CONVERSATION
For nearly two decades, University of San Francisco sociology professor Kimberly Richman has taught criminology, sending her students across the city to make a wide range of close observations: the presence of broken windows, the availability of fresh produce at grocery stores, and the transit options in various neighborhoods.
Ordinarily, this work would be the preamble to a deep dive into police reports and census data, which students would then compare with their observations. “The city is a laboratory for what we teach,” says Richman.
But the coronavirus pandemic scuttled the semester’s plans, upending the lives of her students as well as her own. The fall term will offer little respite. The recent spike in coronavirus cases has sidelined or altered the city’s reopening, including K-12 schools, which means Richman, a single mother with shared custody, will continue to work from home while her 11-year-old twins likely continue with school from home.
She’ll do it with a pay cut too. USF, like most universities across the country, is facing deep budget cuts due to lower enrollment, fewer students in dormitories, and the loss of campus life, including sports that bring in money.
The school likely dodged one budget bullet when the Trump administration backed away from an order to deport international students who don’t take at least one in-person class. International students, whose full-freight tuition subsidizes low-income students, make up about 14 percent of USF’s degree-seeking population.
But the crisis remains. Unlike schools with multibillion-dollar endowments, USF leans heavily on tuition. Its endowment stands at $399 million as of mid-2019. Cuts are looming. Richman isn’t part of the faculty union leadership, but she has participated in negotiations, spending hours debating workloads and pay for the coming term. (A tentative agreement was reached this week. See below.)
In all her spare time, Richman also works with Alliance for Change, a nonprofit she cofounded 12 years ago after five years of teaching classes inside San Quentin. The alliance helps San Quentin inmates prepare for the successful transition to life after prison.
Richman carved out time recently to talk with The Frisc about the pandemic’s effect on her job (”I have never worked so many hours on teaching in my life”), faculty negotiations with the university, her life as a single parent, and her beloved city.
The conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Frisc: How has the pandemic affected your life so far?
Kim Richman: Everything changed in my classes. There’s learning the technology and figuring out how to deliver everything effectively. But my colleagues and I also did an enormous amount of emotional counseling and dealing with all kinds of student emergencies. We have students who have sick parents, or who don’t have good WiFi. I had one student hospitalized with COVID herself. She’s okay now. But a lot of people have had a lot of extenuating circumstances, so suddenly a class of 35 students becomes 35 different cases, and I’m kind of a caseworker. I have never worked so many hours on teaching in my life. My colleagues and I estimated that on top of the regular 40 hours, we probably worked sometimes up to 20 hours a week.
‘It’s been a crazy time, and we’re getting to the point where a lot of us are saying, “Where’s our sanity?”’
That sounds like a lot. What about research and other duties?
You know, the research just went out the window. The other class I taught was my honors thesis students, and they were doing research. That became a huge obstacle. Among my students, three were looking at homelessness and working with community organizations, which shut down to outside people. So I had people crying with me on Zoom because they were so stressed. They’d put in a year of work. But we worked one-on-one with their faculty advisors, figuring out how they would be able to complete their honors thesis under the circumstances.
I have my own college students at home and have seen how this works sometimes — and doesn’t work at other times.
There are a lot of parents like yourself and students who are thinking, “Why should I spend all this money just to listen to recorded lectures?” So there’s a huge fear of enrollment losses.
We put in a lot of hours with the admissions process. I would get a list of 50 students who were admitted and email every one, answering questions and encouraging them to come. I did Zoom sessions with admitted students because we’re doing everything we can to bump up the enrollment.
Anticipating these shortages, the university tried to invalidate our contract to get us to the bargaining table to talk about cutting pay and retirement, and to cut every untenured faculty member. But we all stood together to share the sacrifice and save the jobs of our colleagues.
We’ve done a ton of free labor and yet the university has proposed a 15% pay cut, which is what the top administrators and top income earners at the university took.
[On July 14, the USF Faculty Association and the administration reached a tentative agreement. A university spokeswoman confirmed to The Frisc that the president, members of the cabinet, and leadership team will take a 15% salary reduction. She said that salaries of faculty and other staff will be reduced in a progressive manner, based on compensation: “The objective of bargaining was to prepare for the uncertain future due to COVID-19, and what possible cuts were needed for the upcoming academic year if net tuition revenue decreased due to the pandemic.”
The spokeswoman added that the university is anticipating a shortfall in the coming year of at least $80 million.
Under the agreement, Richman said her salary would be cut 14.6%, from about $160,000 to $136,000. “I have more or less the same percentage cut as the basketball coach, provost, executive VP, etc., some of whom make a half-million [dollars] or more. So it’s not terribly ‘progressive’ in that way,” she said.]
What might the fall semester look like?
They are proposing a hybrid method. Some classes will be on campus and some remote. You’d have half of your students come on, say, Monday and Wednesday and the other half come on Tuesday and Thursday, which means you’re teaching double the time and making less. [Two weeks after this conversation, on July 14, the university decided it would go to having most classes online, citing the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases as noted in this release.]
And somewhere in there you have to be able to care for your children. How old are they?
They’re 11-year-old twins. I love the students, but I also love making a living to support my kids, you know? Most of [the faculty] have kids, they’re teaching from home, learning how to use Zoom for their own classes while their kids are home full-time, homeschooling.
How does it feel to a kid, my kid, when they need help with dinner or homework or something, and I say, “I’m sorry, I’m in a class for four hours”?
I have to tell them “I can’t help you” or “I’m teaching,” or I say to my students, “Excuse me, class.”
That was no substitute for child care.
You cofounded and direct Alliance for Change, an organization for formerly incarcerated people. What has been the pandemic’s effect there?
We used to teach classes inside San Quentin. Now we’ve shifted to the reentry population. Normally, we would be teaching at the biggest transitional houses in San Francisco on how to use technology, how to navigate online job applications, helping get their identity documents. I’ve been doing this work since 2003, as long as I’ve been in San Francisco. During the COVID crisis, we’ve had to suspend all our in-person help and classes, but I’ve been fundraising and using that money to deliver groceries and necessities, because these people are having trouble getting jobs. It’s been a crazy, crazy time, and we’re getting to the point where a lot of us are saying, “Where’s our sanity?”
How have the pandemic and shutdown made you feel about San Francisco?
I’m in a holding pattern. We’re still very much in the middle of this crisis. I’m thankful to live in a community that takes evidence seriously, that doesn’t see it as a political statement to wear a mask.
I think London Breed has done the right thing rolling back the reopen date, but the longer this goes, the financial devastation is going to be very difficult to avoid for a lot of people. I worry that small businesses will collapse and an influx of huge corporate entities will take away the character of the city. I’m concerned about the face of San Francisco in the future, if it’s going to become a whiter, wealthier place than it already is.
This story was changed on July 20 to correct the length of Richman’s tenure at USF, her child custody arrangement and the history of Alliance for Change, and to update USF’s endowment total.
Kristi Coale (@unazurda) is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and radio producer for various outlets, including KALW’s Crosscurrents and the National Radio Project’s Making Contact. USF campus photos are by Kristi Coale.