Saint Mary's College of California built its public image on former students like Ryan Coogler — the Oakland-born filmmaker who just won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Sinners — and his old Saint Mary's professor, Rosemary Graham. The college's tagline: teachers matter.

In mid-March, dozens of us — faculty who have taught at Saint Mary's for ten, twenty, even thirty years — were told without warning that our jobs would be gone next year. The only explanation: "structural changes."

This is not an isolated decision. It is the latest move in an "education last" pattern from the current administration: breaking commitments made in our union contract, attempting to make faculty work more without pay, increasing class sizes, cutting workload hours, eroding tenured faculty retirement benefits, and now eliminating long-serving adjuncts.

The numbers tell the real story. Between FY22 and FY25, Saint Mary's non-academic spending grew by $30 million. Academic spending grew by $0.4 million. From FY25 to FY27, the administration plans to cut academics by another $18 million — while continuing to increase non-academic costs. Spending on academics is, proportionally, the lowest it has been in at least thirty years. "Academic excellence" is one of the President's "four pillars." The budget says otherwise.

Between us, we have given centuries of service to Saint Mary's students. We have gone to their weddings. We have read their manuscripts. We have written thousands of recommendation letters, advised them through job interviews, and met their parents for coffee long after graduation. The relationship Rosemary Graham has with Ryan Coogler is not an exception at Saint Mary's. It is the rule. It is what teachers do at Saint Mary's.

Saint Mary's wants the public credit for those relationships. Then it tells us, by email, that we are disposable.

Education doesn't matter to Saint Mary's College of California — not in practice, no matter what the marketing says. Not yet. We are asking you to help us change that.

We, the undersigned — faculty, students, alumni, parents, and members of the Saint Mary's community — call on the administration to:

1. Meet with union leadership in an open, public forum.
2. Publicly answer the budget question: how does cutting $18M from academics, while increasing non-academic spending, serve “academic excellence”?
3. Halt the layoffs of qualified union faculty, stop displacing adjuncts by reassigning tenured faculty to work beyond their contract and outside their expertise, and cap the class-size increases.
4. Honor existing collective bargaining commitments — no more asking faculty to work more without pay, honor your office space commitments, and recognize unionized faculty’s qualifications to teach all courses for which they are credentialed, including newly created ones.

Beyond signing what can you do today?

Email President Thompson directly at President@stmarys-ca.edu. Tell them you signed, and why.
Share publicly with #TeachersMatterAtSMC and tag @stmarysca.
Alumni: Contact the Office of Advancement and let them know your giving is paused until these questions are answered.
Current students, prospective students, and parents: Ask Admissions what "academic excellence" means at a college cutting $18 million from academics.