Cal State Trustees Urge Reynolds to Change Her Ways

The California State University Board of Trustees unanimously approved on Monday a resolution that calls on Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds to change some of her ways in her dealings with board members and subordinates and in her approach to running the Cal State system.

The board also voted to reorganize the university’s central administration, creating the office of executive vice chancellor as a strong second-in-command to Reynolds. The change is an attempt to address a frequent criticism of the Cal State administration since Reynolds took office in 1982--that it is difficult to get decisions made when she is absent.

The board’s actions at a special meeting Monday culminated several months of controversy and growing division within the board over the 49-year-old educator’s stewardship of the 19-campus, 335,000-student system.

At least half a dozen of the 23 trustees have been so opposed to the chancellor’s administrative style, which they have termed abrasive and inattentive to the needs of individual campuses, that they have pushed hard in recent months for her ouster.

A slightly larger number have been strong allies of Reynolds. Among that group have been three notable statewide officeholders who are ex-officio trustees--Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy and California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig--who took the unusual step of attending last month’s regularly scheduled board meeting to cast votes of support for the chancellor.

At that meeting, the board was to have discussed the results of a confidential job review on Reynolds prepared by Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co., an accounting and management consulting firm. Believing, however, that the presence of politicians made any meaningful discussion impossible, some of Reynold’s detractors demanded that the chancellor’s performance be taken up again at a special session--the one that took place Monday.

The meeting began with a 1 1/2-hour closed session from which the chancellor, a member of the board, was excluded.

Most trustees said afterward that they were pleased with the results of Monday’s meeting, simply because, as one board member put it, “It was the first frank discussion we’ve had around here in a long time.”

At least a few trustees, however, remained unconvinced that any substantive changes will be made as long as Reynolds remains in office.

“We’ve said she is going to have to change her style,” said one trustee who asked not to be identified. “She is going to have to work differently with the presidents and with students and with board members. But what we are asking for is a new human being, and I don’t think we are going to get that.”

One indication that the board is still deeply divided over Reynolds was demonstrated by a lengthy discussion over how to draw a new organizational chart for the system.

A Matter of Lines

An ad hoc committee on management structure chaired by Trustee Tom J. Bernard had proposed that the organizational chart show a dotted line connecting the board to the presidents of the 19 campuses and a solid line connecting the chancellor to those presidents--thus suggesting that the chancellor is the chief executive officer in a classic management sense and has substantive power over the individual presidents.

But several members of the board, led by Trustee Theodore A. Bruinsma, called for a solid line, in essence implying that the presidents should have greater direct access to the board and not have to go through the chancellor on all matters.

Because the board is explicitly empowered to hire and fire presidents, but has historically viewed the chancellor as the administrative head of the entire system, George M. Marcus suggested “a new kind of line--a wiggly line or a long dashed line.”

Halfway through the remarkably passionate debate, Lee A. Grissom, who characterized himself as a solid Reynolds supporter, broke the tension momentarily when he said the discussion had begun to remind him “of an old television show: ‘What’s My Line?’ ”

The solid-line proposal was finally adopted on a vote of 9 to 8.

On a less humorous note, the board also heard a report from a five-member trustee committee appointed by Chairman Dale B. Ride to discuss with the chancellor, point by point, the weaknesses and strengths outlined in the Peat Marwick report.

Criticisms of Travels

One of the most glaring problems noted in the report was the frequency of Reynolds’ travels away from her office and the lack of anyone within the central administration to make decisions when she is absent.

To remedy this situation, the board said it will eliminate the post of provost and replace it with an executive vice chancellor--what one board member characterized as a “kind of chief of staff” to run the system when Reynolds is not in her office. A search for that new post is expected to begin immediately, Reynolds said.

Reynolds herself said she will cut down on her speaking engagements to “faculty organizations, women’s groups and Rotary clubs,” but said that new efforts she is planning to increase her contacts with the campuses means she will not actually be cutting down on her out-of-town travel.