stepanek will attend the next Board meeting on Nov. 5 and 6.
Since the end of faculty trustee Bernadette Cheyne’s term on May 21, CSU faculty have been without representation on the Board, a vacancy that raised concerns about whether Brown had neglected his statutory responsibility in making a selection, said Diana Wright Guerin, chair of the CSU Academic Senate Executive Committee.
Guerin said that the week prior to the appointment, she had received 19 campus resolutions requesting that a faculty trustee be appointed to the Board.
“Without this appointment, it would be a half a year without a faculty member on the Board,” Guerin said. “We were getting extremely concerned.”
According to the CSU, the Governor appoints one faculty trustee, who serves on the Board for two years, from nominees proposed by the CSU Academic Senate. Guerin said the Academic Senate had given the nominations for the next faculty member to Brown as early as March.
“We did our part by sending him the nominees in March,” Guerin said. “Yet, here we are having Board of Trustees meetings without a faculty voice.”
Guerin said that the faculty voice is important because the Board makes decisions about academic policies, curricular issues and budgetary issues that affect CSU campuses.
Guerin also said she believes the last Board meeting’s conversation about the CSU’s bottleneck survey would have been different had there been a faculty trustee present at the time.
“I was compelled to bring the conversation back to the results of the survey, being that we need more tenure-track faculty, yet nobody was talking about that,” Guerin said. “I’m sure a faculty trustee would have something to say about that.”
Uhlenkamp said it is not uncommon to have vacancies on the Board and that at any time, there can be four to six vacancies.
“Typically we don’t have the full 25 members of the Board of Trustees,” Uhlenkamp said. “Prior to Bernadette Cheyne, we didn’t have one [faculty trustee] for about two years.”
According to the CSU, the 16 trustees appointed by the governor and voted in by the state Senate serve eight-year terms. The alumni trustee, faculty trustee and two student trustees serve two-year terms.
Trustees confirmed by the Senate remain on the Board until a replacement is named or for 60 days after their term expires, whichever comes first.
