Online Forty Niner: v8n2: How I see it

For new students, it is a stressful yet exciting adventure. For those returning, it can be a time of adjustment to changes made by an administrative bureaucracy larger than some small cities.

Last semester I once again faced the arduous task of picking classes that would fit into a convoluted schedule of work, activities and relationships that would make Al Gore's campaign manager look lazy.

As I perused the fall schedule of classes, I was hit with a frustrating change.

"Tell me this is a typo," I said to a friend, pointing to a listing in my $1.20 booklet of bound recycled paper. I was astonished to learn that beginning in the fall, CSULB would change from a four-day to a five-day schedule.

John Caldwell

This was flabbergasting, a radical procedural change affecting all students and faculty, and no one had asked me what I thought. Such is all my experience with school administration. No one ever includes me in the decisions that affect my very existence. I am left to stand in long lines at understaffed windows only to hear, "sorry Mr. Caldwell, we don't have that information as of yet."

I am not upset that CSULB had to fall in line with other universities because of time and space constraints brought on by a growing enrollment.

It is the process they used that disconcerts me. It is always the process that seems to lack credibility. I think I should be an integral part of it. After all, I am paying the fees and having to balance increasingly heavy loads of school and work. By moving classes into Friday, CSULB has taken away some of my options.

I am inhibited by the lack of continuity in the schedule change. The class I referred to when I asked my friend to "please, tell me I am dreaming," was a required course for journalism majors. To satisfy the requirements of the university, the journalism department had changed all its Monday/Wednesday classes to Wednesday/Friday.

No other department made the same change, however.

The English department changed some of its two-day-a-week classes to three days a week, and other departments changed some of their two-day classes to one.

In a desperate attempt to keep one full weekday available for an off-campus work schedule I had established based on a four-day-a-week class schedule, I was forced to sign up for classes I had no interest in taking.

Once again, I was left feeling bludgeoned by the seemingly haphazard and unconcerned actions of my schools administration.