Weeks after its opening, hundreds of students flow in and out of the Recreation Center daily, and new users can still be seen admiring the 21,000 square-feet of usable space. But some individuals on campus are having a harder time seeing the beauty behind the center.
Cal Poly’s faculty and staff, who are offered non-student priced memberships to the Recreation Center, saw a steep increase in pricing when the facility opened. Their memberships, which formerly cost $45 per quarter, are now priced at $48 per month or $488 for a full year.
Students also pay $432 per year now as part of their regular student fees.
University Union Advisory Board (UUAB) chair and philosophy senior Karen Mesrobian said the approximately 270 percent increase in non-student membership makes the faculty and staff price comparable to that of students.
“I don’t think I would ever feel comfortable having students come up to me and say, ‘Why are staff paying less than us when they have a choice to join, and we don’t have a choice?’” Mesrobian said. “I don’t know how I could justify that to the student body.”
But some faculty said they feel the price jump hit them disproportionately hard and has forced them to find gym membership off campus. David Mitchell, a physics professor at Cal Poly for seven years, frequently used the Recreation Center before its renovation. Now, he said, he cannot afford to work out there.
“I’ve looked at different gyms in San Luis (Obispo) and Morro Bay, and I actually haven’t been able to find anything as expensive as Cal Poly,” he said.
Mitchell said several faculty and staff saw the previously low prices at the Recreation Center as a benefit to working at Cal Poly. In response to the new pricing, some professors wrote letters to the offices of the university president and provost, asking them to force Associated Students, Inc. (ASI) and UUAB to reconsider the pricing.
“(The Recreation Center) is a big selling point because it’s actually kind of hard to hire faculty here because we can’t afford to buy houses,” Mitchell said. “So it was actually like a perk, that we were getting to use it.”
ASI programs director Marcy Maloney said the price increase all comes down to a 2008 decision where students voted to increase tuition by $65 per quarter to renovate the Recreation Center. She said with an increase in student fees, an increase in faculty and staff fees was necessary, too.
“How do you charge the faculty and staff less than you charge the students?” she said. “The students don’t get a choice, (the professors) get a choice. Ethically, I don’t see how you could do that.”
The revenue brought in by outside membership fees, Maloney said, “barely puts a dent” in the cost of operating the Recreation Center. The facility budget, which was created more than a year before the opening, projects outside memberships (including faculty and staff) will bring in just 6 percent of the Recreation Center’s revenue. Student fees will bring in 86 percent, according to Maloney.
In response, Mitchell’s colleague, physics professor Katharina Gillen, said it does not make sense to her why the prices were raised if it does not substantially aid ASI.
“The hardship to us is huge, where the benefit to ASI is, percentage-wise, very small,” she said.
The physics department traditionally holds sporting events at the Recreation Center where students and professors have the opportunity to interact outside the classroom. Since only the kinesiology department can use the center for instruction for free, Gillen said these kinds of interactions will be lost when faculty are not able to afford memberships.
“You have more of this community feeling between faculty and students, whereas, with prices like this, if we can’t go anymore we lose some of that,” Gillen said. “And I think that’s a pity.”
Despite the criticism from faculty and staff, Mesrobian said the value of the Recreation Center is among the best in the nation.
“I don’t think you can go anywhere on the Western Coast where you can get this level of the facility for that price,” she said. “Even here in (San Luis Obispo), state-of-the-art equipment, the views, the service, the student employment, all of that put together is pretty remarkable.”