California Professors are jumping ship

Fresno State is not only having a tough time keeping faculty... recruiting professors to come to the golden state is a tough proposition.

Professors at the state's prestigious UC's are leaving California for better salaries and working conditions. Even Cal State professors are getting fed up.

Lisa Weston, English department chair at Fresno State says it's the first time in her 20 years at the university that a number of her colleagues are ready to leave.

Weston said, "What you've looking at is declining work environment, students who are more and more stressed, less support for what we do, more crowded classes, more pressure to do more and more and more."

Fresno State has lost 10-15 professors a year for the last several years. Associate Vice President of Academic Personnel Ted Wendt says recruiting gets tougher all the time.

Wendt said, "It's too iffy... they hear about possible layoffs, they hear the legislature having second thoughts about CalPERS, they hear that and suddenly California seems like a very iffy place to go."

But the loss for public universities is proving a boon to private schools. Fresno Pacific University in Southeast Fresno expects student enrollment to be 3600 this year, compared to 3300 last year.

Vice president for enrollment Steve Varvis says Fresno Pacific has had to hire nine new faculty members and plans to hire three more before school starts next month. And there's no shortage of candidates.

Varvis said, "In the last few weeks we've interviewed people coming out of Notre Dame, university of Chicago, Duke, Kansas State."

Fresno Pacific looks forward to the fall semester with "great expectations," while Fresno State and other public universities in the state could be described as "les miserables."