Young Cal State San Marcos Feeling Pinch, but Not Ax

While its sister institutions shrink course schedules and lay off faculty members, 1-year-old Cal State San Marcos this fall triples its enrollment, adds more faculty and offers more classes.

The university’s youth shielded it from the Draconian budget cuts inflicted on the 19 other Cal State institutions, allowing it to expand both in numbers of students and academic planning, said president Bill Stacy.

The result has been an ironic tide of students from San Diego County’s more established state university knocking on San Marcos’ door--most unsuccessfully.

Cal State San Marcos, which begins its second year of classes Monday, is not immune to the 10% across-the-board budget cut for state universities. Although the school has hired 24 new faculty members to go with its current 54 members, it originally planned for as many as 31 new positions, Stacy said.

And, although course sections skyrocketed from 60 last year to 160 this year, that increase falls short of the tripling in student population, from 400 to 1,200, Stacy said. The result will be some bigger class sizes and possibly fewer choices.

“There is a little shortage in the number of courses being offered, and it runs the risk of our students not being able to take a full load of classes,” Stacy said.

But Stacy emphasized that the cut is nowhere near as painful as that at other campuses.

“If you had something and it’s taken away from you, it’s much worse than if you had been planning to have so much and you only got 90% of it,” he said.

At San Diego State University, 1,162 students, about the size of Cal State San Marcos’ total enrollment, were unable to get any of the classes for which they had asked. More than 14,000 other SDSU students were denied at least one of their classes.

While SDSU students came knocking on Cal State San Marcos’ door soon after they found out how few classes they had gotten, many were turned away, Stacy said.

“We are, essentially, full,” Stacy said.

Every Cal State campus except San Marcos was cut 10% from its 1990-91 budget, but Cal State San Marcos’ budget was reduced 10% from its projected 1991-92 budget, which was based on an expected tripling of enrollment.

Armed with an expanded budget, the university, situated in a San Marcos business park off Delaware 78, went on to hire a young crop of faculty members with diverse racial, geographic and academic backgrounds.

The 24 new hires, which brings the total number of permanent full-time faculty members to 54, includes 10 women, an American Indian, four Latinos, five Asian-Americans and two African-Americans. There are four white males.

Thirty-two percent of Cal State San Marcos’ total faculty is nonwhite, contrasted with 17.4% in the Cal State system as a whole. Forty-five percent of the university’s faculty is female, contrasted with 28.2% in the system.

White males make up 59.2% of the system’s full-time faculty.

With expertise ranging from African music and rhythms to Native American, Latin American and African-American history to at-risk, early adolescent Latino students, the new faculty in the humanities also has a decidedly ethnically diverse focus.

The diverse faculty and curriculum reflect the university’s mission statement, which laid out a blueprint of an institution whose “multicultural outlook is reflected in our curriculum, extracurricular activities.”

This year’s faculty is also younger than that of previous years. Most either just received their Ph.D.s or held non-tenure track faculty posts at other institutions.

The loss of seven faculty members that the school had expected to hire will take its toll, Stacy said.

“You can’t say you don’t miss them, because you do,” Stacy said of those that were not hired.

Its offering of 160 courses is still at least a dozen short of what the university had hoped, Stacy said. Also, faculty members will have to burn the midnight oil to keep up with academic planning for new majors and two new masters programs--in teaching and business administration--that the university hopes to offer next year, Stacy said.

“We will stretch the faculty in the sense that the planning that they would ordinarily have done they will wind up having to do . . . a little more on Saturday and Sunday and after 5 o’clock,” Stacy said.

The faculty seems unfazed.

“I had my eye on San Marcos ever since I had known it was going to be created,” said Peggy Kelly, a San Diego native who has been an associate professor at Cal State Fresno since 1985 and will be teaching in Cal State San Marcos’ College of Education.

“The system and the board of trustees don’t go around establishing campuses if there is even a remote chance that it will fold. There’s the population to support it, and probably more so than just the population is all the community-based support,” said Kelly, whose specialty is in math education.

The new professors joined Cal State San Marcos for much the same reasons as the one-year veterans did: a chance to build an academic program from the ground up without the encumbrances of entrenched personnel and policies, the university’s emphasis on multiculturalism and the beautiful weather.

“It’s nice to know that there are going to be other brown and black people, but it’s also nice to know that they will be stressing other kinds of cultures,” said Francisco Rios, an instructor in communications and social sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“It will allow me to think about how we can structure the institution in such a way to make itself available to people of color and to create an environment where a person of color can feel comfortable,” said Rios, who will teach in the College of Education and has had 13 years of teaching experience.

The main drawbacks were equally familiar: fear of earthquakes and the high cost of housing.

“The only thing I have concerns with is the cost of housing, but it doesn’t seem as terrible as we imagined,” said Yuan Yuan, an English professor who studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was a teaching assistant.

Yuan received his master’s degree from Shandong University in China, where he studied at the Institute of Modern American Studies. He came to the United States in 1985 and specializes in modern and post-modern fiction and comparative studies of Chinese and American literature.

The one physical addition to the campus this year isn’t really part of the campus.

The biology department, which struggled through the last year without laboratories of its own, has a new lab installed and ready for classes. Although the conditions are not ideal--the lab can hold only 12 students and is about a mile from the main campus--Professor Larry Cohen said it is a significant improvement over what they had before: nothing.

“We have the essentials for a good program. We don’t have every course that we would like to teach, but that takes time,” said Cohen, who hopes for a shuttle bus from the main campus to the labs.

Labs had been planned to open last year in the same industrial complex as the rest of the university, but fire codes and zoning laws prevented that, and the university had to share facilities with Palomar College.

Almost all of the scientific equipment, which includes freeze driers, incubators and sterilizers for ultra pure water, had been purchased and ready for use last year, when the labs were meant to be opened, Cohen said.

“This has been sitting here so long that it’s out of warranty, and we haven’t even used it yet,” said Cohen, pointing to a refrigerated super-speed centrifuge.

A young biology professor last year left for another university, citing the lack of labs and the possibility that research facilities at the permanent campus might not be as large or as fast coming on line as previously hoped.

No new biology professors were hired this year, also partly because of the lack of research facilities, Cohen said.

“We don’t want to go through the same trauma of inviting people young in their careers and not giving them a place to perpetuate it,” said Cohen, referring to Cliff Summers, who left in July for a post at the University of South Dakota.

Cohen said no new biology professors will be hired until they are closer to moving onto the new, permanent campus and research laboratory facilities.

Those labs are part of a three-building complex that has suffered construction setbacks because of the contractor’s financial problems. The contractor, Louetto Construction, was eventually replaced by Lusardi Construction.

Despite the lost time, Stacy said he is confident that all of the buildings will be ready for occupation as scheduled in August, 1992.

But other university officials are not as optimistic.

“That’s not going to happen,” said Al Amado, assistant vice president for physical planning and campus construction.

While construction of the buildings might be finished by Aug. 28, 1992, it would take at least 30 days for the lecture building, 60 days for Craven Hall, an administration and library building, and 90 days for the science building to be ready for occupation, Amado said.

“Even if the contractors stay right on schedule and deliver on, say Sept. 1, we’re still looking at mid-November to be in operation, at a minimum,” Amado said.

“And once we miss the first day of classes, we typically would not want to move classes from one facility to the other,” Amado said.

The student body, however, is expected to double by then, and no one knows quite what the university will do to accommodate the influx of students next year.