N.Y. Educator to Head California’s 2-Year Colleges

A New York City college official with a Harvard education was picked Thursday as the chancellor of California’s beleaguered community college system.

Joshua L. Smith, who helped turn around a Manhattan community college plagued by a loss of funding and students, will get a chance to do the same in California, where the two-year colleges have been in what officials admit is a “downward spiral” since 1982.

Smith, 50, noted that his home state of Massachusetts provided the model for free public education in America. But, he said Thursday, it was California that was “the nation’s pioneer in creating community colleges.”

Despite a three-year enrollment decline, California’s two-year colleges still take in 1.1 million students annually, making the “community colleges here the largest system of higher education in the free world,” Smith noted.

“We are democracy’s colleges,” Smith said, because the public two-year colleges are open to all. But to regain public support, he said, the colleges should “take a thorough look at themselves” and stress “academic excellence.”

Smith succeeds Gerald Hayward, 47, who had been chancellor since 1980. Hayward announced last July that he was retiring to pursue other interests.

Smith, who will earn more than $80,000 a year in his new post, was praised Thursday for having both a strong academic background and a solid record as a college manager.

Has ‘National Stature’

Just last week, he was chosen as chairman of the board of the American Assn. of Community and Junior Colleges, which represents the nation’s two-year colleges.

Smith has a “national stature as an education leader, proven administrative ability and a commitment to community college education,” said George David Kieffer, who heads the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges, which made the selection.

Smith graduated from the Boston Latin School, earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and master’s and doctorate degrees from Harvard. He has been an Air Force pilot, a school administrator in Pittsburgh, an instructor at Harvard, a program director at the Ford Foundation, a dean of education at the City College of New York and, since 1977, president of Borough of Manhattan Community College.

‘Losing Very Valuable Man’

He took over a storefront college where, due to New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s, a no-tuition policy had to be scrapped in favor of a $750-a-year fee. Yet by 1982, under Smith’s leadership, the college had a new $126-million campus in lower Manhattan and its enrollment had climbed to 12,500 students.

“Our New York people say they are losing a very valuable man and we are gaining one,” said Bob Gabriner, president of the community college council of the California Federation of Teachers. “He’s an educator of stature, and he has had an excellent working relationship with the faculty and the students.”

“He is a man of serious bearing and considerable academic credentials,” said William Pickens, who monitors the community colleges for the California Postsecondary Education Commission. “And if he can handle the politics of New York, I’m sure he can do OK here.”

Gabriner, whose union is affiliated with the faculty in the New York colleges, said Smith has seen the worst of times for a college.

“He’s gone through the trauma there. And they bottomed out and have leveled off now,” Gabriner said. “Smith will probably set a stronger direction from the state level, but that’s where the money is coming from.”

Kieffer, a Los Angeles attorney who helped pick Smith, recently contended that the 106 community colleges in California have suffered in part because no one is in charge. Since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 the state Legislature has provided most of the money and set guidelines for the colleges. Still, locally elected boards of trustees have the legal responsibility for running the schools.

‘Unified Consortium’

“Right now, no one has control, and you can’t hold anyone accountable,” Kieffer said, adding that he hopes Smith can muster the clout to be a strong state spokesman and leader for the colleges.

At a Los Angeles press conference, Smith picked up the same theme.

As chancellor, he said, he wants to give the colleges a “sense of identity as a unified consortium.”

In contrast to many local college officials, he added that he generally supports tuition for students as long as financial aid is provided for those who are too poor to afford it.

In 1983, the Legislature, after a bitter fight, set the first mandatory fee of $50 a semester for California’s community college students. Since then, enrollment has shrunk, especially at urban colleges. Twenty legislators in Sacramento are sponsoring a bill to repeal the fee.