The following is an article from the future.
The future three years from now when City College offers rocket science and astrophysics majors.
The future three months from now when we’ll all be glaring at the sea for summer vacation.
The future three minutes from now when you will have become enlightened by this article.
The future is coming up a lot faster than you might think, so it’s time to start thinking about it.
The admissions people predict that City College enrollment will be slumping in the coming years. This, after consecutive semesters of intense growth, including the addition of almost 400 full-time students last semester.
It isn’t hard to see why these kinds of upward numbers will be falling off. The outrageous price of housing, the improbability of getting all your classes, and the virtual impossibility of finding a parking spot after 9 a.m., all point to the fact that City College has simply reached its capacity.
There is no opportunity for the student body to grow in the future. City College can no longer accommodate the growth it has enjoyed for so long in the past.
But this is a college. We’re supposed to be about growth, not just physical growth, but also the far more valuable, intellectual growth, which the entire student body has a right to, no matter how large.
City College is trying to regain its growth in a variety of ways.
The first step is to keep them coming in with appeal of the affordability of a two-year colleges. Superintendent-President John Romo and the student senate are pushing for the ballot initiative that would bring tuition prices down from $26 to $20 per unit.
Of course, if you build it, they will come. With generous funding from the trustees, we are building up a new media arts building, new parking garages, library remodeling, and even talking about a dorm room housing 600 students.
These are just the kind of fresh ideas we need to start preparing for the future. This is a proactive approach to accommodate any rate of growth the school would like to generate.
So what’s stopping us from doing it?
The only opposition comes from those who cannot think about the future.
City College is no place for reactionaries, who desire the college shrink back into an institution of two-year mediocrity. This is no place for the conservators who seem stuck in the past with only a sense of fear for the future.
Perhaps the utopians among us feel there is no way to make things any more perfect than what we’ve got going.
In any case, there is no denying that the future is coming, and we are it.
The point here is that growth, in its many dimensions, is good. Growth is progress, growth is right.
If we’re going to continue to grow as the finest City College in Calif., we need to get that proposition on the ballot and build a dorm on Loma Alta. We need to do everything we can to keep growing.
Not just for the sake of boasting one of the highest community college enrollment rates in California, but in the quest for the expansion of knowledge, for which there is nothing better to look forward to in the future.