UCSD always looks empty to me. I don’t know why. It’s fairly easy to appear empty when you have the second largest UC campus with one of the smaller student populations. Although it’s easy to be afraid of change, especially such a big change as school expansion, I view this change positively. Not only would more students bring increased diversity, but the university would have to make a number of administrative changes in order to deal with the influx of students. Some of these changes would include bigger academic departments, more professors, different classes offered and current classes offered more times a year.
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Let’s be realistic: This campus could serve a lot more than 20,000 students. The only time the campus appears fully populated is during the day on Library Walk. Geisel Library fills up once a quarter, during finals week. On the weekends, campus is a ghost town. A lot of UCSD resources not only remain unused but also unnoticed. I’m a second-year student here and still unaware of hundreds of things going on the campus where I live.
A lot of people complain about student apathy here at UCSD. I think the lack of school spirit could be explained by the separation into five different colleges and the absence of campus unity. With more students added and subsequently more colleges, school spirit will increase. I found out firsthand that the lack of school spirit is more of a school tradition, in which older students inform younger students of the trend of apathy, and younger students play the nonchalant role to fit in. With more freshmen coming in every year, school spirit and campus unity are bound to increase. Less and less freshmen will be aware that they are supposed to loathe UCSD and all its spirit nights.
There is a lot of complaining on campus regarding the ability to get certain classes and the small rotation of professors in some departments. With student population growth, the university will be forced to hire more faculty and increase the size of departments as well as the amount of classes being offered. The university should be able to afford to offer more obscure classes for every department. The faculty hired here will also stay at the current level of academic superiority. There is no need to fear the decline of academic standards. In expanding UCSD, the administration will have the examples of UCLA and UC Berkeley to look to in keeping academic standards high while having bigger student populations. Both Berkeley and UCLA have more students than UCSD (each by about 10,000) and are both comparably higher in the “”U.S. News and World Report”” annual college ranking.
For those of you who are sports fans, the student population boom will make it inevitable for UCSD to have a Division I athletic department, which will ultimately lead to a football team. A school cannot be a Division I school without a football team. So how, might you ask, will this happen? The administration will be unable to ignore the clamoring of even more student sports fans for a football team. Additionally, UC schools have a history of moving to Division I with the passage of time, as well as with student population booms. UC Riverside and UCSB are examples of campuses that have recently moved up to Division I. It is inevitable that UC Davis will move up to Division I with its success in Division II sports, along with its increasing student base. It is easy to imagine UCSD hitting the 30,000 student mark, and it is nearly impossible to imagine a school with that many people without a Division I athletic program. This will surely bring athletic scholarships to our nerdy UCSD, and subsequent success and notoriety in sports.
This is all beside the point. How stupid would the regents be if they passed up the chance to expand UCSD? Here we are, already the third best academically ranked UC campus, in a mere 40 years of existence, located in one of the premier vacation spots in the states, and feeding off a booming Californian population of young scholars eager for a reasonably priced, great education. And to boot, we have tons of acres of land within UCSD lying unscathed, and calling out for thousands of students to keep it company. UCSD is essentially the ultimate capitalist opportunity for the regents. Using public money to expand a public good, and extract greater profit from it. If the UCSD population reaches a certain point, maybe it will be possible for the regents to bring down tuition because of the larger profit they are bringing in.
We live in a democracy that survives on capitalism. We go to a public university. We at UCSD cannot say we didn’t see this coming. It is only the American way to exhaust our resources to provide the most enjoyment and wealth for all hard-working citizens. By allowing more students into the university, the regents will increase their profits and satisfy the needs of a growing California middle class.
UCSD itself will achieve all of the things outlined in this article. These include more school spirit, Division I sports, bigger departments with a higher rotation of professors and classes offered, as well as the benefits that come with a more well known school name. Maybe UCSD will stop being the secret of San Diego. Maybe I will be able to reply “”UCSD”” instead of “”UC San Diego”” when people ask me where I go to school.
