Coming from Riverside City College to CSUDH last fall, I had high expectations. For example, at RCC, classrooms were more inclusive and accommodating to different body types. The in-classroom terminals always just seemed to work, and there were whiteboards everywhere.
Now imagine my surprise when I came here and saw that some of my classes still used chalkboards.
Students need to be in the right environment to succeed. CSUDH has invested a lot of money into new buildings and on-campus experiences, but some facilities are still stuck in the past.
In some of my classes, professors have had to wait while IT fixed a connectivity issue. I’ve started to view this as a disruption to my time and performance. I would love to be in a classroom that supports my education from the moment I walk in.
My professors keep things moving regardless, despite the occasional Wi-Fi outage or unexpected maintenance to campus-wide systems like Canvas. For students like me who live on campus, these disruptions can hinder our ability to complete assignments on time—especially journalism students working on deadlines.
Julia Talante, an English lecturer, told me the amenities in older buildings—fewer electrical outlets or projectors that quickly enter “sleep” mode—made teaching difficult. Talante said the technology didn’t always cooperate with her lesson plans, causing students to wait. She realized they were just wasting their time, so she would end class early.
“Anything that impacts the amount of productive classroom time is going to impact learning ability,” Talante said.
Joseph Emmanuel, an art student, told me he could do without the desk-chair combination in some classrooms. Emmanuel said he could also do without the chalkboards, which one of his professors often used.
“Sometimes you [couldn’t] understand what he wrote because the chalk didn’t cooperate with him,” Emmanuel said, adding that the dust aggravated his asthma. He hopes the university will install whiteboards and refurbish older classrooms.
“If rooms are not working for the students, then the students won’t be able to last in the environment,” he said.
That’s really what it comes down to at the end of the day: the student experience. CSUDH students face enough challenges while working toward their degrees. For some students, specifically those who may have enrolled at CSUDH for no other reason than just getting a degree, the least the university can do is make the experience inside the classroom enjoyable.
The new facilities at CSUDH are undoubtedly nice, and I’m sure they will make the college experience better for a lot of students. But the classrooms are where we spend the majority of our time on campus. We deserve to have learning spaces that don’t disengage us simply because the professor didn’t touch the terminal for five minutes during their lecturing.
If CSUDH wants to build a better future for its students, it should start by fixing the spaces where that future is being built every day.