Professors Aren’t Taking Layoffs Quietly : Education: The ‘Sociology 7’ at San Diego State lash out at the school’s administration. They say they have been unable to get answers about how job cuts were distributed.

SAN DIEGO — Last January, Ruben Rumbaut turned down a full professorship at UC Berkeley out of loyalty to San Diego State, where he has built a national reputation and garnered $1 million in grants.

But on May 13, Rumbaut and six other sociology professors got termination letters from the university’s president, Thomas Day.

So much for loyalty.

The anger of Rumbaut and his colleagues runs as deep today as it did in May, despite the temporary one-semester reprieve that Day gave on Monday to all 146 professors he ticketed for layoffs in 14 academic departments.

The “Sociology 7,” as they call themselves, have come to symbolize the feeling of betrayal that much of the faculty harbors about Day’s initial efforts to balance the university’s budget by dropping tenured professors without warning. They also have emerged as the most outspoken group on a campus that has taken the biggest hit in tenured faculty layoffs throughout the state university system.

Personal and professional lives have been disrupted by what the professors say was the capricious manner in which Day tossed aside the tradition of tenure. Nine departments were eliminated; nine others, including sociology, were deeply cut.

“I will not accept an illegitimate decision by a man without a shred of an idea of what my discipline is about before he trashed it, who thinks of sociology as social work or socialism, who has no notion of the value of the work that’s come from his own campus,” said Rumbaut, an international expert on immigration and ethnic issues who has taught at San Diego State for seven years.

Rumbaut and some of the other Sociology 7 say they would rather leave the campus than grovel for positions that might open in other departments.

Sociology professor William Sanders, an expert on criminal justice and gang issues with a dozen books to his credit, leaves next week to become associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, El Paso.

Richard Hough, a specialist on mental health and homeless issues who has received almost $8 million in research grants since 1983, expects to get a visiting professorship in psychiatry at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. Hough is bitter that his chances for a $13-million federal grant this spring went up in smoke with his tenure.

Said sociology professor Charles Hohm: “It will certainly affect my outlook toward this university, toward putting in all the time I did in the past toward chairing university committees, toward increasing our visibility.”

Prof. John Weeks, whose book on demography is the best known in the field, will transfer to the university’s geography department, a move that will allow him to maintain the campus’ International Population Center, which he founded.

The Sociology 7 say they are angriest about their inability to get a straight answer from Day or his top assistants about how Day applied his budget-cutting criteria to the department.

Strong teaching, scholarship, community links--all were high on the list that Day said he used to decide who stayed and who went. The sociology department excelled in all, the professors say.

“That’s why we feel so betrayed,” Sanders said. “We were too successful, we published a lot, we were not troublemakers, we were well known nationally and in San Diego--we were the goodest little sociology department that you can imagine.”

A top administrator who asked not to be named said the sociology cuts came because the department has a large number of professors at the top of the pay scale and Day felt “there ought to be less of a need for them” given the 25% forced reduction in San Diego State’s budget over the past two years.

In fact, the administrator said Day at first wanted to eliminate sociology and merely cut anthropology--the reverse of what he finally did--but was talked out of it by assistants who were more concerned about the loss of the larger, highly ranked department.

Hohm and his colleagues say Day had little familiarity with the people he was terminating.

“We were told that they had no idea of whom they had laid off because no one bothered to read the (resumes) of the affected professors,” Hohm said.

The sociologists resent attempts by the same administrators to place them in other departments. Day has said he will retain “name” professors like Rumbaut, using so-called “soft” or non-state money if necessary.

But Rumbaut turned down a position in the economics department.

“Why should I go teach economics when I’ve spent my whole life in sociology teaching, educating, researching?”

“For Day to (rescue) some people by moving them, a la musical chairs, simply because they bring in lots of grant money displays a complete ignorance of what a university ought to be about.”

Department Chairman Jim Wood, 51 and also one of the Sociology 7, is the only professor eligible for early retirement. But even with a bonus enticement plan passed by the Legislature last week, he would take an 80% pay cut.

While promised a temporary reassignment in political science, Wood, with several books to his name, worries about finding a new position at his age.