Board Forced Horn to Quit Cal State Post at Long Beach

Stephen Horn was forced out as president of California State University, Long Beach, this week after an outside review team found his relations with the faculty were poor, his management skills were deficient and his relations with community leaders--especially football team boosters--had deteriorated.

Several members of the Cal State system’s Board of Trustees told The Times that Horn was given a choice between resigning as president and retaining an $83,000-a-year trustees’ professorship on the Long Beach campus or being fired.

Horn decided to resign Tuesday after the trustees discussed his situation for two hours behind closed doors. He declined further comment Thursday.

Horn’s departure next July 1 will remove one of California State University Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds’ sharpest critics. Last March, Horn accused Reynolds of “unconscionable and unprofessional” treatment of former President Richard Butwell of California State University, Dominguez Hills, who died of a heart attack two weeks after Reynolds suggested he look for another job.

No Major Role

But trustees stressed that Reynolds did not play a major role in Horn’s ouster.

According to these trustees, all of whom spoke on the condition that they not be identified, the five-member review panel headed by former University of Oklahoma President Paul Sharp, found that morale was low among the 965 full-time Cal State Long Beach faculty members.

Horn has fought a running battle with some faculty leaders since taking over as president in 1970. He was censured by the campus Academic Senate twice--once in the mid-1970s and again in 1981. Nicholas Hardeman, professor of history and past Academic Senate chairman, said Horn had a “highly autocratic” administrative style.

Ben Cunningham, professor of journalism and current Senate chairman, said, “His management style over the years managed to increase the number of critics he had. . . . You can’t point to a single thing. It’s been building up.”

Robert D. Kully, who was the faculty representative on the Board of Trustees from 1983 until last spring, said Cal State Long Beach “is a better university academically than it was before or would have been without him,” but that Horn “wasted too much valuable energy fighting with the faculty.”

Low Morale

In a Nov. 4 letter to trustees, Horn denied that faculty morale was low and said the review team’s conclusion was “based on interviews out of proportion with ‘veteran’ faculty.”

The review panel also criticized Horn for allowing the campus to run a deficit of more than $1 million last year. The chancellor’s office had to provide a bail-out loan of $900,000 and only recently returned fiscal control to the campus.

The review team said Horn’s support in the Long Beach community had slipped in recent years, especially after he threatened to drop intercollegiate football because of a separate $719,000 deficit in the campus athletic fund.

“He would prefer it be an Ivy League school, not a 33,000-student California institution,” said Don Dyer, a Long Beach attorney and past president of the 49er Athletic Foundation, the boosters group.

While commending Horn for improving the university’s academic standing, Dyer criticized the president for neglecting athletics.

“He was not aggressive enough in the athletic program to do what was needed,” he said.

In the past five years, Cal State Long Beach has had four athletic directors, four basketball coaches and three football coaches, Dyer pointed out.

In his letter to the trustees, Horn said, “The budget and the football issues are behind us.”

He said the chancellor’s office loan has been repaid, and boosters have raised several hundred thousand dollars to save the football team.

“General community support for the university has never been higher,” the president wrote in a separate letter to Marianthi Lansdale, head of the trustees’ personnel committee.

Past Disputes

However, other Cal State officials said Long Beach business leaders did not come to Horn’s support this time, as they have in past disputes with the faculty and others.

According to several trustees, the management review contained both praise and criticism but concluded, one said, with the recommendation that “Horn was not the man to lead the campus into the future.”

When 17 trustees gathered at the systemwide headquarters in Long Beach Tuesday, they had to read the management panel’s report in a guarded room and were not allowed to take copies to the closed-door meeting that followed.

This same procedure was followed when the board reviewed Chancellor Reynolds’ performance last spring. It is intended to “allow the board to deal with sensitive personnel matters with confidentiality,” said trustees’ chairman Dale B. Ride.

When the meeting began, opinion in the room seemed to be closely divided, according to several people who were present. But some wavering votes turned against Horn when the trustees’ personnel committee--Lansdale, Claudia H. Hampton and Tom C. Stickel--strongly supported the panel’s suggestion that the president should be replaced.

Chance to Quit

The personnel committee proposed that Horn be offered the chance to resign and given the one-year trustees’ professorship, but that he be fired if he would not resign.

“There was one hell of a plea to stand by the committee and the outside report,” one trustee said.

There were differing counts of the vote, but most of those interviewed said five trustees either voted against the resolution or abstained. This group included trustees Theodore A. Bruinsma, Marian Bagdasarian, Dixon Harwin, Dean Lesher and a fifth trustee who could not be identified. Reynolds abstained.

In addition to the specific failings cited in the management review, Horn was thought to be “arrogant and abrasive” by some, one trustee said.

“His manner and style can be irritating,” another said.

Then there was the matter of Horn’s severe criticism of Reynolds after Butwell’s death last spring. This did not sit well with many trustees, even those who were themselves critical of Reynolds’ performance.

Cal State sources said the management review would not have proceeded without Reynolds’ approval, but one trustee said she played a “passive role” in the process and did not vote during Tuesday’s meeting.

“The board and the chancellor are being very cautious, so there can be no relating this to what went on before,” another trustee said. “There can’t seem to be a vendetta out for the people who were opposed to her.”

But several Cal State officials wondered what lies in store for Thomas B. Day, president of San Diego State University, who also severely criticized Reynolds for her handling of the Butwell affair.

Day said at the time that the chancellor’s behavior toward Butwell was typical of her “brutalizing” treatment of the 19 campus presidents in the system.

“I think Day is relatively safe for the time being,” one trustee said. “He and Horn traveled in tandem for a long time and have been very protective of one another. Day also has some really bad personality traits, and he has wanted to secede from the whole system for some time. But I don’t expect anything to happen regarding Day in the near future.”

Horn, a political scientist, said he would accept the trustees’ professorship, even though the $83,000 salary is about $20,000 less than he would have made as president next year.

In addition to Sharp, members of the management review team were Evelyn Ballard, former deputy medical director at San Francisco State University; Richard Jarrett, business manager of the Los Angeles Unified School District; Warner Masters, former vice president at California State University, Northridge, and Theodore Merriam of Chico, who was a Cal State trustee from 1960 to 1971.