Faculty and staff at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) announced a 71% supermajority in favour of forming a union on 19 November. The group will seek pay increases, better healthcare benefits and transparency regarding salary increases for executive leadership while faculty and staff experience high turnover rates. The last time CalArts faculty and staff pushed for unionisation was in 2015, withdrawing their petition soon thereafter.
The unionising group cites a disparity between cost of living in Valencia, Pasadena and the Los Angeles region where the campus is located, in addition to stagnant wages for instructors and staff in the past few years. In 2021, the school purchased a $4.5m home for its president, Ravi Rajan, whose salary in 2023 was $450,374 with an additional $58,352 listed as "other”.
Meanwhile, faculty continue to struggle. According to organisers, the tipping point came in December 2023 at a town-hall event, when administrators announced that they would be switching staff and faculty healthcare benefits to a "self-insured plan", essentially exporting their plan to a third party.
"Since the switch occurred, I've been able to see one physician who gave me referrals to a number of other physicians in Pasadena—and none of them take this insurance. None of them have heard of this insurance," Patrick Schmid, an assistant director of admissions, tells The Art Newspaper. "The healthcare shift was really instrumental in motivating us, but that's the tail end of years of issues we're addressing."
In addition to changes in healthcare benefits, stagnant wages and layoffs are concerns for many of the school's faculty members.
"One of our biggest issues as an institution right now is student retention," says Sam Wentz, the faculty chair at CalArts' school of dance, who adds that staff retention is similarly challenging. "Due to our low salaries, we're not very competitive with other schools for hiring faculty. So if UCLA comes knocking, instructors leave."
This, in addition to programme cuts, contributes to what unionising staff and faculty see as a mismanagement of CalArts’ resources and a threat to the institution's legacy.
Tuition at the school is around $58,000 per year, with a 4%-5% increase annually. The salaries of roughly 600 faculty and staff members account for around 40% ($46m in 2023) of the school’s annual budget. Executive leadership, totaling nine individuals, accounted for almost $1.4m. As of 2022, the value of CalArts’ endowment, including contributions and fundraising, averaged $223m.
Programming cuts and problems with retaining students reflect a nationwide trend of colleges and universities cutting arts programming. This echoes an ongoing pattern of non-profits and educational institutions running their organisations like corporations, where executive leadership is compensated in the six figures while faculty struggle to afford rent and the high cost of living in the major metropolitan areas where many prestigious art colleges are located.
CalArts is run on a shared-governance model, which unionising faculty hope to galvanise through this process, rather than diminish. This leaves much of the work of detangling the new healthcare policies, committees and additional duties to staff and faculty, who are often full-time artists themselves—which is what made them attractive hires for CalArts in the first place.
Reached for comment, Ann Wiens, CalArts’ vice president of marketing and communications, said in a statement: "CalArts respects its employees' right to organise, and is committed to maintaining a positive, collaborative teaching and learning environment for our students and all members of our community."