The CSU is _STILL_ Hiring Fundraiser Execs!

I kid you not. After the UC laid off 30,000 part-time instructional workers, some of whom were longtime employed by the UC, and the considerably larger CSU did likewise, I am shocked to find out that CSU Fullerton continues to hire executive fundraisers while laying off lecturers, janitors, failing to fix for months on end important safety features like the fire sprinklers and restrooms and electrical problems in Engineering, and making department secretaries work in 53° F conditions with elevators that slip, lock in teachers at 10:30 at night, or outright don't work at all.

Oh, and have I mentioned that the restrooms and other water facilities in the Computer Science building have never, EVER had hot running water? For a nice little pictorial essay, see here. I'm betting the fundraisers have nice, warm, toasty offices in winter, cool ones in summer, fire sprinklers, hot running water and functioning restrooms. I'm betting they don't lose computer workstations to meltdown because they're not allowed to run the AC in the summers. I'm fairly certain that their secretaries don't have to worry about frostbite.

The State of California and the management of the CSU in particular have badly sold out California's future. While management continues to hire its own and let go the people on the instructional and basic student services front-line, they continue to construct more and larger ivory towers from within which to ignore the fact that their front-line people and students basically struggle to achieve the state's so-called educational mandate in third-world conditions, despite residing in one of the state's richest counties in itself one of the world's top-ten economies. I literally know people in NIGERIA who have better access to university computer networks than my classes had, semester after semester, at the South County/El Toro/Irvine/Whatever Makes Us Look Good This Term campus.

Imagine double-clicking the little Explorer icon... only to have it take A FULL THREE MINUTES TO CONNECT TO THE NETWORK. Enter a search term. ANOTHER THREE MINUTES. Get a Google list; click one; ANOTHER THREE MINUTES. Multiply that by the number of machines in the classroom, and then make a few adjustements for the always-present fact that up to 25% of the machines in the classroom SIMPLY WOULDN'T BOOT AT ALL, week after week after week. Call in IT, right? Yeah... they came in, looked at the machines, and said, "Yup; they don't boot alright." Need ink cartridge replacements in your office? Do it yourself. Nice.

And, you know what? Those IT people? I'll bet they could tell similar horror stories; I'm especially envisioning the scene in which people who spend zero time in the classroom interacting with zero students sat around in copious meetings on the state's dime deciding to construct classroom facilities on land we didn't own, KNOWING that they knew we'd be bulldozing in under a decade saying, 'screw it; why invest in the infrastructure since we're not staying there?' I'll bet those IT people's jobs well and truly sucked as well. But it's a tough thing to sell to your students who only know that their classroom labs suck, that it sucks that there isn't the same software in the open labs as in the classrooms, that "supported software" changes wildly from one semester to the next without instructor notification, and that THEY ARE PAYING AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR THIS and receiving incredibly shoddy service. No wonder so many of them honestly believe they are paying for a (mostly worthless) piece of paper rather than for a life-long edifying educational experience.

I should be happy for the person who just got this exec job. He's a former student-mate; we both served in student government together. While we perhaps didn't often agree, I always thought and still believe him to be a person of conscience and integrity. I should be happy for him. But I can't ignore the price society will pay for this, the people who have already had to pay and those who will continue to pay for the system's complete indifference to what really should be important in these years of lean economic circumstances. Student tuition has seen unconscionable increases, locking many native Californians out of a college education, leaving behind a perhaps permanent undereducated, underemployed underclass of California residents; massive layoffs have deprived loyal state employees of their livelihoods and drive unimaginable increases in student-to-faculty ratios (I was invited to apply to teach the same class I had been teaching, only with THREE TIMES the student enrollment; needless to say, I wasn't very sad not to have gotten the course); enrollment is capped; and yet we still continue to hire non-essential management-level personnel while it takes longer and longer for the fewer and fewer to graduate.