The seasons wax and wane and now a new school year is upon us.
Over the last school year, CSU East Bay has made great strides towards providing a richer and fuller student experience on campus.
While we still believe this campus’s transition to a Science, Technology, Education and Mathematics (STEM) campus betrays CSUEB’s natural and historical focus on the liberal arts and business, the efforts made by the campus to address student concerns to be overall satisfactory.
Food service has ranked high among student concerns consistently and while there is much room for improvement, we appreciate positive efforts towards meeting student needs.
While we do not condone such decisions as linking the hours of availability of food service to purely economical concerns—after all the university is not a for-profit business—we find encouraging that the university has brought brands such as Starbucks and now Subway to campus.
We also commend the repaving of the school parking lots for the first time in several decades. Student commuters continue to comprise a large majority of the student population on campus and parking space will remain a high concern well into the future.
As this university has committed itself to the cause of environmental sustainability, going hand-in-hand with efforts to alleviate parking problems must be the search of green solutions to our transportation concerns.
If this campus insists on maintaining its own shuttle service, it ought to look into clean energy vehicles to replace—what appears to be—as a secondhand fleet of medium capacity shuttles. Similar commitments to clean energy transportation have been made by universities such as UC Davis and Stanford and CSUEB ought to aim to be ranked in the same category as those California institutions in campus transit.
Beyond local Hayward campus issues, more attention ought to be paid to the needs of our students at our satellite campuses at Concord and Oakland.
Once again accessibility to food services and in addition access to books and other classroom supplies are a concern for these satellite campuses.
Positioned a ways away from the main campus at Hayward, the student populations of these satellite campuses mostly attend classes in evening. Many of these students are working full-time in addition to completing their degrees and every accommodation should be made by making sure they can purchase the essential supplies they need in the evening, when they are on campus.
We recognize that many of these suggestions fly in the face of a traditional business model but we believe that when the university is reduced to being treated as a business, the value of a student depreciates into that of a mere client.
By ensuring that hours of operations in such areas as food service are expanded, it will display a clear commitment to increasing and aiding the productivity of the student body by the university.
After all, surviving through a long evening class or study session in the library could be made easier by a simple cup of coffee.
