CSUN Bars Events at Student Union in Response to Gunfire at Party

Cal State Northridge officials have suspended student dances and concerts at the University Student Union in the wake of two shooting incidents that erupted after a weekend dance there last month--a move that some student groups said will cause a severe setback to fund-raising efforts.

The moratorium will put on ice 10 social functions booked at the union between now and Nov. 2, the day of the university’s homecoming football game, Fred Strache, CSUN’s associate vice president for student programs, said Wednesday. The temporary suspension will give campus officials time to devise a new policy for controlling crowds at large events and measures aimed at preventing violence in parking lots and around dormitories.

“The moratorium is a delay, but it doesn’t solve any problems,” Strache said. “At some point, we have to get to the root causes of how we deal with parking lots, how we deal with people firing guns after events.”

The university’s action follows two separate shooting incidents early Aug. 31, a few hours after campus police spraying tear gas shut down the first dance of the school year. No one was injured in the incidents, which occurred outside dorms and near a crowd of about 200 party-goers.

The dance marked the first test of new crowd-control procedures instituted after a similar moratorium last spring, which had been imposed after a fraternity-sponsored fete deteriorated into a series of brawls.

The current ban on dances and concerts was greeted with dismay by some student organizations that rely on such events as their primary fund-raisers.

“We pretty much try to get the majority of our fund-raisers out during the first semester” to subsidize programs in the spring, said Sean Gaston, an officer with Phi Beta Sigma, the fraternity that sponsored last month’s back-to-school dance. The group had booked the Student Union for another dance at the end of October, but those plans now have been scuttled.

“The first dance not going through has really tied our hands up,” he said. “We have a fashion show every year that benefits a charity and costs us about $3,000 to put on. We don’t know if we can have that show now.”

Limiting admission at major on-campus events to CSUN students and their guests--a proviso Strache said will almost certainly be included in any new policy--also will cut deeply into the financial success of future dances, Gaston said.

The chapter probably will be forced to slash the amount of money donated annually to the black fraternity’s national scholarship fund, which benefits nonprofit organizations, he said. Other community programs, such as paying for speakers for Black History Month, will also be scaled back or eliminated.

“The things that we did and the scale that we did them on last year won’t repeat this year,” Gaston said.

CSUN Activities Coordinator Michael Hughes acknowledged that minority groups, which tend to depend heavily on events at the Student Union to drum up revenue, will feel the effects of the moratorium immediately. But the challenge for student groups will be to develop alternate means of generating funds.

“It’s going to affect the groups dramatically, but there are thousands of ideas out there,” Hughes said. “We just need to sit down to discuss the specific skills and strengths of each organization.”

Meanwhile, campus police Wednesday arrested Ferris T. Valentine, 23, of Pasadena on suspicion of three counts of attempted murder in connection with the first shooting incident after last month’s dance.

Valentine had been arrested immediately after the shooting on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, shooting into an inhabited dwelling and being an ex-convict in possession of a gun. He was later released on $15,630 bail. Valentine was rearrested Wednesday on the attempted murder charges, a district attorney spokesman said.

He was being held without bail at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division.