CSSM Faculty Cries Out for More Lab Space : Academia: Professors say inadequacy of laboratories in the plans could keep the new university from gaining respect in the sciences.

As construction for the Cal State San Marcos campus gets under way, science professors are up in arms over what they call inadequate plans for laboratory space and equipment.

Those inadequacies could keep the brand-new university from building a reputation for good science education and repel potential professors and students, both faculty members and the designer of the first set of labs agree.

The first phase of construction, scheduled to be completed by 1992, provides for two chemistry labs and four labs in biology, which suits most of the Cal State San Marcos’ four full-time science faculty just fine.

But planning for the second phase, which must accommodate the first freshman classes as well as the upper-division courses, allows for two more chemistry labs and one more each in biology, physics and geology, numbers that faculty find unacceptable.

“One accepts that, when you’re building a new university that it’s not going to go poof and be there,” said Larry Cohen, founding faculty member in biology, “but you don’t expect the growth to be at a standstill from the beginning. It should be accelerating, not grinding to a halt.”

Even the professor who had designed the first phase of the labs finds the situation hard to believe.

Andrew Montana, chemistry professor at Cal State Fullerton, described the second-phase labs as “totally inadequate.”

“If I were a professor there, I would be bitching all over the state,” said Montana, who in addition to the San Marcos facility designed a yet-to-be-constructed science building for Cal State Fullerton.

Montana’s own campus, with 17,000 students, has 10 laboratories for chemistry and 15 for biology. Smaller Cal State campuses, however, have as few as nine laboratories between those two disciplines.

“Unless the campus makes a commitment to put in good undergraduate labs, they are not going to be able to attract the quality faculty they need,” Montana said. “And you cannot get quality faculty unless you provide them space for research.”

A commitment must be made soon, Cohen said, or the university’s reputation as an institution dedicated to science will be in jeopardy.

“If we don’t establish ourselves for having dedication in teaching science here within a few years, nobody is going to take us seriously,” Cohen said.

“I’m going to have a devil of a time recruiting top young people to teach here, and I’m going to have a hard time keeping the ones I’ve got if they don’t have space to research in.”

Cohen said the lab plans show that Cal State San Marcos’ mission statement of being a “university of the 21st Century” is “rhetorical rather than actual.”

Steven Welch, professor of chemistry, said that, when he was recruited to the campus, he had been led to believe that there would be a significant commitment to the sciences.

“I was told that chemistry would either have its own building or a building in combination with biology, and that all of its needs for labs would be met,” said Welch, who feels that a chemistry department needs at least six or seven labs, as opposed to the four or five he is likely to get.

“Usually each professor gets a small lab where they continue to do new and innovative work on their own,” Welch said. “In the Phase 1, we have 2.5 of those, and I was told that in Phase 2 there would be no more.”

Welch said that the lack of professorial research labs would not only hurt the university’s ability to attract quality faculty but also diminish the existing faculty’s ability to keep up with changes in science.

The squeeze for funds for constructing the labs comes in part from the formula the state applies to determine funding levels for the university, which are based on projected enrollment.

“Science labs are notoriously expensive for lots of reasons, and, at every stage of the way, the amount the state is proposing through their formulas . . . they don’t fit the desires,” said Pat Worden, acting dean of the college of arts and sciences.

“And that’s not just the case with sciences, it’s also in fine arts, humanities, journalism, you name it,” Worden said. “Part of the problem is that we’re very ambitious and we may be aspiring to a more ambitious project than the state had envisioned.”

Although starting up a new university might be ambitious, the five biology labs proposed to be completed in the campus’ second phase, by 1995, are hardly sufficient to house a modern biology teaching facility, said Cohen, who was professor at Pomona College, a college of 1,300 students, where there were nine biology labs.

Cal State San Marcos is projected to have more than 1,700 students when it moves onto the campus in 1992 and an additional 1,000 students when the second phase of the campus is built.

Enrollment, however, already is running 13% above projections, and university officials say there is no reason to expect that trend to fall off. Qualified students will start to be turned away beginning next semester because demand for Cal State San Marcos classes exceeded expectations.

“It’s the way every state university institution tends to do it nationwide,” Worden said. “Whether it’s appropriate or not, I don’t know.”

But Welch feels that a student population-based funding formula does not translate into quality education.

“You don’t build science programs on projected numbers of students, but on what it takes to put together a quality program,” Welch said. “It involves a large capital outlay to set it up, and it really isn’t something that can be phased in over a long period of time.”

There are plans for four chemistry labs by 1995, but Welch said separate labs are needed for the five areas of chemistry--analytical, bio-chemistry, organic, inorganic and physical--plus another lab for general chemistry.

Biology, Welch said, has even more need for laboratory space because it “is a much more complex science with many more disciplines and sub-disciplines.”

“Designing labs that are both efficient and safe and will give students a good laboratory experience is really important to attracting students into science,” Welch said. “Hopefully, the Cal State University system is not totally formula bound.”

Cal State San Marcos president Bill Stacy said he will make an appeal in January to the board of trustees of the university system and to the chancellor to fund the laboratory space beyond what is allowed under state formulas.

“I think the formulas work very well for a continuing campus, I don’t think they serve the start-up campus well,” Stacy said.

Stacy acknowledged that, in order to get the extra laboratory space, the university might have to give up other resources, a decision that would have to be made by a faculty committee.

“You can’t ask the chancellor’s office to do all the giving, and it would be a matter of a campus commitment as well,” Stacy said.

Local industry might affect what and how much the campus is willing to give up to get more laboratories. Stacy said local industry is looking towards Cal State San Marcos to provide the education for young scientists in the community, which has a strong and growing high-tech industry.

“We must suit the region where we live, and that’s why science has a big push in my thinking,” Stacy said in expressing his support for his faculty. “We can’t ignore science, it’s a necessary program strength for us because of the place where we live.”

Stacy believes that funding for the laboratories will be the first test of whether the state is willing to spend the money it will take to make Cal State San Marcos a school on a par with its 19 sister campuses.

Cohen emphasized that it is laboratory work and “the excitement of discovery” that keep students interested in the sciences and, without sufficient lab space and equipment, the university will lose science students.

“We were charged with building a science program for the 21st Century, and one that would train our students to occupy positions in local industry,” Cohen said. “Modern science is high-tech, and high-tech equipment, with its sophistication, does have a price tag associated with it.”

The university is requesting $6.3 million in science equipment to fill the science labs available in 1992, and Welch said that those instruments are just the bare necessities.

“I have not requested anything in excess of what we absolutely need,” said Welch, who used guidelines of the American Chemists Society in requesting the equipment.

“It’s crucial to get that equipment, or else that building will be useless for the function that we have built it for,” said Sheila Chaffin, assistant vice president for physical planning and facilities management at the university.

In the end, the university might have to go begging to private individuals and corporations for donations of special equipment.

“(San Diego State University) has a long history and tradition of getting resources outside the state system, and that is something we want to emulate,” Worden said.

But, even if private donations of scientific equipment or money to buy it comes through, it will be of little value if there is no lab space in which to put it, professors said.

Even in Worden’s field of psychology, no laboratory space was planned for after the first phase is completed in 1992, and there is now a scramble on to find space in the designs for a psychology lab, which most likely would share space with physiology.