News

by Mackenzie Stafford

MULTIMEDIA EDITOR

After over a year of expansion on Nov. 8, Associated Students held the Aztec Recreation Center’s grand reopening to present the newly rebuilt gymnasium.

As the news spread through campus it created a major buzz amongst students. Over 50 students, faculty and staff gathered around the new front doors on the south end of the building awaiting the opening. The doors opened at noon.

The new ARC is nearly complete with 94,000 square feet, two floors, an indoor track, many activity rooms, almost all brand new equipment, a rock wall, different fitness areas and more.

ARC employees were ecstatic with the results and attendance at the reopening event, finally being able to see how all of their hard work paid off.

“I feel like the new ARC will fit a variety of people’s needs and next semester we should have a new basketball court,” ARC employee and SDSU student Rachel Browne said.

The construction on the ARC renovation will continue throughout the upcoming semester until the summer of 2022 in order to finish the basketball court, activity rooms and heart rate monitors throughout the gymnasium. This will result in seven multi-use courts on the north portion of the facility according to the Associated Students website.

“There was some noise with the construction, but I was more excited about more machines and more space,” second year student Marcus Duggs said.

The anticipation for the grand reopening was heightened especially due to the lack of an indoor campus recreation center due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new and improved Aztec Recreation Center officially opened on Nov. 8.

Photo by Owen Ekstrom

“It was really hard during the pandemic. I had to go to my friend’s gym,” second year student Parsa Pourmoula said.

In order to follow COVID-19 protocol facial coverings are required in the ARC, there are only touchless water fountains and there is a touchless entry with the Aztec Rec app. This app allows members of the recreation center to access the facility with a barcode and access drop-in events.

The new ARC continued to fill in as time continued, packed with students taking tours, trying out new equipment and fitting in workouts they were unable to get in days before due to the closure of the Aztec Recreation Center on Nov. 6 and 7 to prepare for the grand reopening.

For one student this was a momentous occasion.

“There was so much equipment, so many happy people working out, probably one of my best experiences on campus so far. I was just thrilled to be a part of it,” a first year student Liam Riley said.

This excitement could be felt throughout the new section of the ARC. Students were able to discover new sections and get a better understanding of the new layout of the recreation center.

To learn more about what the new ARC offers, visit the website

Mike Hastings new interim police chief

by LuceLiS Martinez

SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Mike Hastings has become the interim police chief for the San Diego State police department as of last week.

The University Police Department (UPD) sent out a brief email on Nov. 5.

“With this message I would like to share that while UPD leadership has changed, we remain committed to building public trust while cultivating partnerships with our community members and stakeholders,” the email said.

According to the email, UPD will proceed with community-based policing efforts by working collaboratively with the SDSU community to improve engagement and relationships.

Hastings has become the interim police chief after former UPD Chief Josh Mays became the associate vice president of Public Safety and Community Empowerment.

According to the SDSU News center, Hastings joined the UPD in January and has more than 30 years of law enforcement experience.

“It is my belief that upholding a high level of professionalism and accountability within a police department reinforces the quality of public safety everyone deserves,” the Nov. 5 email said.

The email explained that even though leadership has changed hands from Mays to Hastings, Hastings is committed to building upon the community-centered police culture Mays is identified with.

Hastings said in the email he encourages feedback and looks forward to working together with campus partners and stakeholders to collectively identify areas and opportunities of improvement.

ASSOCIATED STUDENTS APPROVES NEW WAITLIST POLICY FOR FALL 2022

by eugènie budnik

STAFF WRITER

At the University Senate meeting on Nov. 2, the governing body passed a new policy which will change the course waitlist process starting in the fall 2022 semester.

The current waitlist policy ranks students based on multiple factors such as “completion of course prerequisites, total units completed, whether or not the student is already enrolled in a section of the course, and the date/time added to the waitlist,” according to the SDSU Office of the Registrar website.

The new policy, which was introduced by the Academic Policy and Planning Committee, ranks students on the waitlist based on the order in which they are added to the waitlist. Effectively, when space becomes available in a course, students will be automatically added in order of the waitlist to the course over the first five instructional days of that semester.

Pamela Lach, chair of the Academic Policy and Planning Committee, said at the meeting the new policy will “align with the shift to the PeopleSoft Student Information Session, as well our [SDSU’s] move from a prepaid to a postpaid campus.”

The Academic Policy and Planning Committee explained the university’s switch from being a prepaid to a

Photo by Kelly Smiley

The new waitlist system will implement a first-come first-serve system.

postpaid tuition campus and the Senate policy change approved in spring 2021 to the order of registrations which mandates students must register in a seniority based tiered order.

However, the new policy also allows instructors to have the option of adding students to their classes using “permission numbers” in the days leading up to the schedule adjustment deadline. “Permission numbers” are private codes which can be given to students from instructors which allow them to register in the instructor’s course.

This element of the new policy brought up concerns of favoritism from a few senators.

“I would urge senators to oppose this policy if it means an instructor can select ‘this’ student over ‘that’ student for enrollment in the class rather than an anonymous waitlist,” Senator and philosophy professor Steve Barbone said. “It could make it possible for it to seem as if some instructors are ‘cherry picking’ their students.”

The creators of the policy fought back against this concern, and instead discussed how this new policy of allowing instructors to invite students to their courses through permission numbers could help instructors keep track of their rosters.

“In creating an automated waitlist, there were quite a lot of faculty who were concerned that they needed to have some degree of control of their rosters to ensure that only students who were prepared would be entering in their courses,” said Associated Vice President for Academic Affairs Stefan Hyman.

Ultimately, 44 senators voted in favor of the new policy, while 22 senators voted against the new policy. Five senators chose to abstain. Adrianna Redmond, a first year criminal justice and psychology student, found the new policy to be perplexing and unfair.

“I prefer the current policy because I think it is more fair to students,” Redmond said. “I think picking and choosing students to be in your class is a little odd. I don’t feel like the professor should be able to choose who they get to have in class.”

The new waitlist policy will take effect starting in the fall 2022 semester.

Students strive to restore coral reefs

Social Justice Summit looks to elevate student careers

Photo by Mark Little With over half of the world's coral reefs having been destoyed, students are stepping up to save the coral reefs.

by chriStian houSer

STAFF WRITER

The San Diego Arks Project, a project featuring many San Diego State students, builds midwater structures called arks that can help build new coral reefs and restore reefs that have degraded due to microbialization and climate change.

The San Diego Arks Project is led by Jason Baer, an SDSU Ph.D. candidate, who has worked in the Caribbean and San Diego to study the impacts of the arks.

“My passion for coral reefs comes from personal amazement,” said Baer. “The more you learn about them you realize that not that many people know how much of an economic and cultural value they have around the world.”

Over the last 25 years, half of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed or depleted. This project aims to reverse these damages.

“There are very few environments that are degrading that fast and it is pretty sad to watch,” said Baer. “It is much easier to break something than it is to build it back up.”

Conor Kennedy, a SDSU senior studying International Security and Conflict Resolution (ISCOR) with an emphasis on the environment, said he believes this project is important for students at SDSU who are interested in the environment.

“If SDSU wasn’t doing things like this maybe I wouldn’t have an emphasis on the environment,” Kennedy said.”It’s inspirational to see that doing things here can lead to something in the real world.”

The lab led by Forest Rowher, an SDSU microbial ecologist and virologist, has been working on characterizing the mechanisms of coral reef degradation for about 20 years.

“One of the main findings of the lab in the last twenty years is that coral reef degradation is really mediated by the microbes and the viruses on coral reefs. It starts from human impacts like overfishing and pollution,” said Baer. “As those things change the community structure of the reef. It has big implications for the microbial and viral communities which then cause feedback loops that end in coral death.”

The new focus of the lab is to break the feedback loops that result in coral reef degradation.

Baer and Mark Hatay, an engineer at the SDSU lab, designed the initial structures that aim to fight these feedback loops.

“We tried our best balancing a structure with one that is practical and one that is biologically and physically representative,” said Baer.

The shape of the Arks are modeled after a phage capsid that offers a high surface area to volume ratio. The phage capsid structure resembles an icosahedron which is made up of many triangular faces.

“Three dimensional structure has this funny ability to recruit things,” said Baer. “Fish flock to it, and it turns out that on those local scales you get these rich biological communities that develop over time.”

These structures slow down water flow in order to offer an internal reef environment that simulates a coral reef.

Jared Brzenski, a Ph.D. student in computational science, works on the project to help predict how the water behaves when going through and around the arks.

“I put it (ark) in a simulation in a virtual tank so I can see the vorticity, the turbulence that it generates and the difference between the outside ambient flow versus how fast it is once it is inside the ark structure,” said Brzenski. “This is just to get an idea that if they place it in a water column with a certain velocity they can expect what the flow over the reef would be. They want to try and match that to the actual conditions on the seafloor.”

Brzenski uses an online modeling software utilizing smooth particle hydrodynamics to test flow on Ark structures by adjusting different parameters such as density and gravity.

“You get a ton of information,” said Brzenski. “Imagine a bunch of tiny marbles and you push them all past the structure and each little marble keeps track of all of its properties for its entire lifetime and then you go back and look at the information and extract something meaningful from it.”

The San Diego Arks Project next step is to implement two of their 750-pound stainless steel and fiberglass structures in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

Photo courtesy of SDSU Social Justice Summit Guest speakers and workshops centered the Social Justice Summit.

by eugenie budnik

STAFF WRITER

San Diego State’s career services branch of the Division of Student Affairs and Campus diversity held a two-day hybrid social justice summit on Nov. 4 and 5.

This year’s theme “Bridging Belonging, Career and Calling for Change” emphasized the summit’s focus on social justice in the workplace and in everyday life.

On Thursday evening, the event started with a networking event held in Montezuma Hall and on Zoom, which allowed students, faculty and community members to meet and connect. 2021’s appointed Social Justice Summit Co-Chairs Claudia Martinez and Eunice Flores formally opened the event. Martinez is a member of the SDSU faculty as an experiential learning specialist, while Flores acts as the assistant director for the Center for Student Life.

Griselda Ramirez spoke about her upbringing, as well as her early involvement in political campaigns guided her towards a career in social justice.

“I grew up in the Los Angeles area, and I was able to see inequities between neighborhoods,” Ramirez said. “I always had the question ‘why do neighborhoods look different?’ and that’s when someone told me that neighborhoods that vote get resources. That stuck with me, so I started volunteering with political campaigns and educating people on why they should vote.”

Ramirez works in the Office of San Diego County Supervisor Nora Vargas and has also built successful civic engagement programs in City Heights.

Rebecca Bartel Nuñez, Ramirez and Daryl Bambridge spoke on a panel on the pathways to finding careers connected to social justice Nuñez is an Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion, as well as the Associate Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at SDSU. Nuñez’s research on structural violence in the Americas has earned her the title of the Fred J. Hansen Endowed Peace Chair at the College of Arts and Letters.Bambridge is a General Manager for the San Diego branch of the Cintas Corporation.

Nuñez explained that her upbringing and politically aware family also propelled her towards a career in social justice.

“I grew up in a household where the values of peace and justice were debated hotly around the kitchen table,” Nuñez said. “What do these words mean? Is it actually possible for the world to be better? Can we work collectively towards a horizon of peace and justice? This became a conviction and a need to make an impact for me.”

The second day of the summit was held virtually on Zoom. Participants could choose from an array of different workshops hosted by SDSU faculty, staff and prominent members of the community.

These workshops included topics such as social justice internships, identity consciousness within career journeys, how to incorporate activism into your career and much more.

Dr. Ricky Pope of SDSU Counseling and Psychological Services closed out the summit with a session entitled “Striving While Black: Exploring Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Strategies to Manage Wellbeing and Persist toward Upward Mobility.”

Dr. Pope’s session focused on mental health and self care for social justice advocates, and also touched upon strategies to work through racial identity.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion is a lifelong learning process and it has taken center stage in the workplace,” Flores said.

All sessions from 2021’s social justice summit will be available for viewing on the SDSU Career Services website after Nov. 13.