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.