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San Jose State University

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San José State University, commonly shortened to San José State and SJSU, is the founding campus of what became the California State University system. The urban campus has an enrollment of about 30,000 students, and claims to have more graduates working in Silicon Valley than any other college or university.

San José State was founded as the California State Normal School by the California Legislature on May 2, 1862, and is the oldest public university in the State of California. The California State Normal School was itself derived from the City of San Francisco's Minns' Evening Normal School, which existed in that city from 1857 until 1862. Thus, the school now called "San José State" is even older than the University of California, Berkeley (the "Organic Act," which established the University of California, was signed into law on March 23, 1868).

Campus

File:Tower Hall and MDA.JPG
Tower Hall, the most recognizable building at SJSU

The main campus is a rectangular area in downtown San José, California, bordered by San Fernando Street (north), Fourth Street (west), San Salvador Street (south), and Tenth Street (east).

The California State Normal School never had a permanent home in San Francisco, and was moved to San Jose in 1871. The original California State Normal School campus in San Jose consisted of a rectangular, wooden building with a central grass quadrangle. The wooden buildings were destroyed by fire in 1880, and were replaced by a stone and masonry structure of roughly the same configuration in 1881. This building was declared unsafe following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and was in the process of being torn down when an aftershock of the magnitude that was predicted to destroy the building occurred and no damage was observed. The demolition was stopped, and the portions of the building still standing were made into four halls: Tower Hall, Morris Dailey Auditorium, Washington Square Hall, and Dwight Bentel Hall. These four buildings are the oldest on campus. A $2 million renovation of Tower Hall, the oldest and most recognizable building on campus, was announced in October 2005.

Paseo San Carlos runs through campus, along the former route of San Carlos Street

Formerly, San Carlos Street, Seventh Street and Ninth Street crossed the campus, creating essentially six small schools separated by roads clogged with traffic. Beginning in the fall of 1994, the streets were closed and converted to pedestrian walkways and green belts within the campus. San Carlos Street was renamed Paseo San Carlos, Seventh Street became El Paseo de César Chávez, and Ninth Street is now called the Ninth Street Plaza. Three of the six residential brick blockhouses have been demolished, and the phase one of the new student village was completed in 2005. If this phase is a success, the three remaining red brick residence halls and Joe West Hall may be demolished and replaced with phase two of the project. However, the school's commuter school status and lower rents in the surrounding community have depressed demand for this new student housing, and future phases are uncertain.

The University's historic Eureka Seal, from its days as a California State College

The new housing complex, which is called Campus Village, is a $375-425 million project designed to replace the old residence halls. The concrete poured for this project was the largest amount of concrete poured in the state of California. Campus Village consists of three buildings ranging from 7 to 15 stories tall. The project was completed in the fall of 2005, and doubled student capacity for on-campus housing. Campus Village has housing options for first-year students, upperclass students, graduate students and faculty, staff or guests of the university.

The new Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, which opened its doors on August 1, 2003, won the Library Journal’s prestigious 2004 Library of the Year award, the publication’s highest honor. The King Library is the first collaboration of its kind between a university and a major U.S. city. The library is eight stories high and 475,000 square-feet.

The Business Classroom Project was a $16 million renovation of the Boccardo Business Education Center. Renovations included state-of-the-art telecommunications as well as interior and exterior upgrades.

The university boasts a year-round, outdoor Olympic-size swimming pool that is the largest in Northern California. The Event Center has a full gym including basketball and racquetball courts, a weight room, and a climbing wall. It also plays host to rock concerts and other events. The student union features a bowling alley and large game room.

Spartan Stadium, the other athletic fields, additional student housing and overflow parking are located on the South Campus on Seventh Street, about 1.5 miles south of the main campus.

San José State maintains a facility at Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport as part of the Aviation Department, and manages the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in Moss Landing, California, on the Monterey Bay, a cooperative research facility of seven CSU campuses.

Organization

As a university of the California State University System, San José State falls under the jurisdiction of the California State University Board of Trustees and the Chancellor of the California State University. The current Chancellor is Charles B. Reed.

The chief executive of San José State is the President of San Jose State University. The current president is Don Kassing, who was appointed to the position on May 11, 2005 after serving as acting president for less than a year. He had been filling in for Paul Yu, who assumed the presidency on July 15, 2004, and resigned a little over two weeks later on August 2, 2004 due to health reasons. The University Provost is the head of the academic affairs department of the university. Marshall Goodman "resigned" from this position in Fall 2004. Carmen Sigler took over as interim provost.

San José State offers 69 bachelors degrees with 81 concentrations, and 65 masters degrees with 29 concentrations.

The university has seven colleges and six schools:

  • College of Applied Sciences & Arts [1]
  • College of Business [2]
  • College of Education [3]
  • College of Engineering [4]
  • College of Humanities & the Arts [5]
  • College of Science [6]
  • College of Social Sciences [7]
  • School of Art & Design [8]
  • School of Journalism & Mass Communications [9]
  • School of Library & Information Science [10]
  • School of Music & Dance [11]
  • School of Nursing [12]
  • School of Social Work [13]

as well as International and Extended Studies [14], which coordinates continuing education and professional development programs.

Students

The campus has approximately 30,000 students. It is one of the most ethnically diverse in the nation, with large Asian (particularly Filipino and Vietnamese) and Latino enrollments. The majority of students are commuters who live outside the immediate area of the campus. As a result, student participation in campus and university activities is quite low for a university of its size. For example, voter turnout for Associated Student elections is generally fewer than 2,000 [15].

SJSU is ranked in the top 10 public colleges and universities in the West that offer undergraduate and masters’ programs, according to the latest survey by U.S. News & World Report. On the national level, the university tied for 14th place for the best undergraduate engineering program, placed 5th for the best computer engineering program, and tied for 5th place for the best industrial/manufacturing engineering program.

The SJSU College of Business is one of the 500 institutions worldwide that are accredited by the prestigious AACSB International at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. In addition, the College of Business is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and the California State Board of Education.

The engineering, science, and business schools have more graduates working in Silicon Valley than any other university in the world. Nearly 200 SJSU graduates have founded, co-founded, served or serve as senior executives or officers of public and private companies reporting annual sales between $40 million and $26 billion.

The College of Education has been accredited under the performance-oriented standards of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education.

The school newspaper, the Spartan Daily, was founded in 1934, and is published five days a week when classes are in session. KSJS, 90.5 FM, is the university's radio station. Known for being one of the best college radio stations in the country and broadcasting with 1500 watts 24 hours a day, KSJS is a student-training ground that features five different types of music (electronic, urban, jazz, subversive rock and rock en espanol), as well as a variety of public affairs programming.

Faculty and research

The Central Classroom Building

San José State has about 1,600 faculty members, 87 percent of which hold doctorate degrees.

Research collections located at SJSU include the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies and the Martha H. Cox Center for Steinbeck Research.

SJSU research partnerships include the SJSU Metropolitan Technology Center at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, the Cisco Networking Laboratory, and the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.

It is also home to various institutes, such as the Mineta Transportation Institute. Since 2001, the university has operated the Survey and Policy Research Institute (SPRI), which conducts the quarterly, high-profile Silicon Valley Consumer Confidence Survey and other research projects.

Noted faculty members

  • Elbert Botts—chemist, inventor of the epoxy used to secure Botts dots.
  • Mark Fruin—expert on Japanese business
  • Alejandro L. Garcia [16]—physicist, author of Numerical Methods for Physics
  • Larry Gerston—political commentator, expert on California politics and co-author of Recall: California's Political Earthquake
  • Daniel Goldston—mathematician, develops methods for proving that there are arbitrarily large primes that are unusually close together
  • Kevin Jordan—psychologist, works closely with NASA in developing the Human Factors Research and Technology Program
  • Tom Layton—archaeologist, documented origin of the shipwreck "Frolic" off the Mendocino coast, for which he has received national media attention
  • Rudy Rucker—computer science professor and science fiction author
  • Randall Stross - author of eBoys, The Microsoft Way and Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing
  • Yoshihiro Uchida—head coach, SJSU Judo Team, 1964 U.S. Olympic Judo Team (also an alumnus—BS Biology, 1947)
  • Brent Walters [17]—Expert on early church history; director of the Centre for Early Christian Studies and curator of the Ante-Nicene Archive (the largest private library in the country regarding the first 3 centuries of the Common Era). He is also an alumnus from SJSU's Philosophy department.
  • Donald West—chemist, co-author of Analytical chemistry, an introduction, the standard first year textbook in the field
  • Joel Slayton—new media artist, former publishing editor and chair of MIT Press, director of Leonardo/ISAST (international society for art, science, and technology), chairperson for the ISEA 2006/Zero One San Jose Festival, and director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media
  • Susan Shillinglaw—sometimes regarded as the world's leading expert on John Steinbeck, she was director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies for 18 years and has not only written many book introductions to Steinbeck novels, but has also published several of her own books related to Steinbeck.

History

Bell commissioned for the California State Normal School in 1881

What is now called "San José State" was founded by the California Legislature on May 2, 1862 as the California State Normal School when the state of California took over the Minns' Evening Normal School, a city funded normal school in San Francisco, California. The founding campus of what would become the California State University system, San José State is also the oldest public institution of higher learning in the State of California. The school moved to San Jose in 1871, and was given Washington Square Park at Fourth and San Carlos Streets to locate its campus, where it remains to this day.

In 1881 the first branch campus of the California State Normal School was announced, which later became the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). To commemorate San José's identity as the original California State, the bell pictured at right was forged with the words "California State Normal School, A.D. 1881". After creation of the Los Angeles campus, the San Jose campus was officially known as the California State Normal School, San José. In 1887, the school was renamed the "State Normal School" by the California Legislature. Later on, other normal schools were established in Chico, San Diego and elsewhere throughout the State of California. These normal schools were eventually collected together to form the precursor of today's California State University (CSU) system.

In 1921, the school's name was changed to San Jose State Teachers Training College. In 1935, the State Teachers Colleges became the California State Colleges, administered from the State Department of Education in Sacramento. As a result, the school's name was changed again, this time to San Jose State College. In 1961, the California State Colleges became a separate entity (later the California State University (CSU) system). In 1972 SJSC was granted university status, and the name was changed to California State University, San José. However, in 1974, alumni at the school succeeded in lobbying the California Legislature to change the school's name to "San José State University".

In 1942, the old gym (now Yoshi Uchida Hall) was used to register and collect Japanese Americans before sending them to internment camps.

In 1972-1973 the Economics Department experienced political turmoil. The Administration conducted a purge of left-leaning professors. For several years thereafter, the Economics Department was under censor by the American Association of University Professors.

The English Department has sponsored the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest since 1982.

In 1999, San José State and the City of San Jose agreed to combine their main libraries to form a joint City/University library located on campus, the first known collaboration of this type in the United States. The combined library faced opposition, with critics stating that the two libraries have very different objectives and that the project would be too expensive. [18] [19] Despite opposition, the project proceeded, and the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Library opened on-time and on-budget in 2003. The new library has won several national awards since its initial opening in 2003.

Sports

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San José State Spartans logo

The university has participated in athletics since it fielded a baseball team in 1890. SJSU sports teams are known as the Spartans, and compete in the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) in NCAA Division I (I-A for football). The school has achieved an international reputation in judo, having won 38 out of 42 national championships in the sport (as of 2004). Additionally, SJSU students and alumni have won more than half of the U.S. olympic medals in judo.

On December 7, 1941, the football team travelled to the island of Oahu to play the University of Hawaii. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, the game was cancelled and the team volunteered for duty with the Honolulu Police Department instead of returning home.

The athletics program has struggled for almost two decades. The football and basketball teams consistently rank near the bottom of NCAA Division I-A, in terms of both performance and attendance. In May 2003, the university's faculty voted overwhelmingly to leave Division I-A and to disband the football team. Ignoring this vote, the administration hired a new athletics director (Tom Bowen), a new football coach (Dick Tomey), and a new basketball coach for the 2005 season. However, both teams continued to post losing records and poor attendance.

SJSU alumni have won 18 Olympic medals through the years, dating back to the first gold medal won by Willie Steel in track and field in the 1948 Olympics. Alumni have won medals in track and field, swimming, judo and boxing. Due to pressures to maintain the football team, several of these programs have been eliminated, including the historical track team known as "Speed City" which produced Olympic medalists and social activists John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

Rivals

Notable alumni

The College of Engineering Building

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