Vision threatens CSU, Stanislaus

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California State University, Stanislaus, has been a gem in the valley and earned national recognition because of its history of close faculty-student interaction and high-quality faculty scholarship.

President Hamid Shirvani's recent vision, excerpted in The Bee ("CSUS chief makes provocative points," Oct. 23, Page A-12), threatens all of that. Suggesting that larger classes can be equally effective overlooks the dilution of close student-faculty interaction. Suggesting that teachers need not be scholars overlooks the degree to which scholarly activity informs and enriches teaching. It also endangers the national recognition in which the president himself has declared so much pride (and for which he has claimed credit). His demeaning remarks about graduate education — through which CSUS gives so much to the region — are shocking coming from a university president.

He defended his recent abolition of the winter term, despite an overwhelming vote by the campus senate (39-6) to retain it, as "normalization." But far from being "abnormal," winter term made CSUS unique, allowing teaching opportunities — studies in Mexico or of the valley's wetlands, for example — that will now be impossible.

Educational quality will suffer if Shirvani's vision materializes. The economy requires us to adjust, but Shirvani is failing to preserve what has made CSUS special. The valley deserves better.

BRET CARROLL
Modesto