On March 5, dozens of students were arrested at the state Capitol while protesting California’s cuts to higher-education funding.
Cal State Online, which is expected to launch this fall, isn’t without its critics.
Dennis Loo, a sociology professor at California Polytechnic State University, urged CSU System faculty members to rally against the new online learning hub in part because Cal State Online could use services from for-profit education companies, outsourcing web-based courses to those companies once the online system is established.
“CSU Online represents nothing less than a Trojan Horse for the CSU put forth by those who wish to undo the CSU as a public good,” Loo wrote in a blog post. “No public money or CSU funds should be used for such an enterprise, nor should the good name of the California State University be stolen by applying it to this destructive scheme. An online university run in whole or in part by for-profits is divorced from the development of CSU campuses dedicated to public education.”
Teri Yamada, a blogger for the website Restructuring Public Hi Ed, said the implementation of Cal State Online “may set up a new corporation to sell the CSU brand to foreign students and the military, funneling needed resources away from campuses to a virtual CSU.”
Yamada said the university system should use its limited funding for other programs outside of the new online hub, charging that the funding of Cal State Online “siphon[s] money from courses that students need to graduate.”
The CSU System’s open letter about its online learning hub could assuage some long-held labor-related fears among professors and instructors across the state.
The letter said that Cal State Online “will adhere to all statewide collective bargaining agreements” and faculty will “have the option of participating in Cal State Online with one or more programs that they have developed or that they are developing alone or in consortium with other CSU campuses.”
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