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President Corrigan's ViewPointViewPoint by President Corrigan is published in First Monday for the faculty and staff at SFSU on the first Monday of the month during the fall and spring semesters by the Public Affairs and Publications offices. EXT 8-1665. pubcom@sfsu.edu |
One January over 14 years ago, just a few months after I arrived at San Francisco State, I found myself on a stage in one of the beautiful historic buildings at the Asilomar conference center, amid a costumed group of faculty, administrators and staff, playing an unrehearsed part in a clever and satirical play that purported to recount the University's history.
Our audience was the rest of the several hundred other members of the SFSU community who had gathered at Asilomar, near Monterey, for the University's biennial off-campus retreat. That night, we were, indeed, a community.
New as I was to the campus, I did not know that in the years to come, one of the things I would hear most often in conversations with faculty, staff and students, would be their desire for a greater sense of campus community. It has been many decades since we were a small enough campus that faculty and staff easily knew most of their colleagues by sight, and often by name. But though we have grown and changed in many ways since then, the need for a feeling of camaraderie, of familiarity, persists. I hear it in CUSP II meetings, in gatherings of faculty and staff, and, most recently, at the student leadership retreat.
We know what makes that difficult: our size, our largely non-residential student population, the absence of a collegiate neighborhood around us; even the high cost of housing that has led to long commutes for many on campus.
All the same, I believe we can, with deliberate effort, recover much of that sense of academic community that we once had. A number of successful approaches to this are already under way. Under the warm and energetic leadership of Prof. Vicki Casella, director of the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching, our new faculty orientation program is bringing colleagues together as a cadre, across disciplinary and college lines. I see the effect in the series of new faculty dinners I host during the year. Before we even sit down, the dozen or so faculty, drawn from across campus, are engaging in animated conversation, obviously on familiar terms with each other.
Our Presidential Scholars program, which has proved spectacularly successful in achieving its aim of giving students a "small college within a major university" experience, has given us a model we can expand to many more students through such strategies as moving small groups together through core classes, or working to replicate beyond the residence halls the kind of on- and off-campus activities that help those students feel closer to each other and to the university. Another fine example of enriching students' personal, as well as academic experience, is our RISE program (Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement) in the biomedical sciences, which takes its cadre of talented, underrepresented students through a demanding curriculum, pairs them with faculty mentors, helps them form study groups, and brings them together for special events, while preparing them for successful entry into Ph.D. or M.D. programs.
New construction and remodeling has enabled us to give many more faculty individual offices, and providing all tenure-track faculty with a computer has made it more possible -- and more likely -- that they will spend time on campus beyond their teaching and other obligations. The new cafes around campus are part of an effort to provide both a needed service and occasions for casual interaction. And we are looking at opportunities to provide similar gathering spots in some of our academic buildings. With our Parkmerced purchases -- we currently own 180 rental units immediately adjacent to the campus -- we have begun to address the critical issue of faculty and staff housing while providing the foundation for a university neighborhood. We are making further efforts to increase the number of university-owned rental units and we are starting to explore the possibility of developing for-sale housing for staff and faculty.
But we need to find more ways to make this campus much closer to the ideal of the community of scholars that drew so many of us to academic life in the first place. At the recent student leader retreat, led by Vice President Saffold, students told us in no uncertain terms that they wanted more "campus life" -- events and activities that would bring them together. Early on, CUSP II began to discuss the issue of campus community and has been addressing it from several perspectives.
Right now, though, one of our very best opportunities to enjoy a sense of community is at hand. Registration is still open for the 2003 Asilomar retreat, being held January 20-22. Asilomar brings us close to that old, smaller, more collegial campus. The serene, oceanside setting, the shared meals, the presentations and discussions, and the simple pleasure of strolling the car-free paths, talking with colleagues, make for a remarkably rewarding experience. Probationary faculty and lecturers are eligible for subsidies; check the Senate web page for details. Asilomar is a retreat for all of us -- faculty, staff, and administrators. I hope to see a great many of you there.
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Last modified November 4, 2002, by the Office of Public Affairs
