SDSU frats scrub their image, UCSD profs get home loan perks

UCSD cozy with Qualcomm, how to recruit best faculty, miserable life of an adjunct, the very early days of San Diego State

Author

By Matt Potter, Jeannette DeWyze, Ken Kuhlken, Ernie Grimm

Publish Date

Dec. 13, 2021

Sigma Phi Epsilon. "In the past there has been that Animal House mentality, and we’re really trying to change that." (Sandy Huffaker, Jr.)

Escape from the Chicks and Beer Image

“Monday night the actual rush starts, but we can’t give out bids on Monday. That gives everyone a chance to get around and see where they want to go before someone says, ‘Hi, here’s your bid,’ and you’re stuck there. You can actually go somewhere else after you get a bid, but you might be more inclined to stay there without seeing any more houses. So there are no bids Monday night.”

By Ernie Grimm, Nov. 21, 1996 | Read full article

Faculty Row

Economics professor Roger Gordon, who bought the most expensive of the homes on the list of those purchased by academics using university-sponsored financing, says he's since obtained private refinancing and no longer has a U.C. loan, which originally was in the amount of $1,095,000. "The UC mortgage program provides a minor subsidy, which helps a bit to attract people here," Gordon says. "But it is a small program compared with many other competing schools.

I Don’t Do Operational Stuff

"I think it would be foolish to think companies will be wide-eyed idealists that will let scientists pursue whatever interesting new finding they have," Bruce Jaffee, an outspoken UC Davis professor of nematology, told the Sacramento Bee last January when Davis first announced plans for the so-called "public-private" institutes. "Faculty work with these public/private labs, and they will have the best equipment and technicians and access to students' help," warned Jaffee.

By Matt Potter, Jan. 25, 2001 | Read full article

San Diego State, 1935. “We only have about one college in San Diego — little better than a teacher’s college really.”

Starting at State

At faculty meetings he would administer avuncular homilies on absence from our offices during the period we were expected to assign for conferring with our students (“Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know that is not the sort of thing your children would expect of you”). He was very much a “straight shooter” who took sides against his own politically conservative instincts by persistently refusing to fire a member of the faculty for whose blood the town patriots were thirsting.

By John Theobald, Nov. 29, 1984 | Read full article

Pat Churchland, Philip Kitcher, Paul Churchland, Patricia Kitcher. The Churchlands were recruited under a special procedure known as a “target of opportunity’’ recruitment. (Paul Stachelek)

School Ties

“We have something on the order of five Latin Americanists,” Ritchie says. “Most [history] departments at most have two. But for us, it’s a major item. The twenty-nine-member department has no permanent specialist on Middle Eastern history. It has only one person who studies Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; only one who does research on Africa. It had no Japanese historian until last year, when it scored a great coup from the University of Wisconsin.”

By Jeannette De Wyze, Apr. 16, 1987 | Read full article

Because a five-class schedule is considered full-time teaching, instructors are usually restricted to two classes per semester.

Rats in the Ivory Tower

My first college teaching was at SDSU during 1978. Creative writing. I was thrilled but nervous, especially after realizing that students took as gospel everything I said. I had to issue a warning— “Don’t trust anything I say, please. Just file it away and test it against what else you hear and against your experience.” Students would gaze astonished at me, as though unable to assimilate the news that a professor could be wrong.

By Ken Kuhlken, Dec. 14, 1995 | Read full article