Within the past seven semesters, President Alexander Gonzalez has overseen the creation of some infrastructure necessary to overcome some of the real problems that institutionalize a disembodied student population.

A statement given by Gonzalez during his Spring Address last year really led me to understand why, his administration is fighting a losing battle; he fights on one battlefield, toward that solitary promise of acquiring “community support” for Destination 2010.

Gonzalez addressed the question of how to battle against sub-standard retention rates and a decline in enrollment growth with this sweeping, beautiful statement: “The goal of Destination 2010 is to get us out of the year-to-year, ad hoc responses. We spend too much of our time and energy merely reacting-we need room to breathe.”

Gonzalez sought private funds to alleviate the very real pressure of a state fiscal crisis. The result?

His policy reacts to the concerns of private industry rather than those concerns central to the running of an academic institution, even those reflected in the Destination 2010 policy.Gonzalez has made the fruition of Destination 2010 dependent on the will of the few super-investors who have the cash and the guts to invest in Sacramento State.

The evidence is all around us: University Enterprises Inc., a private non-profit organization, sold the bookstore and The Store in the University Union to the private corporate collegiate conglomerate e-follett.

UEI has also helped erect a towering parking space and more than likely criminally overcharging brand new, million-dollar concrete shell that will become our new bookstore and UEI administration building.

Plus, our recreation center, one of the centerpieces of Gonzalez’s “Campus Environment” addendum, received funding for the new field house while, infamously, the student body- friendly portions of the center remain without funding and without any solid plan for their construction in sight.

However, this dependency on big investors is not the worst downfall of the Gonzalez administration’s single-track push for non-state funding: It is the administration’s inability to show support toward what Gonzalez called in his Fall 2006 Address “the heart of our Destination 2010 initiative”-his goal to have “first-rate academic programs.”

The “Academic Achievement Plan” on the Academic Affairs website has been dormant for over a year, and the plan seems to have achieved little more than having set goals. When you look to view “Assessments” or “Accomplishments” of those goals, you will find what I found: “Under construction.” We’re used to that at Sac State: leading the way in rent-a-fences.

After his Spring 2007 speech, Gonzalez told me to visit the Provost’s home page to find the desired material, and yes, it did provide the assessments for which I had been searching. Many of the assessments of our university’s colleges have been made during the 2003/2004 calendar year. It has also been three years.

Right now, we have an Honor’s Program with 58 of Sac State’s 23,000 or so full-time students in it, and 36 new full-time hires to show for it. But we also nearly had a budget cut that would have ripped a gash through our junior faculty population.

If it weren’t for an upheaval towards Gonzalez’s proposed budget cuts towards Academic Affairs, Sacramento State could have lost up to 40 percent of its junior faculty in certain departments. Thanks to a potential redistribution of funds to “University Development” which would have cut funding for Academic Affairs and, consequently, the ability for the University to pay faculty salaries. University Development is responsible for alumni affairs and charitable gifts to the institution.

In essence, Gonzalez planned to further expand University Development by rolling the dice on private investment at the cost of losing the faculty who are the lifeblood of our institution, the lifeblood that fuels Destination 2010’s heart. The uproar was alive and well in junior faculty population now rightfully driven to paranoia. I hope you checked out the protest on the first day of school.

With that said, Gonzalez realized this error, and the proof of such recognition can be found when he froze the proposed cuts to Academic Affairs. He also formed a University Budget Task Force that will give him, and the community as a whole, insight into how to implement his budget. This will lead to a University Budget Committee that will dissect the campus budget for years to come.

If other proof is needed, read the transcripts of both President Gonzalez’s Fall 2006 and Spring 2007 speeches for their tones and its appeals for “respect and understanding,” all pointing toward an acknowledgement on his part that more needs to be done to keep the heart of Destination 2010 pumping.

Although the establishment of an Honors Program and additional co-op educational opportunities for the best and brightest at Sac State are excellent additions to our campus, the rest of us will need teachers so that we can actually get into classes we need in order to graduate. And, by all that is right and good, to learn.

Gonzalez shows signs that he will lay down the green and gold gala preparations for a while, that he will pull his finger off his cell phone itching to speed dial Alex and Faye Spanos, that he will set himself toward assisting Academic Affairs achieve the goals of its “Access to Excellence” program: He told reporters after his speech Thursday that academics would be his first priority this semester.

Hopefully, our president will help ensure that the plans of Academic Affairs become attainable, important and vital, as well publicized. And again, hopefully, more meaningful, than those new beige and green signs that can do no more than show the way, or the monstrous bookstore looming over the University Union.

He shows signs that he seeks to not just point, but push Sac State to replace the simple, bold, black line of print: “Under Construction.”

But the train must redirect itself and I will believe it when the truly best laid plans, the plans to help our university act as a university, start to come to fruition.

Frank Loret de Mola can be reached at [email protected]