A Nervous Cal State San Marcos Set for 1st Day of School

The laboratories aren’t where they should be, the carpeting in some classrooms was a little late being installed and about a fifth of the books are still en route for the first day of classes Monday at Cal State San Marcos.

And, although the chalkboards, chairs and lecterns in classrooms have been in place for a while, and experienced professors have well-prepared course outlines for the first semester at the new university, some professors are experiencing first-day jitters.

“Yes, I’m nervous . . . in the extreme,” said Margaret Rourk, who will be teaching her first class after being a post-doctorate fellow at Caltech in Pasadena.

“It’s a new university, and we want to be really good, and I guess the students and others are counting on me to do my part to make it good,” Rourk said. “And you just put pressure on yourself.”

Professors aren’t the only ones under the gun. The first day of classes for a new university means new experiences for everyone, and basic tasks such as who will unlock classrooms and turn on lights in the morning need to be assigned.

“Here, we’re establishing new policies and new procedures,” said business services director Patricia Farris. “But we’ve benefited from the experience of all of our sister institutions who have been here for years.”

A worst-case scenario: somebody forgets to unlock the student parking lot in the morning and students are forced to park along narrow West Los Vallecitos Boulevard by the campus.

“You don’t realize how many things you don’t think about and take for granted every day,” Farris said.

Farris is also responsible for just about every purchase at the university, from computers for the faculty to desks for students.

“Yesterday, one of the items was to make sure there were marker-boards, markers and erasers in the classrooms,” Farris said.

And, with much of the 32-member faculty arriving over the summer for the first time, Farris and her staff of five are scrambling over problems such as where to put people in the temporary campus of the fledgling university.

As late as last week, workers were erecting partitions to act as walls for faculty offices. “This is where a faculty receptionist would sit,” Farris said, motioning to an open area surrounded by 6-foot-high partitions that make up faculty spaces. On the floor a telephone sits atop a phone book.

Hand-me-down paintings and prints from the Cal State system chancellor’s offices sit on the floor, waiting for someone to hang them.

And, as the university grows, so do its needs, such as for a newly created shipping and receiving room.

“We used to do shipping and receiving in the hallway. Then it was in front of the president’s office, then it was in front of my office,” Farris said.

“Now we have an entire room.”

Space already is tight, Farris said. “We will accommodate everything we need to accommodate, but it will be tight.”

And, as professors arrive, they bring with them their own supply needs, which Farris tries to fulfill.

Farris said professors have ordered everything from hard-to-find South American musical instruments to state-of-the-art science laboratory equipment so elaborate that she could only guess their function.

Students won’t be able to buy all their textbooks on time for the first day of class because many professors, who arrived on campus during the summer, ordered books late, she said.

“Some of the faculty were not actually hired until mid-summer,” Farris said. “Next semester will be much simpler, because they’ll already be here.”

Nonetheless, 80% of the ordered textbooks should be on the student bookstore shelves by the first week of school, and 95% of them should be in within two weeks, Farris said. Meanwhile, some science classes originally scheduled to be taught at the temporary facility in San Marcos are now being held at Palomar College.

University officials found last month that its temporary campus in an industrial park is not zoned to allow some chemicals used in the laboratories.

“We hope that (holding classes at Palomar) is entirely temporary, and we’re working very hard to locate another building in a business park for leasing,” Rourk said.

“We hope that this new building will come on line in time to handle our labs next semester.”

Rourk said laboratories commonly use flammable chemicals such as ethanol that require special zoning, and changing the laboratories’ location delayed ordering them.

“There’s a bunch of chemical orders that we couldn’t even put our orders in for until we had some place to put them,” Rourk said.

Some of the laboratory equipment has already arrived, been unpacked and checked in by the staff.

A spectrophotometer, high-speed centrifuge and a specialized freezer sit in a room waiting for a place of their own.

The freezer, used for long-term storage of cells and tissues, can reach temperatures of minus 70 degrees centigrade, whereas a household freezer generally goes no lower than minus 20 degrees.

Although some of the academic materials are out of place, coffee mugs bearing the school’s blue and silver California mountain-lion logo are sold out at the student bookstore.

The logo and colors were selected at the end of last year, and vendors at the Aztec bookstore, the student store Cal State San Marcos shares with the North County campus of San Diego State University, wasted no time in submitting proposals for everything from T-shirts to key chains.

Cal State San Marcos paraphernalia went on sale in the middle of July, and bookstore officials say business is booming.

An official seal of the university, however, is still pending.

“The seal is very important,” Farris said.

“Once you do something like this, it’s in place for many years, so it’s important that everyone is happy and it expresses the mission of the university,” Farris said.