SDSU Students See Their Salvation in Summer School

A large number of San Diego State University students, especially those with majors being eliminated because of budget cuts, are flocking to expensive summer courses that begin Monday as a last-ditch effort to take needed classes before they permanently disappear.

The university’s summer sessions under the College of Extended Studies already have enrollments 14% higher than last year, and administrators expect even more students to show up when the first classes begin Monday.

Several of the departments targeted for elimination--anthropology, family studies and consumer sciences, industrial studies, Russian and German--have already added courses so that some students may be able to satisfy graduation requirements in their majors before the departments are scheduled to go out of business this September.

Larry Cobb, assistant dean for the summer school, said also that many students have signed up for classes in other subjects not identified for elimination or severe cuts because of general uncertainty over what the fall course schedule will look like.

“Right now I’m showing more than 8,000 (class) applications, compared to 6,000 at this time last year,” Cobb said. Not all of those represent individual students, because a single student may have signed up for two or more classes.

The classes are not cheap--a typical course costs at least twice as much as one during the regular academic year--because state law requires that summer sessions operate without state general fund money.

Partly for that reason, San Diego-area community colleges have been getting more than 400 telephone calls a day from worried SDSU students asking whether specific courses that can satisfy SDSU requirements are being offered on their campuses this summer. The maximum cost at a community college is $60 per course, contrasted with $300 or more at SDSU’s summer sessions.

But the community college will give its own students higher priority for crowded classes than the SDSU students, said Barry Garron, public information officer for the San Diego Community College District. The summer session for that district’s three campuses begins June 15, with registration for new students to begin Thursday.

“We’re offering 22 additional class sections,” Francine Deutsch, chair of the SDSU family studies and consumer sciences department, said Friday. “We care about our students, and I feel they should not be caught in the cross-fire of politics.”

Deutsch said 92 seniors who are close to completing their degrees will be able to take the last of the required courses in their major through the summer offerings and then complete still-available general education courses next fall before graduating.

Four of the tenured professors in the department agreed to teach the summer courses “despite everyone being devastated, depressed, overwhelmed and unsupportive,” she said. “It’s a very bittersweet situation” to be in the position of teaching a course one final time.

Out of 193 faculty positions being eliminated along with nine departments, 93 involve fully tenured professors.

Deutsch added that professors who teach food and nutrition courses in the department “have refused to meet with students or teach anything. . . . They are saying that the institution created the problem, the institution can fix the problem.”

“It’s a position I don’t share, but their perspective is very different from mine,” she said.

Deutsch has arranged for the university to waive normal limitations on the number of courses a student can take for his or her major during the summer.

The five summer courses already scheduled by the department of recreation, parks and tourism will be far more crowded than normal, department chair Gene Lamke said Friday.

“I imagine that some students who are not yet registered will also show up on Monday,” he said. “The closer a student is to a degree, the easier it will be for the administration to accommodate the student.”

Lamke conceded that the morale of professors is “one of the most difficult things we are dealing with now,” but that all eight in his department have agreed that, if they must end their SDSU careers, it will be by offering the highest-quality courses they can during the summer.

“What if the department were not to be cut after all, and we all had said ‘to hell with it!’? What would that bode for us in our professional reputation and in dealing with students in the fall?” Lamke asked. “My faculty won’t give up that way.”

The additional summer classes will be of less help to students in affected departments more than a year or two from graduation, department heads say. And, with no coordinated effort as yet by top university officials to deal with student problems, departments are moving ahead on their own.

Deutsch said she has contacted colleagues at the Long Beach and Los Angeles campuses of the California State University system, and that representatives from those campuses will meet with her students June 9 to talk about transfer possibilities.

Lamke has told students in his department “not to panic and not to prematurely jump ship.”

“I’m a fairly optimistic person, so I’m trying to figure out what we can do, and hopefully things will turn around (in the budget) so we won’t be eliminated,” Lamke said.

“I’m trying to be as prudent as possible, and we can still put in summer courses in July if we have to.

“And, if our faculty is terminated, we’re looking at the possibility of professionals in community organizations perhaps teaching some courses in the fall, or what we could possibly teach through the College of Extended Studies in the fall if need be,” Lamke said.