My wife, myself and three of our parents were educated at SDSU. My son is going to be a graduating senior from high school this spring. He also applied and was accepted by Cal, UCLA and UC Davis. We encouraged him to seriously consider this school as one of his top choices because we felt that the faculty and other resources here permit self-motivated students to get top-notch undergraduate education at a great price. In addition to his 4.2+ GPA in honors and AP classes, he’s also one hell of a good baseball player. We felt that the wonderful program here combined with the modest difficulty of making grades would have allowed him to play ball and still aim at grad school.

Alas, we somehow neglected to account for the gum in the otherwise well-oiled works of this potentially fine institution, namely the administration. While all of his friends with solid 2.2 GPAs were admitted months ago, he has yet to hear word one from the numbskulls who get paid a whole bunch of your money to handle this task. They claim they need more time to evaluate his transcript (apparently they have trouble counting past the twos) as it has only been in their hands since sometime in November. Further, they assured us that they would be admitting students clear into September, as though that would have a major soothing effect on us. Naturally, they weren’t quite sure if they would admit him.

With the real universities needing a firm response by May, this seems to preclude him from entering Parking Ticket Tech. Like Ronald Reagan, who was governor during my time at State, Pete Wilson after him has figured out that the best way to ensure the exodus of business from California is to cut funding from our university systems and then channel what little money is left into the non-teaching bureaucracy and leave it to them to devise every way possible to discourage young adults from entering, and once there, from ever getting enough classes to graduate.

I’m willing to bet dollars against donuts that the best employees in the administration office are the ones who get the paychecks and retirement benefits out to the rest of the slackards.

While we’re still pursuing legal opinions about suing the university for the difference in the costs, plus interest between SDSU and Cal, at least we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that our son will experience an educational environment where administrators realize they have some obligations besides being first to the bank with their paychecks.

Chris Lovelace

Class of ’72