SDSU PIG Manifesto

Concerned that the imminent departure of San Diego State president Stephen Weber, coupled with the state’s financial crisis, will crimp research funding at the school, a group of professors there has launched the SDSU Principal Investigators Group, led by biology professor Mark Sussman. “The administration and SDSU Research Foundation have long dealt with researchers on campus as individual isolated entities, group participation has not been encouraged, and ultimate authority for institutional policies affecting research lies solely with the administrators and SDSU Research Foundation personnel. As a result, this website and Group concept was born to fill a void that has disadvantaged research on campus through a lack of advocacy and perpetual misunderstanding/misrepresentation of researcher needs,” says a manifesto on the group’s new website. “Stay strong and remember: ‘Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.’ (Vince Lombardi) Or to put it another way: ‘There is one thing you have to understand about our movement. Three people are better than no people’ (Fannie Lou Hamer).” Among possible upcoming efforts planned by the group, a ten-minute “flash mob” demonstration by the professors in front of Manchester Hall, where the administration is housed, and multiple Public Records Act requests to the university regarding its grant-funding practices.

Gros