We last wrote about San Diego State University in 2018, mocking their then-newish Engineering building and all the damn ofo rental bikes dumped on the campus. Things have gone downhill since then. According to Peter Herman*, professor of English and Shakespeare scholar, the main library (Love Library, opened in 1971 and named after ex-SDSU President Malcolm Love) is crumbling to pieces; they could not take a massive collection of Jazz/Blues/Gospel/Funk records all recorded by Black artists from an emeritus UCSD English professor (Bram Dijkstra) and his wife Sandra because the library cannot control humidity to a level where LP records and their sleeves aren't slowly being damaged, because it would require a new HVAC system for the space where all the records would be kept (plus the listening space where people would actually listen to the music, probably on headphones) was "too much of an expense." They literally have small dehumidifiers in the stacks to suck out the moisture, and the garbage cans the water is pumped into have to be drained multiple times a day. Also the exterior of the building is losing small chunks of concrete; "A colleague tells me he has seen 1,000-year-old cathedrals in better shape."
It's not just Love Library - the Life Sciences complex either reeks of saltwater in the Oceanographic section or like a greenhouse in the Botany section. The place is split between "north" and "south" sections; the former is where the greenhouse is and dates back to 1962, the latter is connected to the long patio (collonade? loggia?) that connects Hepner Hall to Hardy Tower. The school wants to demolish Life Science North and replace it with a slightly larger building, but the funding has not been scrabbled together.
This is a college where you pay one-hundred and eight American dollars to graduate, where they no longer hand out parking stickers if you drive to the campus, but the price to park keeps rising for the privilege of getting you license plate scanned. A school with a bookstore that charges "new" prices for "used" paperbacks in literature classes just because they can. A body of higher learning so terrified of their own football team, they would not investigate a recent gang rape case by ex-SDSU football players in 2021 that only surfaced in 2022 because the student victim didn't go to the SDSU police. It's now a civil case, because the SDPD and the District Attorney were unwilling to charge anybody for anything.
The final cut to all of this is the probable 2027-2028 enrollment cliff Dahn Shaulis has written about a lot; the students that weren't born during the Great Recession's worst period are going to start making their absence felt in a few years, so it might get very easy to get into SDSU because they will be desperate to find any students at all. Will the education be worth anything? Only time will tell.
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