By Esteban Ramirez
Editor-in-Chief
With the constant increases in class sizes, CSU Bakersfield is facing a big problem with full classrooms.
On Sept. 16, the Geology 309 class taught by David Miller was full of students, and some had to be standing up. Geology major Rick Fewtrell posted on the Facebook page “CSUB students interested in buying/selling/swapping” to spread the word about it.
Fewtrell said that there are 38 students in the class, and 40 is the cap.
“I was kind of curious as to why we had that classroom,” he said. “Yeah, he first contacted the head of the department with Sue Holt, and then they talked [John Dirkse] and because they based what classroom they get off like in August.”
Director of Academic Operations & Support Dirkse attributes this to rising enrollment rates and how difficult it is to get new classrooms approved and funded.
“We have a lot more students now than we had before,” he said. “We had increases in enrollments every year for the last five years. We had no increases in rooms and even a few rooms were lost. It’s really causing the problem
“The campus is trying. You may know that there is a Humanities faculty office building that will replace faculty towers and as of part of the plans for the building, there’s a possibility of adding a couple large classrooms in a wing in the building. Then again that’s a lot of politics and a lot of dollars.”
“We just don’t have enough rooms of the size that we need to accommodate for the students we have,” he said.
Associate Vice-President and Facilities Management Patrick Jacobs said that their biggest problem is that they have an awful lot of small classrooms on this campus that were meant to accommodate 30 to 40 or 30 to 45 students.
“There are a large number of classes that tend themselves to be taught in a larger setting and very simplistically what that means really is, if we have a class and we have 60 students who either want to take two classes or we help to tell the students wanting to take it that they can’t take the class,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs added that a few projects to expand classrooms are working on is to build two additional very large classrooms, and it will be in the arts and humanities building. However, he said the Faculty Towers are not ADA efficient and neither are the old dorms,
On Sept. 18, Fewtrell said that they studied Dorothy Donahoe Hallway 107K and then they moved Education building 128.
