'Bedlam' at San Francisco State: Desperate Students Pack Classes -- and Must Request Library Books 48 Hours in Advance
If college is intended to brace young people for the real world, consider San Francisco State students well prepared. They're paying more, receiving less, and coping with conditions most Americans thought were more likely to plague a university where classes are occasionally canceled due to rocket attacks. 
With budget cuts to the California State University System hitting home at the same time as a 10 percent tuition increase, SFSU students are finding their candles burned at both ends. Students and instructors reported to SF Weekly of chaotic daily scenes taking place as spring semester commences; roughly 75 lecturers teaching 290 classes have been cut for budgetary reasons in the past two semesters alone, and students - many of them needing just a few more classes to graduate - are packing the hallways, sitting in the aisles, and attempting to cajole and wheedle their way into classes that have doubled or tripled in size.
"You want to see bedlam? Come to my class," said anthropology instructor Sheila Tully. Her course on sex and gender is capped at 140 students with a 10-student waiting list. Nearly 200 people showed up for the first day, and three quarters of them were seniors who needed her class as a general education requirement. "The whole concept of a four-year college has been thrown out the window," added Philip Klasky, an instructor in the American Indian Studies Department. "In my department, students have 30 percent fewer courses to choose from this semester. They can't matriculate, they can't graduate. My classes are capped at 50 and I have 20 [more] students trying to add each one. What am I supposed to do as a teacher? Add 20 students and have them sit on the floor?"
But getting required courses has become something of a luxury for students - many are happy just to get any courses. Students must keep up a certain courseload to be eligible for scholarship money (much of which isn't coming, anyway, along with promised work study jobs), grants, or health care. Unable to get into any of her desired classes, senior Honora Keller said that "paying a state school tuition has gotten to be like a really expensive gym membership. The only classes open end up being kinesiology. You end up taking, like, three of those just to make it to 12 units."
Junior literature major Samantha Adame was lucky enough to get into her preferred lit class - but found 100 fellow students in the room along with her. In the past, that class would have been capped at around 30. There's only one instructor and one grad student, by the way.
But wait - there's more! In the midst of finals last semester, the J. Paul Leonard Library was closed for retrofitting. The notion of shutting the campus' main library during finals week angered students - but not as much as returning to campus this semester and discovering that our current economic morass had frozen construction (construction that was estimated would last until 2011, even during better times). As a result, a handful of books and some computers have been moved to a large, military-like tent "annex" a few blocks off campus at Winston and Lake Merced.
But what's truly bizarre is that, in order to obtain needed books, students must submit requests to the school 24 to 48 hours in advance and then return later to pick them up. Any university student lucky enough to have the benefit of a great library knows that you often find five useful books for every one you ventured into the main stacks to seek. Truly, SFSU's current library situation sounds abysmal.
"We have to pre-order the books a day in advance - and that doesn't include weekends. You can't even get books on weekends," says Dillon Martin, a junior anthropology major.
That sounds like a lot of work. No wonder students needed to pay 10 percent more.
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