We're hiring management, killing off degree programs... AND we rejected hosting a U.S. Presidential Library!

Fun little update to the last post: The same campus that can afford to build new parking structures and buildings (but apparently NOT the new Children's Center, funded by students, that was approved probably 2 or more decades ago), to bulldoze buildings not 10 years old, and to hire management-level fundraisers cannot afford its degree programs in French, German and Portuguese and will likely kill them off because not very many students major in these programs. Can Physics, Mathematics, Engineering or Computer Science be far behind?

The university sells a book by history professor Lawrence de Graf entitled The Fullerton Way. Pity nobody thought to ask any rank-and-file employees at CSUF how they have have always used that phrase: codespeak for the incredible level of incompetent and corrupt management of Orange County's "premier CSU" (another stupid phrase of CSUF's, as CSUF has always been and still is Orange County's only CSU). Someday when my blood pressure has returned from the stratosphere, I'll have to read the book. But I digress.

Okay, forget about the book... I have this KILLER idea in terms of fundraising and CSUF: host a US Presidential library. I wonder how much money such a puppy would rake in... Perhaps some kind soul can check in with the nearby Richard Nixon Presidential Library in neighboring Yorba Linda, a few minutes bus ride away from CSUF. I'm kinda betting it's not chump change.

Seem like a far-fetched idea? If so, then perhaps someone can explain to me exactly why it was that CSUF in fact REJECTED a proposal that it originally authored, to host the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on CSUF grounds, despite having invested in the development of what by 1988 would be a massive 200 volume effort that also was "the only such collection on him [Nixon] that is complete and open to the public," namely, the Nixon Oral History Project and having previously been actively campaigning to be the repository of Nixon's archives and library since the 1970s. CSUF History Professor B. Carmon Hardy, who was involved in the negotiations, noted that the acquisition of the Nixon archives would result in CSUF being:

"a matchless source location for the study of American society during the significant, tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s... one of the most auspicious academic events to occur in the history of this institution."

Except that, per The Fullerton Way, it was an auspicious event that never happened. You might think you know the answer -- you know, those dastardly liberal professors who were looking for the opportunity to stick it to a Republican president. Except that the campus' governing Faculty Council voted 35-1 to endorse hosting the library, with Political Science Professor James P. Pfiffner noting that:

"refusal to accept the archives because somehow we disapproved of Richard Nixon or his policies would be like rejecting an institute for the study of cancer because we somehow disapproved of that disease."

You think?! Okay, so, maybe it was a group of student radicals who killed it... Oh, except that the student government's governing board voted UNANIMOUSLY to recommend hosting the library. Ooops. So, what monumental monstrosity occured which resulted in CSUF NOT hosting the Richard Nixon Presidential Library?

It's monumentally short-sighted chief officer, then-University President Jewel Plummer Cobb, who personally and single-handedly saw to it that Orange County's premier CSU would never achieve academic luminosity. As sickening as it is to realize this, the rationale was even worse: due to a scarcity of land at CSUF, Cobb wanted that land to be handed over to the City of Fullerton for a truly nominal amount of money, for the city to sublease to a major hotel corporation for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, all to put a second rate hotel on university property. Why exactly did the university "need" a hotel so much more than it needed a presidential library? It was so that the City would help fund a stadium for what was at the time the single worst university football team in its league in the nation. Why she trusted the City of Fullerton is entirely unclear, as time and time again the City would threaten to weasel out of its promised obligation to co-fund the university's celebrated Arboretum (the rest of the funding coming from years and years of CSUF students themselves).

And now? CSUF has an empty stadium that's not even used during commencement (just as well inasmuch as, contrary to ADA law, its elevators have NEVER worked), no presidential library and no football team (well, the last is a silver lining at least). It's stupid decisions like this that have helped put the CSU in the predicament it's in.

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.