Editor’s Note: Jeff Lustig is a professor of government at Sacramento State.

We’re nearing the time of year when classes end, students shelve their books and we all forget about the campus for a while. There are good reasons, however, for not forgetting about it this year. Beneath the cheery press releases, a host of problems are plaguing Sacramento State, which, if not addressed, could degrade the quality of education we offer and keep us from being a desirable destination for students and faculty alike.

Students are familiar with many of these problems ?” the overly crowded classrooms, growing student/faculty ratios, increased student fees, increased reliance on contingent (non-tenure track) faculty and commercialization of services (producing, for example, higher textbook costs). These are real problems, and they call for something more in the way of solutions than a new logo or a fieldhouse for a few athletes.

Two serious problems have surfaced in recent weeks. The first is the unprecedented tax levied on students for a construction project differing from what you voted on in April 2004. You voted to help fund a RWEC complex including a new events center, for the whole campus. But your $110 per semester is now being annexed to pay for a fieldhouse for athletes, with the events center in limbo. The shift resembles a massive bait-and-switch tactic; and Associated Students Inc. and President Angel Barajas were right to raise questions about it.

Facilities like those envisioned are capital investments anyway. They are campus infrastructure and should be paid for with capital funds, not out of the pockets of the poorest segment of the community. That would be true even if CSU students hadn’t suffered a 76 percent recent increase in fees (on top of an earlier 500 percent increase). To saddle them with $220 more each year ?” and now higher dorm fees to boot ?” isn’t only unfair; it’s unwise, as recent reports on disappointing campus enrollment gains show.

The second problem is that our junior faculty are so poorly paid that it turns out their salaries are lower than those of new hires ?” sometimes $8,000 per year lower. Our junior faculty are penalized, in effect, for their years of experience at Sac State. Given that our salaries are already 18 percent below the national average and our teaching loads the heaviest, an unprecedented number of faculty are choosing to resign ?” simply to leave Sac State.

President Gonzalez wanted to solve this problem by having affected faculty apply for increases. But that would have made individuals responsible for an institutional problem and turned faculty into supplicants for what’s theirs by right. As a stop-gap measure, junior faculty will now get one-year bonuses. But that still leaves the larger problem of base salaries unresolved (while CSU campus presidents garner a 13.7 percent raise on top of past increases).

Neither of these problems is necessary. Both are examples of a new model of university life that downgrades the essential work of the campus ?” teaching and learning ?” relative to administrative activity and big ticket construction projects.

Both problems raise a fundamental question: for whom is this to be a destination campus? Not students, if they can’t afford the fees. Not faculty, if they’re penalized for teaching here. And making it a destination simply for developers and venture capitalists is a joke. Think about it this summer; maybe we can come up with something new for the fall.