The following letter was drafted in response to Espi Sanjana's letter date April 22, 2009.

Concerned Students of the San Francisco Art Institute

April 30, 2009

To Chief Operating Officer Espi Sanjana and the Administration of the San Francisco Art Institute:

Administration Compensation 

SFAI students recently received a letter dated April 22, 2009 that responds to a leaflet distributed by concerned SFAI students. Mr. Sanjana, we find your letter to be misleading and inaccurate. Our leaflet titled, SFAI Executives, Extravagance and Exigency, summarized and charted SFAI Executive compensation, SFAI travel expenditures, and credit card use. Mr. Sanjana, your letter does not and cannot dispute the compensation and expenditure information contained in the leaflet.  Those facts are taken from SFAI’s own records, including its tax returns. For example, you do not deny that SFAI’s tax returns for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2007 show that President Bratton’s salary was $ 333,308. If, on the off chance you do dispute the information obtained from SFAI’s tax returns, SFAI then has some very serious problems with the federal authorities, namely, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education. Furthermore, by comparing President Bratton's current, post-pay cut salary to the salaries of presidents of comparable institutions, you ignore the fact that for every year of his time at SFAI other than 2009, Bratton made MORE than the presidents of comparable institutions!  Bratton and other SFAI executives received significant salary increases and allowances, while other employees were denied basic cost of living increases.

Student Housing

In your letter you do not and cannot dispute the fact that, in 2007, SFAI leased a mold-infested building for the purpose of housing students and then demanded that sick students continue to pay rent and not move out of the mold-infested dorm. SFAI may now argue that it moved “rapidly” to correct problems in the dorms.  However, most SFAI students who had to live with the mold, the bedbugs, the non-functioning internet service and broken plumbing would vehemently disagree with your characterization.  

Faculty Benefits

In your letter, you tout the many benefits of teaching at SFAI without acknowledging that these are the very benefits currently under attack by your administration.  Yes, there is tenure at SFAI, but tenure becomes meaningless if tenured faculty can be laid off at will in blatant disregard of their negotiated contract. Yes, SFAI’s faculty can apply for sabbaticals, but they can’t when sabbaticals have been suspended, and at this point they might not want to even if they could, now that you have admitted in your letter that simply taking the sabbatical you’ve earned is enough to get you laid off! Mr. Sanjana, you write that the decision to lay off faculty was made quote, “with a view to mitigating any impact it might have on the quality of education at SFAI. One faculty member teaches only one course per year, and that course has been canceled due to insufficient enrollment. Five faculty members are not teaching at present—they are on sabbatical, family leave of absence and suspension.”  When did the fact that someone is on family leave of absence or sabbatical become an acceptable reason for that person to lose his or her job?  Taking those factors into account in deciding who to lay off is not only completely unethical, it's completely illegal. 

Administration Ignorance

We believe that the administration's actions have directly undermined the very values you claim to support: free expression, dissent, and dialogue. When a group of graduate students presented a specific list of questions about the faculty layoffs to President Bratton at a LOGS meeting on February 23, he refused to answer them. When a member of the Board of Trustees attempted to ask a group of students attending the March 26 Board meeting about their concerns, he was immediately silenced by the Chairman of the Board. Those of us who have asked questions and voiced our concerns have been yelled at and intimidated on campus, and our fliers have been removed from appropriate posting areas and mailboxes in clear violation of our rights to free speech. 

Failure of Leadership

If your administration has nothing to hide, why did you refuse to answer the list of questions a group of graduate students took the time to compile and present? Why not answer them now? We would be happy to provide you with a written copy. If you have nothing to hide, why were our fliers torn down and our letters removed from student mailboxes?

Mr. Sanjana, we hope that you or Mr. Bratton will respond to the questions posed in this letter.  Our questions have already been met with too much silence, and when you choose not to respond to them, we can only assume it's because you can't.

Sincerely,

The Student Action Group

<This letter was copied from the original electronic document, no part has been altered or omitted.  Please feel free to contact the administrator of this page with any questions or concerns about the contents herein.>