EDITORIAL: New destination: Help the faculty

It’s 2010, which means Sacramento State President Alexander Gonzalez’s Destination 2010 initiative has reached its namesake year.

But even after this deadline, Gonzalez has said he plans to continue the initiative’s goal of improving this university.

And he would be continuing a concept that has already done so much good for this campus.

Destination 2010 has broadened students’ ability to study what they are interested in.
Since 2007, Sac State has been able to issue doctorates in educational leadership and, in 2006, our campus added an honors General Education program to our curriculum. The Writing Partners Program, added in 2005, was created to help students learn basic writing skills.

Improvements like these give students the opportunity to graduate, get jobs and give back to the communities they came from.

Gonzalez said our university actually makes a difference to the Sacramento region, and gives back a substantial amount of money to our area.

“It’s very important to the region,” Gonzalez said. “The economic impact we have as a campus on the region is close to a billion dollars … When you look at long-term contracts, and all those things, it makes a big difference.”

Even though 2010 should mark the end of an initiative with a name like Destination 2010, Gonzalez said the idea of making this university better will endure.

But if it does, there is a major issue that needs to be addressed.

Destination 2010, up to this point, has not focused enough on its goal of maintaining Sac State’s faculty.

“We’ve begun those discussions through the SPC (Strategic Planning Council),” Gonzalez said. “Pretty soon we’re going to start making it much more formal in the types of discussions we have about the future.”

Professors suffer from cutbacks and furloughs. The quality of their teaching is expected to be up, but they are given less time with their students.

They need to feel the support of this university just as much as students.

They just want to teach, even if their pay doesn’t justify their hard work.

“We’re not here for the money,” said sociology professor Kevin Wehr, California Faculty Association capital chapter president. “Frankly, the money we get is pretty abysmal. We’re here for students.”

Professors want to teach students but they need better classrooms and better equipment.
He also said the initiative has focused too much on beautifying our university and not enough on actual education.

Citing the construction of the Recreation and Wellness Center and the purchase of the California State Teacher’s Retirement System building near campus, Wehr said that funding could have instead gone toward education.

But since the old CalSTRS building is being converted for use by nursing, speech pathology and audiology departments, it seems to have been a solid investment.

Destination 2010 is almost six years old, and even with the budget problems that have been going on lately, there is little denying that the initiative has done a lot of good for this campus.

Is it at its final destination point? No.

But Gonzalez seems to know what it takes to get to his end-goal of making Sac State a vibrant, beautiful community-oriented campus.

And while we might have reached 2010, here’s to hoping this initiative keeps going for a long time.

The opinion section can be reached at opinion@statehornet.com

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