Campus Life at Issue

What’s afoot in academia? Editors of student newspapers on Southland campuses report.

At UC Santa Barbara, the Daily Nexus has been exploring the complexities of an apartment shortage in Isla Vista, a square-mile unincorporated area adjacent to campus. The core problem, says Editor in Chief Marc Valles, is that university housing accommodates only 20% of the 20,000 students.

“It’s really bad,” he says. “The university keeps upping enrollment, and Isla Vista is not zoned to house everyone.”

“It’s a seller’s market,” Valles adds, and some landlords have been illegally erecting “privacy partitions” to create makeshift second bedrooms, while some enterprising students have been subletting rooms “not intended to be bedrooms. It’s just a big mess.”

At Pomona College, a wall that since the ‘50s has provided a forum for free speech was at the center of a recent controversy when someone painted an anti-lesbian slur.

“People were offended,” says Teddy Schall, managing editor of the weekly Student Life, which received “a rash of letters.” During a protest march, protesters painted over the offending words.

In the past, Schall says, the administration has considered whether the tradition of the wall should continue, deciding “it’s a small price to pay” for freedom of speech.

At Loyola Marymount University, the transfer of 13-year athletic director Brian Quinn to a fund-raising job--director of athletic development and promotion--made Page 1.

“It was pretty big,” says Editor in Chief Don Zacharias. “It wasn’t something that he wanted.”

The bottom line, reports Zacharias, is that the university must still raise $8 million to $10 million for a new gymnasium projected to cost $18 million and Quinn “was pretty successful at fund-raising.”

The California Educational Technology Initiative continues to stir up controversy at San Diego State University. At issue: a proposal for the financially strapped 23-campus CSU system to enter into a 10-year contract with four private corporations--GTE, Microsoft, Fujitsu and Hughes Communications--who will ante up $300 million to update CSU’s technology infrastructure by 2000. And, presumably, profit handsomely.

Daily Aztec Editor in Chief Jamie Butow says the newspaper has been “trying to make students aware that this is going to affect everything from their e-mail accounts to their online access to how many computers we have on campus.”

In an editorial, English professor Jerry Farber asked, “Will once-great university systems like CSU emerge as franchise operations, ruled by the bottom line, and dishing out their assembly-line degrees like so many Happy Meals?”