Editor’s note: A portion of this story has been changed from the print edition.

The “Access to Excellence” program, held in the University Ballroom on March 20, sought to build a new strategic plan from “the bottom up.” The CSU Board of Trustees met with Sacramento State administrators, full-time faculty, staff and students to discuss the future goals, visions and identities of the CSU system and the campus. The task was to discuss the Domain Topic 4 of 6, “Ensuring Success in Student Learning.” No matter how much the need to lower fees to allow students to focus on their studies was stressed, the overall debate seemed to focus on how to work within the parameters of our existing system.

I’m concerned over the state of the CSU system, which stems from information distributed in pieces, in issues and problems within our school that don’t seem related to each other.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to find out about the “Access to Excellence” event, to participate in it, and a real change took place in my mind. I started looking at the university, and the CSU as a body. Issues are not isolated events but symptoms of an overall sickness within our educational institution.

The trustees voted, 15 to 1, to approve a 10 percent CSU student fee increase to start next year, including our very own CSU student representative, Andrew LaFlamme. CSU Trustee Melinda Guzman voted against the fee increase.

More than 23,000 CSU faculty members have committed themselves to a part of the largest strike in the history of education, precisely because they are being underpaid.

Despite our fee increases and the systemwide underpayment of faculty, all CSU presidents received a pay raise.

In the meantime, Sacramento State has incurred a $6.5 million deficit. This may result in cutbacks, both one-time cutbacks and permanent cutbacks. And by cutbacks, I mean an additional supply of dropped classes.

Assistant Professor Dan Melzer offered a “Free Campus-Wide Workshop” to help other professors learn to cope with large class sizes. Since it’s inevitable that teachers will have classes too large to offer the student any kind of personal input into their learning process.

The system is supposed to have a “top-down” hierarchy. The students learn from the faculty, faculty answers to administrators, who answer, to the trustees, who answer to the chancellor, who answers to the state. But, if the trustees won’t confront the chancellor and the governor to fund the CSU, and our President doesn’t send a strong message to the trustees that they have placed his faculty, students and staff in a bind, then who will fight for us? The answer is no one. There is a sense of inevitability to the CSU’s lack of state funding, so much so that the powers that be focus their efforts on assessment. It’s great. But if the CSU is looking for enrollment growth while maintaining CSU goals and values that there will be quality education accessible and available to the achieving poor and middle classes, student fees are not the answer.

Suffocating our faculty is not the answer. And though performing in Strategic Plan meetings are important, we should still work through the means provided by the system. We must also get in the face of the system, so damn close they can feel our pulse, breathe our air, and come to grips not with “goals and values” based within a faulty system, but our humanity.

Student fees may be the lifeblood of our system right now, but it is blood being tainted. It is the blood of students worked into academic drudgery. We don’t have time to live a journey: so many seek deaf and blind for four years until they arrive.

So what do we do? Well, if faculty members want to bring students to the picket lines to fight their cause, let us use their cause to fight for ours. What is a CSU student cause? The battle for state funding. Without it, students will continue to lack space within their campus, part-time and junior faculty will teach larger and larger classes, and our education will mean nothing more than “this one graduated” and “this one didn’t.”

When the picket lines form, I will stand by my faculty. I will look for the cameras, for anyone holding a microphone. I will say, “Yes, I support my faculty.” And I will also say, “But there is a larger problem, for you to see, I have been made into a zombie.” And when those journalists ask me how, I will tell them, “My brain has been replaced by a sheet of paper.” And when they correct me, tell me that my heart still beats, I will tell them, “My pulse is no longer mine.” And when they ask me how I could live if my pulse could not beat for me, I will tell them, “That is why I am a zombie. I live only for a sheet of paper, as a zombie lives only for brains. My life is not a journey. It is a destination. A Destination 2010.”

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