San Bernardino, Calif. -- Happy New Year!
For many people those three words may sound premature considering January is more than three months away.
But for Cal State San Bernardino President Tomás D. Morales, it’s the perfect time to say it. The university’ s first day of classes for the new school year is on Thursday, Sept. 19. Morales, who is in his second year in leading Cal State San Bernardino, is the university’s fourth president since it opened its doors in 1965.
For the second straight year, the number of students coming to CSUSB will likely surpass 18,000 students, though the final number will likely fall short of last year’s enrollment, when a record 18,234 students attended the university, said Provost Andrew Bodman.
The increasing number of students will be especially significant and historic for the university’s Palm Desert Campus, which will welcome its inaugural freshman class of 100 students and becomes the first four-year institution of higher learning in the Coachella Valley region.
Morales said the university would continue to increase its enrollment at the CSUSB Palm Desert Campus with plans to eventually expand the campus’s size to 165 acres.
At the San Bernardino campus, changes will also be seen as the university has added 29 new tenure track faculty as well as a new dean for the university’s College of Arts and Letters. Terry Ballman, became the college’s dean in August, after having served as special assistant to the provost at Cal State Channel Islands.
The university also welcomed two new vice presidents. Brian Haynes is the university’s new vice president for student affairs and Sam Sudhakar is the university’s new vice president for information technology and chief information officer.
Haynes served as the vice president for student affairs and the dean of students at Clayton State University in the University System of Georgia. Sudhakar served as vice president of administrative services and chief information officer at Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Ill.
The university also continued to receive recognition as a top university by the nation’s leading educational services organization. U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings put Cal State San Bernardino 17th among the Top Regional Public Universities in the western United States and 57th among all western universities for regional public institutions.
The university was also recently selected by The Princeton Review as one of its “Best in the West” colleges and universities, and it made the Forbes list of “America’s Best Colleges.”
Recognition also came to two of the university’s student groups.
The national Sigma Chi Foundation selected CSUSB’s Sigma Chi Iota Alpha chapter as one of only four Gold J. Dwight Peterson Significant Chapter Award winners in the United States. The CSUSB chapter has earned the Peterson Significant Chapter Award in the past, but it was the first time it has been recognized with the prestigious Gold Peterson Award. Only four chapters from more than 240 institutions around the nation received the honor at the annual Sigma Chi Balfour Leadership Training Workshop held at Purdue University.
Beta Gamma Sigma, the international honor society for business students and scholars, named the CSUSB campus chapter as an Exemplary Chapter for the past year, marking the ninth year in a row that the CSUSB chapter has received the prestigious recognition. Membership in Beta Gamma Sigma is the highest recognition a business student anywhere in the world can receive.
CSUSB has several special events scheduled during the fall, including the California Native American Day celebration on Sept. 27, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Pow Wow on Oct. 10 through Oct. 13, the DisAbility Sports Festival on Oct. 5, the EcoFest environmental fair on Oct. 18, a performance by legendary comedian Bill Cosby on Nov. 16, and the university’s Department of Theater Arts starts its season on Nov. 15 with William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” which runs through Nov. 24.
The fall quarter ends Dec. 6, highlighted by fall commencement ceremonies on Saturday, Dec. 7.
For more information on Cal State San Bernardino, contact the university’s Office of Public Affairs at (909) 537-5007 and visit news.csusb.edu.