Fullerton : Cal State Fullerton OKs Location for Memorial

Cal State Fullerton’s Campus Planning Committee last week approved a site on the southeast corner of University Center for a memorial honoring deceased professors and students.

Tracey Stotz, Associated Students president, said that the memorial will not be completed until late March, with dedication ceremonies expected to be held sometime in May.

Stotz said the idea for the monument was prompted by students who “wanted something as a means to express their grief over the death of someone.” Last November, the Associated Students board allocated $750 for the materials and construction of the memorial.

The monument is to honor “individuals who have died while part of the university residency,” Stotz said. The professors to be honored include:

Alex M. Odeh, who taught for several semesters in the school’s department of foreign languages and literature and was director of the California chapter of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was killed in a bomb blast last October.

Priscilla Oaks, an English professor, killed last September in an automobile accident.

Edward Lee Cooperman, a physics professor and founder of the U.S. Committee for Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam. He was fatally shot in his campus office in October, 1984, by a student later convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Also, Stotz said, the memorial is to commemorate five suicide victims within the past nine years. All jumped from the eight-story Humanities Building.

The seven-foot steel memorial is being constructed by school graduate student Steve Metzger. When completed, the base of the memorial will be wide enough to accommodate flowers and other small tributes, Stotz said.