Letters to the Editor

Why go to Grass valley?

Each semester the Team Experience Challenge Course offers fun and challenge to hundreds of CSUS students for free who come out with their instructor during their class time as part of their course work. This course was built and paid for by the students of CSUS and is a wonderful resource for them. With time and money being primary concerns for our students, we feel it is absurd that departments on the campus don’t promote the use of a course that is inexpensive and convenient. The course is also available for a modest fee to clubs and organizations on the campus and hosts two “open” days where students can experience the high or “very challenging” elements for only $20.00. If the State Hornet is a newspaper to benefit and inform the students of CSUS, shouldn’t it feature the facilities and resources available to them on our own grounds?

–Kathryn Robertson
Director, Peak Adventures

An open letter to Reed

This award is given annually by the various colleges in the university, and, save for one exception, carries with it no monetary award. The process through which theses awards are granted is directed by our peers, from establishing the selection criteria, through nominations, through the arduous task of sifting through the evidence supplied by many worthy individuals, to the final selection of one annual recipient from each college for distinguished service in the university’s principle mission.

We wish to go on record that this recognition is more meaningful to us than any monetary airway based your imposed faculty merit Increase program. We are much more honored to receive the confidence of our peers, many of whom are distinguished teachers themselves, and of our students, than the awards of administrators who are not in the position to judge us and whose decisions cannot be appealed. While we recognize the need for general increases in salaries, and acknowledge the CSU academic Senate’s stated principles regarding merit pay (endorsed Jan. 23, 1998), we stand in opposition to the present process that violates both the Senateís principles and places administrator-controlled monetary awards above peer and student recognition of those qualities which represent our life-work.

We are honored and humbled to be named outstanding teachers by our peers. We are conversely, demeaned by the FMI process. We are united in our conviction that no genuine claim of merit can be associated with it until department peer review carries real authority and an appeal process is put into place. Currently, however, it is divisive, insidious and demoralizing; it insults the very meaning of our professional life.

–Juanita Barrena, Biological Sciences
Lynn Cooper, Social Work
Daniel R. Decious, Chemistry
Louis Elfenbaum, Health and Physical Education
Turan Gonen, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Mark Hennelly, English
John F. Henry, Economics
Robert Hubbell, Speech Pathology and Audiology
Robert Kloss, Sociology
Melanie W. Loo, Biological Sciences
Jeffery Lustig, Government
David Madden, English
Linda Palmer, English
Bruce Ostertag, Special Education
Fred Reardon, Mechanical Engineering
Addison Somerville, Psychology