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FACULTY SHRINKAGE:
"I believe that this is the worst," said Humboldt State
University Provost Rick Vrem, addressing a standing-room-only
crowd in the university's Green and Gold Room last Tuesday. "I
believe that the future looks brighter for us, potentially, than
it has for some time."
The occasion was an emergency meeting of the Academic Senate, the corpus that represents the professoriat in the Byzantine world of HSU government. Earlier, professors and lecturers had filed into the room and taken seats to hear reports on how each of the university's colleges were planning to deal with the gouging cuts to next year's academic budget. En route to the meeting, a couple of them unloaded -- the administration was incompetent, they said. President Rollin Richmond and his fellow higher-ups would end by ruining everything Humboldt State stood for. "It's a management problem, absolutely," said one department chair to a reporter.
Left: Humboldt State University Provost Rick Vrem. Photo by Kyana Taillon.
But once everyone had taken seats, the old collegiate pleasantness seemed to reign. There was much tweed on display, and a high proportion of beards even for Humboldt County. While waiting for the program to begin, two music instructors enthusiastically discussed the department's new organ, which is apparently still being assembled.
Then Provost Vrem, the head of the school's academic affairs division, took the microphone. The background to his speech was known: Due to inflation, the university's flat enrollment and a relatively new get-tough policy from state government and the California State University system, Humboldt simply doesn't have as much money as it used to. To bring itself into the black, there would have to be university-wide budget reductions. Academic Affairs -- under which umbrella falls all the university's academic programs, the library and information technology services, among others -- would have to bear the brunt of the budget cuts.
Vrem's news was bad: Not only would Academic Affairs be required to cut its budget by about $1.58 million over the next three years, but it would also have to come to terms with what he called the division's "structural deficit." In the past couple of years, Academic Affairs had overrun its budget by $1.7 million or so. No more. Heads of each of the colleges and departments within Academic Affairs would have to come up with their own plans on how to shoulder their share of the cuts.
The deans of each of the university's colleges -- Natural Resources and Sciences; Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Professional Studies -- were there to lay out their ideas. The plans they described varied, but they had one common theme: fewer faculty. There will be layoffs, golden handshakes and eliminations of vacant positions across the campus next year. As a result, students could expect fewer class sections offered, and more amphitheater-sized lectures.
Still, this wasn't enough. Dean Bob Snyder of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences confirmed the rumor that he would seek to eliminate the German language department in order to bring his budget into line. Dean Susan Higgins of Professional Studies said essentially that her college would punt -- she'd seek to defer much of the cuts mandated for next year to the following years, hoping that a better plan or a solution to the budget crisis would emerge in the meanwhile.
Vrem offered some reasons to hope. It looked like the coming year's freshman class would be the largest in history, he said. Since Richmond unilaterally upped student fees to $200 a couple of weeks ago, that meant that there'd be a good bit of extra money to throw around. But when questioned, he admitted that the influx of new students -- precisely what the administration had been pushing for -- carried with it some problems of its own. There'd be fewer sections, so how would these new students find classes? The local housing market is tapped -- where will these students live?
As regards the former, Vrem assured the faculty that new sections would be added late in the game so as to accommodate the record freshman class. As to the latter, he said that the university was looking at any number of solutions, including increasing density in the dorms. A new 450-unit dorm was in the planning stages, he said. Things were happening -- positive things. And that's why Vrem thought that HSU was at its nadir this year, and that everything was looking up from here on in.
"I'm an optimist," he said.
-- Hank Sims
NUKE TRAIL:
We were at the end of our walk on King Salmon Beach.
My dog led the way along the worn path through the dunes toward
the seawall, where our car was 
parked. It was chilly
out, gray-skied and getting dark -- similar to my state of mind.
April was a piece of crap month and I was rehashing everything
that made it so. I wanted to go home, warm up, comfort myself,
eat some Cheetos. Cope, in other words. Scout got to the seawall
and turned to me with that look that says, what are you waiting
for?
I was hesitating at the edge of the dunes, contemplating the earthmoving equipment parked near the grassy entrance. Some entity -- the county, I figured -- was carving a new trail past the bluff and along the shore to lengthen the beach access. But how far it traveled, I couldn't tell from that angle. I stood there weighing my options -- go home and sulk or check out the new path? Curiosity got the best of me -- or at least my reverence for curiosity did. Reluctantly, I put self-pity on pause and kept walking. Scout booked it over to me, happy for any extension of her beach time, and we headed around the bluff -- aka Buhne Point.
I told myself at first we'd just walk a little ways, size up the construction and turn right around to head home. The new path, though, was bigger, clearer, more inviting than I imagined. And the coastline being so curvy, I still couldn't see where it ended. I zipped my coat to the top rung to shield myself from the wind and kept walking. The tide buffeted the riprap, creating a deep bass rhythm -- booooom, booooom -- echoing in the man-made caves where starfish clung for their lives. The rocks, which were dumped there by the Army Corps of Engineers to protect the shore from erosion, were marked with orange spray-painted numbers.
When I got to 17 I stopped. Fighting the urge to let my mind think about cruel April again, I looked around me, past Humboldt Bay's entrance and toward the horizon, wanting to feel connected to something. A seagull hovered above us, balanced itself motionless in mid-air, then let the wind take her away. I remembered how my sister came to this beach once, when she was in similarly bad frame of mind. She asked God for a sign, and up washed a coconut. No lie. She moved to Hawaii a month later and met the man of her dreams. I wanted that to happen to me, or something like that anyway. I put my hand against the orange paint, closed my eyes and imagined it hot against my skin, branding my palm with a 17. All I felt was my heart lurch strangely in my throat. I looked around. No coconut. Keep moving, I told myself.
Scout and I walked languidly on, past number 22, past the Humboldt Hill exit 'til we got to a little hill that met a barbed wire fence. Pacific Gas and Electric was on the other side. We scrambled to the top and peered in. A man with a white hard hat waved at us. Even from this vista point, I still couldn't see where the trail stopped so we started back to the car.
This week, I asked HumCo Supervisor Jimmy Smith -- the soft-spoken fisherman whose district includes King Salmon -- for details on the new trail. He said the path was not a county-constructed road like I'd assumed, but a PG&E project. In exchange for permits to build a dry cask storage facility for nuclear rods (slated for completion in 2009), the California Coastal Commission asked the utility to create and maintain a public trail along the shore. For decades the rods have been stored in a cooling pool situated above a fault line. With a new underground storage facility, King Salmon would be safe from radioactive contamination, even in a devastating earthquake -- 9-plus on the richter. Plant manager Roy Willis said that construction of the trail, which will be three-quarters of a mile long, should be completed by the end of the month. It will end where PG&E's property meets the derelict railroad tracks by the Elk River.
Above: Trail along King Salmon Beach. Photo by Helen Sanderson.
-- Helen Sanderson
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