Opinion: Is SDSU’s Imperial Valley Campus a Boondoggle in the Making?

On July 1, San Diego State College declared that the freshly-signed state funds commits $80 million to SDSU’s Imperial Valley campus for “a spectacular enlargement in STEM schooling and analysis.”

On the exact same day (not coincidentally, the Friday in advance of a holiday weekend, the greatest time for dropping bad information), the California School Union explained to its members that the price range also consists of an uncomfortable shock: Gov. Gavin Newsom, Senate President professional Tempore Toni Atkins, and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon agreed among themselves to strip the CSU spending plan of $100 million.

The new funds quantity implies that the wage elevate supposedly signed, sealed, and sent in the most recent agreement, a increase that must have been 4%, is now 3%. At a time when inflation, the greatest given that 1981, is managing at 8.6%, Newsom, Atkins and Rendon made the decision to crack the deal negotiated with the union, and place CSU college even farther at the rear of. Their lousy religion does not bode effectively for potential contract negotiations.

Nor did the CSU administration action up to protect its college. We generally listen to from our leaders about how grateful they are for the superb work faculty do for our pupils. In her May possibly 26, 2022, e mail to the CSU college, for illustration, interim-Chancellor Jolene Koester praised “the do the job, notice and treatment you deliver each individual day,” and how “it will be just one of my maximum priorities — and biggest joys — to assist and shine a mild on your impressive function.”

But did Koester struggle to preserve the currently much too-low elevate? Not as significantly any one can explain to. Instead the Board of Trustees is targeted on increasing their individual salaries.

Past 12 months, Trustee Jean Firstenberg characterised boosting their compensation as “just one of the most essential concerns as a board that we can discuss,” and the board authorised a prepare for raises up to 10% a year for 3 yrs.

When you place these two bulletins alongside one another, it’s challenging not to see that the state is applying money originally earmarked for faculty salaries to pay out for the growth of the Imperial Valley campus. And the CSU administration, whose original income offer was 2% this calendar year and none following calendar year, is flawlessly content to go along.

“Expansion,” nevertheless, is not quite the appropriate word, mainly because the Imperial Valley campus does not have any STEM (“science, technology, math, and engineering”) programs. As of tumble 2021, the campus serves just 951 college students, and its science system consists of specifically three majors: homeland protection (16 graduate college students) arithmetic (13 undergrads) and psychology (258 undergrads). No physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, laptop or computer science, mining or metallurgy.

The software supposedly “ties into area enjoyment over potential customers for extracting lithium, uncovered underground close to the Salton Sea.” But the programs that will, in principle, provide the lithium marketplace will will need be built from the floor up, and it is unclear if there will be sufficient student desire to justify the expenditure.

In addition, there’s California’s new flat-level tax on lithium which, Reuters reviews, “will delay deliveries of the electric powered auto battery steel to Basic Motors and Stellantis and may perhaps push some mining providers to exit the condition completely.” So there is some doubt the lithium sector will even exist.

After all over again, you have to surprise at the priorities of the men and women working the CSU. San Diego Condition University has big infrastructure problems: a crumbling library, roofs that require replacing, lecture rooms that want updates, elevators in determined have to have of restore. But in its place of addressing these requirements, the university will spend $80 million —money, remember, that really should have funded college salaries — to create from nothing a STEM application for a very small outpost that serves 1/35th the student entire body the most important campus serves.

Likely, showering cash on the Imperial Valley campus can make for excellent politics. But does it make monetary or academic feeling?

Either way, the CSU faculty undoubtedly ought to not have to fund it with a pay back cut. 

Peter C. Herman is professor of English literature at San Diego Point out College. He has printed on Shakespeare, Milton and the literature of terrorism, and has posted essays in Salon, Inside of Better Ed, as well as Times of San Diego. His most the latest e book is “Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11” (Routledge, 2020).