Academic Freedom vs. Money: A Dispute CSUN Can’t Shake

Inviting Glenn Dumke, former chancellor of the 19-college California State University system and friend of the wealthy W.P. Whitsett family, to launch the Whitsett lecture series at California State University, Northridge on Tuesday was supposed to put an end to a controversy.

It didn’t.

Dumke, a respected California historian, was instrumental in creating the $500,000 W.P. Whitsett Endowment Fund for the History Department of CSUN, a fund that will be used, among other things, to finance the college’s first endowed chair.

Negotiated Terms

Dumke not only guided descendants of William Paul Whitsett, a pioneer of San Fernando Valley land development, toward CSUN, but also acted as a negotiator between the Whitsett Foundation and the university over the terms of the donation.

But despite what the money could mean to CSUN, the Whitsett gift became the catalyst early last year for an internal dispute that divided the history department. Some professors feared that terms of the endowment proposal that required professors filling the Whitsett chair to have “a strong belief of God and country” would limit academic freedom. The foundation’s gift became entangled in a debate over who should chair the history department.

Last November, a compromise finally was struck and CSUN and the history department accepted the donation. Tuesday’s lecture is the first public event funded out of the endowment.

To some on the history faculty, asking Dumke to be the first lecturer was a way of showing the discord has ended. Bringing to campus a highly regarded California historian with close ties to the university system would heal departmental wounds, they said. And the Whitsett family could interpret the Dumke invitation as a peace offering, the professors added.

Dumke would not comment on what may have been behind the invitation to speak.

But history professor Leonard Pitt said inviting Dumke was appropriate “because he is a renowned California historian, he is close to the Whitsett family and the lecture topic, ‘The Boom of the 1880s in Southern California,’ is a subject no one knows as well as he.” Pitt was a critic of the original endowment proposal.

Others on the faculty, however, were troubled that the invitation went to someone so closely linked to the endowment donors. History professor Ronald Davis, who also opposed the initial endowment plan, said he believes the Dumke invitation shows a lack of independence on the university’s part.

“If Dumke was not giving the lecture, there probably would not be much controversy,” Davis said. “There’s still a general sense that all we want to do is accommodate the Whitsett family.”

The CSUN history professors do agree on one point--debate over Dumke’s lecture has been far less bitter than the arguments over the original plans to create the endowment.

The W.P. Whitsett Foundation first approached CSUN with a proposal to donate $500,000 to create the first endowed chair at the school in 1985. An endowed chair allows the university to enlarge its faculty without the burden of an additional salary. Interest generated from the endowment pays the wages of the professor appointed to the chair.

Traditionally, endowed chairs are more common at private schools than they are at public colleges and universities. But, in recent years, financially strapped public institutions have become more aggressive in trying to acquire underwriters for the additional professorships.

But finding benefactors has not been easy, and endowed chairs at public universities are rare. Even with the Whitsett chair, the CSU system has only 13 endowed chairs at seven schools.

The Whitsett donation was proposed to honor William Paul Whitsett, the developer who founded Van Nuys. Whitsett came to Los Angeles from the Midwest in 1905 at the age of 30, seeking a cure for his tuberculosis, according to John E. Baur, a CSUN history professor who recently completed a biography of the developer.

Real Estate Venture

In 1911, his illness in remission, he bought half of a company that owned a largely undeveloped piece of property that roughly is bounded by Kester Avenue on the west, Hazeltine Avenue on the east, Oxnard Street on the south and Vanowen street on the north. The area was called Van Nuys after Issaac Van Nuys, one of the original owners of the property.

Whitsett became the firm’s property sales manager and, by the end of the first eight months, land sales reached $4.5 million, a small fortune at the time, according to Baur.

After several decades as a developer, Whitsett spent 17 years as chairman of the Metropolitan Water District. After he died in 1965 at 89, city officials named Whitsett Avenue, which bisects Van Nuys and North Hollywood, in his honor.

In the foundation’s original endowment proposal to CSUN in 1985, Whitsett’s descendants asked that the chair be filled by a person who had “an understanding of Mr. W.P. Whitsett’s philosophy--progress, determination and self-reliance as well as a strong belief in God and country.”

That stipulation sparked the academic furor.

Some history professors complained that the conditions regarding Whitsett’s beliefs would limit academic freedom and lead the university to fill the chair with a Whitsett clone. Others were offended when they discovered that negotiations for the endowment had been going on for a year without their knowledge. They blamed then-department chairman Michael Meyers for keeping them in the dark.

In the spring of 1986, the history department voted 21-10 to turn down the money. Meyers’ supporters were in the minority in voting to accept the money.

The refusal sent CSUN administrators scrambling back to the negotiating table with Dumke and other representatives of the Whitsett Foundation. Months later, an agreement finally was reached.

The offending passage requiring the Whitsett professor to have “an understanding” of Whitsett’s “strong belief in God and country” was dropped. The history department ended its leadership dispute by replacing Meyers with Thomas Bader.

In addition to the professorship, the final endowment agreement stated that the donation would be used to underwrite a lecture series, prepare and publish a biographical sketch of Whitsett and establish a special room on the CSUN campus to house important Whitsett papers.

The dust over the original controversy has been slow to settle.

No one has been named to fill the Whitsett chair and there is no indication when an appointment will be made. Some history professors are worried that the lack of an appointment means there may not be money enough to sustain the chair indefinitely.

But an announcement of the on-campus location of the W.P. Whitsett Room is imminent, said Thomas R. Maddux, the history professor who chairs the committee supervising the endowment. Featuring a portrait of W.P. Whitsett and a commemorative plaque, the room will be used for seminars and research.

The Whitsett biographical sketch is completed and copies will be distributed to guests attending a dinner after Dumke’s Tuesday night lecture. Myrtle Harris, a Whitsett granddaughter and foundation member, was invited by Baur to read the biography before its publication.

Harris said she found a few minor errors in the manuscript, including the misspelling of an aunt’s name.

Dumke was one of five California historians considered for the inaugural lecture. His selection was unanimously approved by the history department faculty, according to Maddux. Even those professors who questioned the selection said they decided to go along with it to ease tensions within the department.

“Dumke may not be as great a scholar as many would him to be, but he is well-known,” said history professor Shiva Bajpai. “It is an accommodation of the Whitsetts, especially to Mrs. Harris, because she was particularly keen that Dumke be the first lecturer.”

Harris said she plans to travel from her Bay Area home to attend Dumke’s lecture.

“To me, he was an obvious first choice,” she said.