Jan. 23, 2023
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to Spring 2023 at CSUCI! Our students were back today, bringing with them their strengths, worries, goals, and needs, all of which we have the privilege of helping them to navigate. While this message on enrollment challenges and budget updates speaks to two current and sobering realities that bind us as a community, nothing binds us more hopefully and truly than the students who are with us now. It’s through our work with them that we will continue building on our many successes and discover new ways of doing and being CSUCI.
Please see the attached Enrollment Challenges and Budget Updates Memo that provides updates on our enrollment challenges and associated budget planning processes. It outlines 1) what we know; 2) what we are doing and planning; and 3) how the campus community will be invited to engage as we plan for 2023-24 and beyond. As you digest the information in the attached memo, I think it is important to first examine our challenges and solutions within the overarching context and dynamics of our organizational development and evolution – especially at 20 years of age.
A colleague recently described to me their theory of three general eras of employee at CSUCI: (1) those who arrived in the early years, founded the University in the liberal arts tradition, and with many years of history and hopes invested in CSUCI, still hold a strong sense of connection with the campus identity and traditions that they created; (2) those who arrived in the middle years, not personally connected to the identity-building work of those who came before, but close enough to the early years and those early-year colleagues to understand and generally value and adopt established identity and traditions; importantly, for this “middle-years” group, the number of faculty and staff was still small enough for members of a small but growing campus community to know everyone, making enculturation in established values more easily and naturally possible; and (3) those who came in later years, who experienced little in the way of stability in executive leadership and for whom CSUCI traditions from early years may feel far away; as the number of faculty and staff additions grew, members of this latter group may not have been able to develop as much of a sense of belonging and connection with the campus’s initial identity as their colleagues from the first two groups.
If this framework resonates with you as it did for me, differing senses of institutional identity and values could explain some of our tensions as we figure out how to do things like enact shared governance, communicate effectively, and move CSUCI into its third decade—all of which are vital and cannot be separated from how we address our enrollment challenges and associated impact on budget and every aspect of our campus community. As we move forward, we can choose tension as a creative force, caringly, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. He wrote, “But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth” (1963, para. 9). While King has been on my mind of late for his success in creating tension to force productive confrontations in the fight for racial justice, his ideas about the relationship between tension and growth have enormous value in countless contexts, including the one in which we are now struggling.
We are battling an enrollment crisis, while operating with arguably differing understandings of who we are and what we value as a University in relation to our long-term strategic vision. This we can change. We can grow together—not perfectly in sync, of course, but closer together—by discussing and aligning the values and the identity we each want CSUCI to have. Through structured discussions and the data they yield, themes and meanings about who we are and who we want to be will emerge, and these will guide and directly inform our immediate, intermediate, and long-term strategies.
I want to fully acknowledge the length of this message and attached memo. However, I want to embrace the significance and complexities of the challenges we are facing and provide our campus community with a solid understanding of how we are addressing our imminent challenges while concurrently being mindful of our long-term strategic vision and success. I look forward to engaging in this work with all of you moving forward.
Sincerely,
Richard Yao, Ph.D.
President