Wikipedia Sucks!

Link there.

Some other commentary:

...And now Elliott Hirshman has resigned as of last week, and Matt Potter [SD Reader reporter/columnist] has nothing to say. When Hirshman leaves SDSU at the end of June for a job as president of a private East Coast ex-Catholic ex-women's college (Stevenson University, formerly Villa Julie College), he will leave behind an unfinished industrial engineering building, a football team nobody gives a crap about, that 200 dollar "success fee", the dumb decision* to name that gargantuan student center after Conrad Prebys a few months before Prebys died, and a new "business college" that is more paper than school. What Hirshman excelled at was finding projects where he could give naming rights to donors, which is why the student center has a "Lee and Frank Goldberg Courtyard", and the Mack family has an elevator foyer in Student Services West named after them (!), and that industrial engineering building (when it is completed) will have a quad named after Thomas Day [former SDSU president, now deceased], but other spaces will be named after donors. It used to be you had to be a professor and dead before they named a building after you at SDSU. The one thing he never did was follow the USD path of Pradeep Khosla and Linda Katehi and double dip by becoming a board member of a corporation. Otherwise, he did everything the college president on the move is supposed to do; he stayed for six years, he tried to be as inoffensive as possible, he encouraged the things that get pay raises.

SDSU alumni should start asking questions of how their alma mater is run, and for whom.

[footnote] I call it dumb because the decision to build the building in the first place was put to the student body in a general vote, but no decision was granted to the students if they wanted Prebys' name on the building.

- Taken from here.

If you want to understand the historical issues surrounding Whale Vagina University find Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (2003) by Mike Davis, Jim Miller, and Kelly Mayhew. Dewey decimal call number: 979.4985/DAVIS

From the blurb:

This text deconstructs the mythology of San Diego, America's finest city, exposing its true undergirdings of militarism, racism and economic inequality. Mike Davis documents the domineering private interests that have consistently overridden the city's weak government. Jim Miller chronicles the history of protest in San Diego. Kelly Mayhew gives oral-historical portraits of the city's forgotten working people and new immigrants....

Despite how that makes it sound, it's a pretty hopeful book, though it doesn't really discuss what went on before the Spaniards showed up; the early chapters of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 by Benjamin Madley (979.40049/MADLEY) cover that pretty well.

One of the first things I learned as a college freshmen was this: "If you ever become a major donor to a college, NEVER ask to be named after a building." At first, it's a beautiful but then it falls apart and the name attached to it becomes synonymous with "terrible."

Student: "Say, where is your dorm?"

Me: "The John Smith Dormitory."

Student: "Eww! Is that the place with the dirty walls, broken toilets, bad plumbing, drug raids, and bloody fights in the back!? I hate Smith."*

Me: "Yeah, Smith is a terrible place."

The now-retired college president named the college theater after his late wife. It's a magnificent building and looks wonderful even today. But one day, it will not be, and her ghost will haunt him for "honoring" her with that building.

*I exaggerate, but it was getting rundown. It needed either an extreme makeover or be replaced. I think they've done the latter.

Heh heh. I went to a state university that seems to exist for only one reason: to expand the campus and put up magnificent new and shiny buildings. It expanded massively thru the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and is still expanding. It's now literally twice the size it was when I went there in the late '70s.

Apparently there is a current fight over spending state tax funds to build a gigantic overpass on Interstate 40 so the campus can expand south of the freeway--the only direction left to expand.

So now they have copious first-class facilities. Academics? Who cares? It hasn't changed since I went there: first-rate equipment and buildings, but second-rate instructors.

ericbarbour wrote:Heh heh. I went to a state university that seems to exist for only one reason: to expand the campus and put up magnificent new and shiny buildings. It expanded massively thru the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and is still expanding. It's now literally twice the size it was when I went there in the late '70s.

Apparently there is a current fight over spending state tax funds to build a gigantic overpass on Interstate 40 so the campus can expand south of the freeway--the only direction left to expand.

So now they have copious first-class facilities. Academics? Who cares? It hasn't changed since I went there: first-rate equipment and buildings, but second-rate instructors.

I looked at a map of the place and there's a small community college south of the freeway - does it get gobbled up by Wossamatta U., or will they wall it off to save it?

Strelnikov wrote:I looked at a map of the place and there's a small community college south of the freeway - does it get gobbled up by Wossamatta U., or will they wall it off to save it?

That's apparently one of the "threatened changes". It's classic Arizona: real estate development comes first and foremost. When I was going to college there, Flagstaff was about 20,000 people. It was mostly known as a place for summer tourists to stop for the night, and for people off the Navajo res to get drunk. Now it has 139,000 people and six major golf courses. All this despite the miserable winter storms they get a few times per year which make the roads impassable.

That should be the state motto of Arizona: "turning worthless shit land into retirement communities and golf courses".

And now that the "EIS" is finished, they won't shut off the webcam!

http://130.191.35.82/live.htm