As the seven graduate students made their way into the dance studio-like basement classroom of Burk Hall Monday afternoon, it seemed by their confused demeanor they already knew the critical information their instructor was about to lay on them.

Professor Dr. Frank Verducci, director of SF State’s kinesiology graduate program, announced the proposal to discontinue the master’s program and then opened up the discussion to the students.

“I’m very depressed,” Areum Kim, a first-year international graduate student, said.

Kim, who had learned English specifically to study at SF State, said she had a full scholarship to attend a graduate program at a university in Seoul, South Korea, but chose SF State’s graduate kinesiology program due to the quality of professors and classes offered.

“Its unbelievable that you would have to go out of state to get an education in kinesiology," said Dominic Daprile, who’s using the program as a stepping stone to medical school. “Basically throughout all the UC schools they’ve integrated kinesiology into their biology or physiology program.”

The university needs to be adding more classes than taking them away, Greg Bianchi, 27, said. This is his first full year here after coming from Arizona State and insists they are able to create instead of cut because the university gets money from alumni and the state to keep up enrollment, activities, classes and programs.

Before the class started Verducci said he thought the university was putting more importance on the full-time enrollment of a program, instead of its quality.

“When we established our current program, we made a decision we wanted to have quality. And in order to have quality you select the best students for your program,” Verducci said. “We’re very selective in the students we admit to our program. And when you are very selective the numbers in your program will be less.”

He added: “I think it’s going to affect our undergraduate program as well. When you have research going on, I think that contributes significantly to your undergraduate program. And when we have graduate students doing research, the undergraduate students become involved in that research.”

Verducci’s announcement stemmed from Provost John Gemello’s presentation of $10.3 million in academic cuts to program directors at a retreat Friday and an official announcement from the university Monday.

Along with kinesiology, which has a current enrollement of about 40 students, four other graduate programs are proposed for discontinuation: consumer and family sciences, gerontology, recreation and leisure, and Russian.

Students have the right to know about and be part of these decisions, said Michael Trujillo, graduate representative and a student in Verducci’s class, during the discussion. “In our weekly board meeting on Wednesday with the Associated Students I’m going to bring it up.”