Horn Sees CSLB Woes as Career Footnote

Stephen Horn passed across the table his one-page, single-spaced summation of why he was forced to resign last fall as president of Cal State Long Beach after 17 1/2 years. He did not care to discuss it further.

“No. I’ve written it out there,” Horn said impatiently. “I can read it to you to get it in the record. . . . So what’s your next question?”

Was he fearful to talk about it?

Censured Twice

“Nope. No. Not at all,” said Horn, who is a Republican candidate for the 42nd Congressional District seat being vacated by Rep. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach). “But there are other issues in this campaign, and that’s an infinitesimal aspect, a de minimus aspect, of the campaign.”

One can hardly blame Horn, 56, for wanting to play down the events that led to his resignation. Long plagued with poor relations with the Cal State Long Beach faculty, which censured him twice, Horn’s presidency came to an end after several years of budgetary problems, anger from athletic boosters and a well-publicized run-in with Cal State University Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds.

In his campaign, Horn wants to at once take credit for his many achievements at Cal State Long Beach--”a record on which I am proud to stand,” he says--and gloss over the events that led to his forced resignation. These he calls “minor, minor.”

Among those who view Horn as a courageous and visionary leader is Frank Bowman, Cal State Long Beach assistant vice president for student services, who has worked with Horn since he came to the campus in 1970.

Bowman, who gave $1,000 to Horn’s campaign, said Horn guided the 33,500-student commuter campus into the big leagues of Cal State campuses. He and other supporters ticked off a number of Horn’s achievements as president: launching an international residence center for foreign students, allowing senior citizens to attend college virtually free, and pioneering a program, widely copied on other campuses, to make the university physically accessible to disabled students.

Of Horn’s problems, Bowman said: “Anybody that does anything that’s progressive and moves forward will have his critics . . . but he was a great leader of this institution for 17 years.”

But Horn left in his wake many bitter people, primarily faculty members, who feel they were insulted, lectured to and ignored.

Faculty Morale Low

The Academic Senate formally censured Horn in 1973 for “unilateral procedures on reappointment and advancement” and again in 1981 for his handling of a controversial reorganization plan that faculty members said made them vulnerable to layoffs. An outside review committee called in last year to assess Horn’s presidency found that morale was low among the 965 faculty members.

“Although Steve Horn can point to many real accomplishments under his presidency, his attitude toward others, particularly the faculty, has often been one of arrogance, occasionally bordering on contempt,” said Art Levine, a professor of legal studies who has been at Cal State Long Beach for 15 years. “No one has a monopoly on truth or wisdom. A university is a marketplace of ideas. The president of a university should have a decent respect for the opinions of others. Steve Horn lacks that respect.”

Aggressive Campaigner

Horn explained that he made “many tough decisions” during his tenure, several of which “upset several special interest groups--principally entrenched faculty politicians.”

In his campaign for Congress, Horn has hired veteran Republican political consultant Bill Roberts, a friend since 1961. Under Roberts’ guidance, Horn has proved to be an aggressive campaigner. He seized on the slow-growth fever in Orange County by coming out in favor of Measure A on the June 7 countywide ballot and accusing front-runner Harriett M. Wieder, chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, of being in developers’ pockets.

These charges, as well as revelations that Wieder lied when she said she had a college degree, have damaged Wieder and put Horn in a better position to win the seat.

In all, there are eight Republicans running in the district, which straddles the border between Los Angeles and Orange counties. It is such a heavily GOP district that winning the primary is tantamount to winning the election.

At candidates forums, the balding Horn hunches over the microphone and peers over reading glasses, a bemused look on his face. Often, he takes copious notes. When it is his turn to speak, he usually takes a few swipes at Wieder and then outlines what he wants to tackle if he is elected: the deficit, the trade imbalance, drugs, gangs, the environment and health care.

‘What’s the Issue?’

Though he resists labels, Horn is more moderate than either of Wieder’s other two major Republican opponents--former White House advance man Andrew Littlefair of Torrance and ex-presidential speech writer Dana Rohrabacher of Palos Verdes Estates.

“I’m a Republican, period,” Horn said. “People can call me anything they want. The question is, what’s the issue?”

Horn’s role model is the late Hiram Johnson, both governor and U.S. senator from California, whom he met as a boy. He said he admired Johnson because he stood up to special interests.

It was Johnson who sparked Horn’s interest in politics. After getting bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in political science from Stanford University and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard, Horn was a legislative assistant for six years to U.S. Sen. Thomas H. Kuchel (R-Calif.). Even after he later entered academia, Horn remained in nonpartisan politics as a Nixon appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission as well as other commissions and boards.

As a congressman, Horn sees himself as a sort of non-flashy hard worker who would do his committee homework and forge inter-party agreements rather than go for publicity stunts.

Respect of Colleagues

Horn named as examples of this style two Democrats: Sen. John C. Stennis of Mississippi and Rep. Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, who was virtually unknown until he served on the special committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. Both are widely respected on both sides of the aisle.

“That’s the kind of member I want to be. . . . One respected by both liberals and conservatives, one who is recognized as a problem-solver, not just going there to talk on C-SPAN when everybody else has left the chamber.”

Horn has written or co-written three books on Congress and has a personal collection of more than 6,000 books for or about members of Congress, a collection that he intends to will to Cal State Long Beach. Collecting these books is his own hobby, said Horn, who abhors sports or exercise. “Every once in a while I move my arms up and down,” he said.

Horn and his wife, Nini, also have been active in civic affairs in Long Beach. He has held leadership roles in United Way, the Chamber of Commerce and the Long Beach Economic Development Corp.

Long Beach Support

These activities, as well as his Cal State presidency, have resulted in good support for his candidacy in Long Beach, where many of the thousands of graduates of the Long Beach campus have settled. So solid is his base in Long Beach that Wieder recently canceled a fund-raiser there, conceding the territory to Horn.

As of May 18, Horn had raised a total of about $193,000 for his campaign, to Wieder’s $270,000.

Though Chancellor Reynolds was not involved in Horn’s ouster by the Cal State Board of Trustees, by the time of its vote Nov. 10 she also had good reason to want Horn out of office. Eight months earlier, Horn accused Reynolds of “unconscionable and unprofessional” treatment of former President Richard Butwell of Cal State Dominguez Hills, who died of a heart attack two weeks after Reynolds suggested he look for another job.

“No president could avoid doing what I had to do and I would do it again tomorrow, and I’d do it again in any similar situation,” Horn said recently.

“He attacked the king and missed,” said one Cal State Long Beach faculty member.

But it was campus budgetary problems that were Horn’s real undoing. In 1986, Horn was stripped of his budgetary authority when a deficit of more than $1 million necessitated a $900,000 loan from the chancellor’s office to allow the campus to meet its financial obligations. He repaid the loan, but his management skills were called into question.

Horn also incurred the wrath of athletic boosters in the community by threatening to drop the university’s intercollegiate football program because of a separate $719,000 deficit in the campus athletic fund.

Trustees’ Offer

When all his problems came to a head with the Board of Trustees vote, Horn was offered, if he resigned, a one-year trustee professorship at Cal State Long Beach. He will earn $83,000, about $20,000 less than his salary as president.

Of his troubles with the faculty, Horn commented, referring to his work as a congressional aide, that he found the U.S. Senate “child’s play in its politics compared to a university.”

“One thing you know in the Senate is that people against you today on an issue don’t take it personally,” Horn said. “They’re voting their interest, their constituencies. It’s not a personal assault on you as a human being.”

An intensely private man, Horn nevertheless revealed in a campus interview in 1981 that he could not think of a favorite color, that he showers in the evening and that he might call an autobiography “Sitting on a Hill.” Given the office he is running for, one could assume that the hill he was referring to was Capitol Hill.