Class of ’96 Aces Test in Adversity

Janet Wilson expected college to open up a whole new world for her, and boy, did it ever.

She mastered the art of living without gas or electricity, and became supremely adept at packing her bags and fleeing with every tremor that shook her San Fernando Valley home. She even learned to juggle classes while being hospitalized for respiratory problems she developed while living in an unheated apartment.

Given the series of disasters she endured it may seem only natural to learn that Wilson attended America’s calamity campus: Cal State Northridge. What may come as a surprise is that, despite myriad obstacles that nature placed in her path, Wilson will graduate from CSUN this week with a master’s degree in education.

The hardships she faced were extreme, yet in many ways typified the experiences of her classmates. For CSUN’s Class of ’96 experienced life at the campus before the great earthquake and came to know too well its toll.

They witnessed the horror of a collapsed parking deck and experienced the nuisance of trailers for classrooms. Many, like Wilson, found themselves stuck in badly damaged apartments that lacked even basic utilities. Some were forced from their homes, while others lost jobs that helped cover their education costs.

Still, they endured, persisting in studies that will culminate in a series of commencement exercises starting Tuesday. With no small measure of triumph, the ceremonies for some 6,000 graduates will be held on the lawn in front of the partly restored Delmar T. Oviatt Library for the first time since the Jan. 17, 1994, quake.

For Wilson, it has been a long and rocky road filled with personal and quake-related tragedies. In addition to dealing with the illness that befell her and her 10-year-old son, Wilson moved three times. She was the victim of a hit-and-run accident that left her without a car during the summer of 1994. Her mother was seriously injured in a car accident in Texas, and her father became a random victim of a drive-by shooting outside his home in South Central Los Angeles. (He survived but now has to use a walker to get around.)

But despite the seemingly endless assaults on Wilson and her family, it was the 6.7-magnitude temblor that affected her daily life the most and left an indelible mark on her surroundings.

“After the earthquake, I considered transferring because I wanted to move out of Northridge,” said the 40-year-old single mother. “But now I’m glad I stuck it out, because it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and because my classmates and I made it.”

At first, everywhere Wilson and her classmates looked, it seemed there were fences encircling damaged buildings. And that meant more courses had to be held in trailers. In the beginning at least, the trailers were cold in the winter and uncomfortably warm in the summer.

“They stuffed us in all these little boxes,” recalled Medhat Bahnan, a 27-year-old accounting major from Sherman Oaks. “Every time it rained, there was mud all over the place. Professors would trip and break their legs.”

No longer was there a library to study in or a convenient place to park. Instead, students took hourlong bus rides to the UCLA libraries in Westwood to find research materials for their courses at CSUN. And open fields at the campus’ edge were paved over into make-shift parking lots from which students were shuttled to and from their classes.

In the end, though, many students said it was the intangible things they missed the most, not the concrete ones lost amid $350 million in damage. After the quake, they said, the campus lacked a sense of community.

“Before the quake, the quad was the place to be because everybody hung out there,” said Cheryl Swanson, a 26-year-old liberal studies major who next week will become the first person in her family to earn a college degree. “But afterward, everything was spread out and everyone was separated.

“School ended up being just about coming to classes because there weren’t any kind of activities. The overall morale of the campus seemed to go down.”

The sense of despair was reflected in the school’s plummeting enrollment figures. By September 1994, the number of students enrolled at the quake-stricken campus had declined to 24,310 students, the lowest level for a fall semester in 24 years. Officials were reluctant to attribute the heavy losses to the quake, but the low enrollment only bolstered students’ perceptions that their classmates were abandoning ship.

Reza Massoumi, a 23-year-old biology major from Brentwood, had the unique and arguably unfortunate experience of transferring to CSUN around the time of the quake.

“I came right after the earthquake and it wasn’t a good experience,” Massoumi said. “All the classes were all over the campus. It wasn’t what I expected the university to be like.”

But out of the bad came at least some good.

Many students spoke of a new sense of intimacy that seemed to creep into their classes.

“The thing I liked about the event, if anything, was the understanding by the faculty and staff that we were living in unusual times,” Bahnan said. “They showed compassion, which they had not always done before.”

Suddenly, students joined their professors in bringing food and water to share at school. When spring arrived, some teachers moved their classes from the stuffy trailers to the campus’ remaining grassy lawns.

“It was different,” Wilson said. “It reminded me a lot of how they used to teach back in the 1970s.”

Many of the once-damaged buildings have reopened, including part of the library, as well as the science, engineering and speech and drama buildings. Still to come are the administration building, the fine arts building, and the wings of the library, among others.

Although Wilson was forced to drop two courses during the semester after the quake, others like Bahnan said they seemed to almost flourish in its aftermath--hunkering down over their books at home rather than being tempted to socialize at the library.

Jason Moss, who lived on campus throughout his four years at CSUN, said he not only adapted easily to the changes on campus, but also garnered his highest grade point average the semester after the quake.

“I had a great time at CSUN,” said the 21-year-old religious studies major. “It was a perfect fit for me, earthquake and all.”