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| Newsmakers is published in FirstMonday for the faculty and staff at SFSU on the first Monday of the month in September, October, November, December, February, March, April and May by the Public Affairs office. 415/338-1665. pubcom@sfsu.edu |
The University's ambitious plan to hire 80 new tenure-track faculty members over the next three years was featured in an article in the Oakland Post on Aug. 25. The story reported on the numerous faculty positions lost during the devastating budget cuts of the early 1990s and outlined the University's plan to spend more than $4 million on faculty - the one state university to make such a dramatic shift away from lecturers and toward permanent faculty. Cinema and management, two of SFSU's most popular majors, will receive most of the new positions and five of the new hires will form the basis of a new Islamic Studies Program. "With this tenure-track initiative of hiring a cluster of faculty experts in Islamic Studies, SFSU will go from a deficiency to a strength concerning this important area of the world and religion," said Joel Kassiola, dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.
U.S. Census data indicates the Bay Area's immigrant population grew to 27.5 percent in the 1990s, more than twice the national average, according to an Aug. 27 story in the San Francisco Chronicle. However, job prospects are limited for immigrants from poor countries with few educational opportunities. Abdiel Oñate, associate professor of history, said, for example, Mexicans from rural areas do not possess educational skills that are up to date with advances in technology. "They do all the menial jobs, here," he said. "All the labor in the kitchens of the restaurants in the Bay Area, installing telephones, landscaping, gardening, construction work. Without their labor, things would be much more expensive."
The 10 O'Clock News on KTVU-TV, Channel 2, ran a feature story on Aug. 28 on "The Rhetoric of Terrorism," a new class in the Speech and Communication Studies Department. Taught by Professor Joseph Tuman, the class studies terrorism as a form of rhetorical communication and aims to redefine terrorism to help people better understand it. "What is it about these particular acts that allow us to define it as terrorism and not something else?" he asked on the first day of class. Tuman decided to create the class after analyzing Osama bin Laden's video messages and President Bush's speeches after the terrorist attacks last year. Bush engaged in rhetoric, Tuman said, when he called the Sept. 11 attackers "evil doers." "The goal of which was to affect, influence the way we talk about (terrorism) and introduce those words to our vocabulary," he said.
Mushroom guru Dennis Desjardin was listed in the prestigious roundup of the Bay Area's brain trust, a story in the Sept. 1 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine featuring five world-class experts from local four-year institutions. The biology professor and mycologist began hunting for mushrooms as a 3-year-old during family expeditions. After a stint as a carpenter, he turned to academia at age 31 and learned that one of the top mushroom repositories in the country was in Hensill Hallwhere faculty members Henry Thiers built the collection. Today, the H.D. Thiers Herbarium has the best collection of mushrooms west of the Mississippi River. And because only 5 percent of the fungi on earth have been identified, Desjardin has his work cut out. "You go out and find a jungle that hasn't been destroyed too much by human activity and you collect," he said. "It's an Easter egg hunt."
An article in the Sept. 16 edition of The Wall Street Journal reported that a message board created by the Internet search company Google is helping people answer queries not easily answered through regular search engines. Users just type in their question, along with how much they're willing to pay for an answer, and freelance researchers respond with the answer, sometimes within a matter of hours. But associate librarian Ned Fielden, who has written a book on Internet research, cautioned users that the Internet is not like a card catalog.
"It's not a library at all," he said. "People feel inadequate when they can't find what they want."
The Oct. 3 edition of KQED-FM's "Forum" featured a panel on issues surrounding the many mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco. One of the panelists, Dede Ranahan, director of the Mental Health Education and Workforce Development Initiative in the College of Extended Learning, has a 34-year-old son who is homeless and has a serious mental illness. She said she discusses her son's illness so candidly because it helps other families who are afraid to talk about mental illness. "I don't feel like for me, personally, stigma is an issue, as it is for my son and it may be for some of the other folks in my family," she said. "I just got to the point where I thought, enough already. There's enough suffering here. We've got to stop putting this in the closet. We've got to start talking."
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Last modified October 8, 2002, by the Office of Public Affairs