Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : EDUCATION : Cal State Fullerton OKs Hotel-Stadium Complex

Cal State Fullerton is going into the hotel business, with the faculty gowns going along with what a town official calls a “win-win situation for all concerned.”

The faculty voted 38-4 Thursday to approve a $16-million on-campus hotel and a $6.7-million, 10,000-seat sports stadium and 2,00-seat baseball pavilion. The university has no stadium for home football games or other outdoor events and the city is short of hotel rooms.

Jewel Plummer Cobb, president of Cal State Fullerton, announced earlier in the week that the fate of the proposal was in the hands of the Academic Senate.

“I’m very pleased,” Cobb said after the vote.

In a complex arrangement, the Marriott Hotel will be built on 3.1 acres of university land that is to be leased to the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency. The agency would then lease the land to the Marriott Corp., which would build the hotel. After 1988, when the hotel is completed, a portion of the gross profits would go to the university, which would, in turn, use the funds to repay a loan to the redevelopment agency for construction of the sports complex.

According to Cobb and Sal Rinella, vice president for administration, the sports complex would be self-sustaining after its 1989 completion.

Faculty critics charged that a sports complex would mean expanding athletics at the expense of academics, and they said sports already gets too much of scarce education money.

“As the university has grown, more resources seem to be devoted to the athletic program, which means that students are impoverished,” said history professor Leland Bellot.

“I’m not anti-athletics, but I’ve always been concerned about the shift of resources into athletics,” history professor Robert Feldman said.

But finance professor Donald Crane, who made a key motion calling for Academic Senate support of the project, said the proposal was a “good investment for the university.”