Rising Needs, Raising Roofs

by Albert Karnig

Fall 2004

This fall our San Bernardino campus is eagerly watching the renovation and expansion of the Santos Manuel Student Union. It’s one of many newly built or renovated buildings that will enhance the student experience at CSUSB.

We’ve brought in temporary buildings to house Associated Students, Inc. (ASI), the student union administration, the Women’s Resource Center, the Cross Cultural Center and other functions. The expansion will double the space for those student service functions, add a new theater on one side, and enclose the outdoor space between the Events Center entrance and the main building with an airy, two-story indoor atrium. Construction is due to be completed in the summer of 2005.

Students in 2001 voted to increase their activity fees in order to finance the student union expansion – further supported with a gift from the San Manuel Band – and a student fitness center. The fitness center is finally underway, after two years of having a temporary building housing some of its functions. This spectacular, glass-walled building will sit on the east side of campus, on former tennis courts, and will feature state-of-the-art exercise equipment for the benefit of the campus community.

These are just two of several extensive projects now underway or in the planning stages. In all, current and future construction will total more than $200 million.

Our new science facility will be known as the Chemical Sciences Building and is due to be completed by next January. Connected to the Biological Sciences Building, the construction will bring new classroom, lab and faculty office space, including three large classrooms. Next to the main building, and joined to it, will be a new science museum. This wonderful asset to our educational environment brings the number of museums on campus to three – together with our recently opened Anthropology Museum (in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences) and the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum, dating from 1996. All three museums will be visible to one another, across a short expanse of lawn.

After the Chemical Sciences Building is completed, we will close parts of the 1960s-era Biological and Physical Sciences buildings for a much-needed update and modernization. Many of their classes, labs and offices will move temporarily into the new building.

This fall saw the opening of the beautiful and functional University Village across Northpark Boulevard. A cooperative venture between CSUSB and American Campus-Titan, University Village brings 480 new beds in a well-appointed apartment complex, with its own clubhouse, pool, spa and covered parking. The university administers the complex, just as we do with Serrano Village. University Village is now totally rented. Total beds available to live-in students now number more than 1,500 – an increase from 400 just four years ago.

Further east on the I-10, the Palm Desert Campus continues to grow. The Indian Wells Center for Educational Excellence is nearing completion this winter. It includes a classroom building, which will house many of the teacher-training and credential programs taught there, and the 300-seat Indian Wells Theater. The theater will accommodate many large lecture classes as well as community events. With the completion of the Indian Wells Center, nearly all Palm Desert Campus classes will take place at our Cook Street campus, which includes the Mary Stuart Rogers Gateway Building. Now the campaign continues to raise $10 million in community support to begin PDC’s Health Sciences Center, which will complete Phase I of the Palm Desert Campus.

And the seemingly endless building program will not stop with these structures. California voter approval of Proposition 55 this past March gave the green light to planning for CSUSB’s long-awaited College of Education Building. Bringing together in one building all of the San Bernardino campus’s teacher training, credential and liberal studies faculty and classes, this edifice has been a dream that is long overdue – and sorely needed by thousands of our students and faculty. This nearly $50 million building will sit behind the library, toward the mountains. With its construction will come the completion of a roadway around the perimeter of our campus, linking with Campus Drive, a new road the city of San Bernardino will build out to Kendall Avenue on the campus’s northwest side. We hope construction of the Education Building will begin in 2006.

All of these projects are necessary to better serve a student population that, while it dipped to 16,200 this fall, is still projected to grow to more than 20,000 by decade’s end and 25,000 in the future, making us larger than the great majority of the nation’s universities.

We’re happy that when the dust settles, we’ll have some fine new structures in which to continue to improve the vital educational, research and service programs that have marked Cal State San Bernardino’s excellence.