Last week in a newspaper op-ed, San Diego State University’s President Adela de la Torre trumpeted the success of Snapdragon Stadium. She cited the signing of a professional soccer team to play at the stadium along with hosting Jimmy Buffett, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Monster Jam, and the American Motorcyclist Association Supercross Championship.
De la Torre also congratulated SDSU for building the stadium on time, “despite the pandemic and significant supply-chain challenges.”
President de la Torre’s op-ed deserves an answer. She writes, “Everything we are creating at SDSU Mission Valley is about what we promised years ago.” But that is not entirely true. Because something is missing in her celebration of Snapdragon Stadium: education.
In 2020, when SDSU began the approval process, education was central to the university’s pitch. In addition to a “35,000-seat stadium, 400 hotel rooms, 13,000 parking spaces, retail and conference space,” SDSU promised to include “facilities for 15,000 full-time equivalent students” as well as “4,600 units of housing for students and faculty.”
But according to the most recent fact sheet, those promises were not kept. The educational benefits, student housing, and faculty housing have dropped out:
- 4,600 residences, including affordable homes
- 1,565,000 square feet of research, office, technology, laboratory, and innovation space
- 95,000 square feet of neighborhood-serving commercial/retail, including a grocery store and restaurants
- 35,000 capacity multi-purpose stadium
- 1 hotel with conference space
- 80+ acres of parks, recreation, open space, including a River Park
- 4+ miles of trails and pathways
When Mara Elliott, the city attorney, tried to include a provision mandating “at least 200,000 square feet of educational uses,” SDSU refused. And there’s nothing in the current fact sheet about “educational uses.” Parks, offices, a stadium, commercial/retail, a grocery store, and restaurants, yes. But not classrooms.
As for housing, while 460 units will be reserved for families making 60% or less of the median income, “The agreement also expressly prohibits the university from specifically reserving the affordable units for students.” No mention of faculty housing.
It’s hard not to see this as a kind of bait and switch. The university promised a development that would include substantial student and faculty housing, and “educational uses” alongside athletic events, rock concerts and monster truck rallies. Education was part of the deal because Mission Valley was supposed to be essential for SDSU’s accommodating an expected influx of students, since the mesa campus has reached capacity.
The erasure of education in the Mission Valley project was entirely predictable. The money to pay for all this development mostly comes from debt, which “will need to be repaid with revenue generated from on-site leases and event proceeds.” As I pointed out in 2020, “This means the development, the buildings, and who occupies the buildings, will be devoted to servicing the debt. Classrooms don’t help with that.”
Meanwhile, the educational situation at SDSU continues to decline. Over 50% of our classes are now taught by adjunct professors. The percentage of tenured professors has dwindled from a high of about 45% in 2012 to a little more than 27% in 2021. Only 11% are tenure-track. Over the last five years, SDSU has added 100 new assistant professors. But the number of lecturers rose from 432 to 593. That’s 162 more lecturers.
At the May 2 University Senate meeting, President de la Torre committed to hiring 25 new (not replacement) professors. But since SDSU has a total of 55 academic departments, at best less than half will see an increase in faculty. When the previous president, Elliott Hirshman, decided to improve SDSU’s “tenure density,” he committed to hiring 80 new tenure-track faculty. This hiring spree briefly halted the trend toward more lecturers and fewer fulltime faculty.
Classroom technology is also deteriorating. True, SDSU has a plan to update the “learning environment,” but it is a ten-year plan, proceeding at a snail’s pace. Starting in 2019, SDSU renovates on average 17 classrooms a year, and will not be done until 2028. Of course, by that time all the computers replaced at the program’s start will be long out of date.
While the classroom update program inches forward, stadium construction zipped along, as the phrase goes, at the speed of business. SDSU managed to plan, design, and build a brand-new stadium in about three years, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic and supply chain issues. Which shows the greater priority?
And the library acquisitions budget continues to run out of money before the fiscal year’s end. The lack of resources makes keeping up with current research more difficult for faculty and more expensive for the university, since Interlibrary Loan is hardly a free service.
But rather than focusing on these issues, de la Torre has decided that real estate development is a more pressing concern. To be sure, the Mission Valley project sounds glorious. It’s great that Snapdragon Stadium will host a soccer team along with rock concerts and motorcycle races. It’s equally wonderful that there will be a park and more housing. Doubtless, it will all be very beautiful.
But de la Torre is not a real estate developer. She is the president of San Diego State University, not the president (or mayor) of San Diego. Overseeing a project that, by the university’s own admission, now has little to do with classrooms or student and faculty housing, distracts from what should be her main concern: SDSU’s educational mission.
Peter C. Herman is a professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He has published books on Shakespeare, Milton and the literature of terrorism, and essays in Salon, Newsweek, Inside Higher Ed, and Times of San Diego. His next book will be “Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature” (Routledge).