SDSU, Under Day, Struggles for Respect : After Decade of Academic Advances, University Still Suffers From ‘Teachers’ College’ Image

On an episode of the Fox television show “Mr. President” last year, actor George C. Scott, in the title role, is being briefed by aides on his new campaign manager.

“Is he qualified?” Scott queries his advisers.

“Well, he graduated from San Diego State,” one of them replies.

“Is that a four-year institution?” Scott asks.

Therein lies the rub for Thomas B. Day, San Diego State University president who marks his 10th anniversary this month as head of the largest and--in the view of most academics statewide--arguably the best institution in the far-flung California State University system.

In the past decade, Day has set a tone for the campus, emphasizing more faculty research, pushing new programs in health, Mexican and Pacific Rim studies, and promoting new links with the community in areas ranging from athletics to secondary-school tutoring.

Graduates from State, with a total enrollment of 36,000 students, hold business and government posts at all levels throughout San Diego--from the mayor to the Chamber of Commerce to the Board of Supervisors--and increasingly are found in similar positions in the state and elsewhere. The dialogue for the “Mr. President” episode was written by a couple of State alumni now working as Hollywood writers.

Teachers’ College Image Hangs On

But as the bit of television repartee points out, the school’s image continues to lag behind the reality at Montezuma Mesa. Many San Diegans still think of State as only an outgrowth of its original status as a teachers’ college, or remember only its football glory days under Don Coryell, or recall only the excesses of party life in recent years among the fraternities and sororities.

Even many alumni who now say proudly that they graduated from San Diego State nevertheless acknowledge the school does suffer an inferiority complex, especially because of comparisons often made between the campus and UC San Diego across town.

“I think the campus today is better than 10 years ago,” the 56-year-old Day, a physicist by profession, said during an interview on his tenure. “We had a good faculty when I came, but it has gotten stronger and has a new level of self-assurance, particularly in its professional (research) activities.

“Our departments are strong, such as Japanese studies, astronomy, business, the sciences. We’ve reached out more to the community, we’ve been more pro-active in fund raising, in getting support for our arts, our journalism, for example.

“But it doesn’t show up in the media . . . that we are a major, vital resource in San Diego. We’ve still got an image as a nice college; we’re not thought of as, well, as a fine research institution, in large part because UCSD is across town and we get compared unfavorably even though our missions as defined by the state of California are different.

“I’ve done everything I can do to emphasize that we are not in competition with UCSD, that we do different things and that each of us are the best of the kind. Yet the media powers-that-be don’t take our scholarship seriously but focus on us only when

there’s a rape, or an ex-jock doing something, or when we’ve got a parking problem.”

Greater Recognition

Yvonne Larsen, a prominent civic leader and State alumna who served on the 1978 search committee that recommended Day, said she would give him an “A” for his tenure.

“He’s done a great deal to bring San Diego State greater recognition by improving academic excellence and increasing community support, “ Larsen said. “No one today should be embarrassed or have to apologize for having graduated from San Diego State. But we do still at times suffer from being compared with UCSD.”

In an interview on the UCSD-San Diego State relationship last year, UCSD Chancellor Richard Atkinson said, “Look, San Diego State is an absolutely first-rate university with superb programs in a wide range of areas. In comparison to Big Ten institutions, I would place it squarely in the middle in terms of quality, and a number of its programs, such as engineering, natural sciences and the like, are much better than those at a number of Big Ten schools.

“I don’t want to get into comparisons with UC because of the different roles we play. And, while San Diego State is not a Harvard or Stanford, how many of those are there anyway?”

As a measure of its growing reputation, State officials point to several joint programs the campus operates with UCSD--more than between any other UC and CSU campus--including doctoral programs in biology, chemistry and clinical psychology. UCSD medical students can obtain a joint medical degree from their campus and masters of public health from State. Faculty from both campuses collaborate on the role of family behavior in disease prevention and on ways to improve nursing home care. The two campuses jointly operate an alcohol education center and the Mission Bay Aquatic Center.

Under the state master plan for higher education, the state universities are charged with a primary mission of teaching undergraduates in preparation for the professions, with faculty research a lesser priority. The top third of all California high school graduates are eligible for CSU admission.

Primary Responsibility

By contrast, only the top 12.5% of graduates qualify for UC admission, and UC faculty members are given a primary responsibility for research and for producing the nation’s college professors in doctoral programs, which are restricted to UC campuses under the master plan. State professors teach four courses a semester compared to two or fewer for a typical UC professor.

“What Tom Day really has done is to make State into a comprehensive regional institution where the faculty is clearly the most balanced (among the 19 CSU campuses) in being both teachers and scholars, and that translates into genuine emphasis on faculty research and development,” Robert Detweiler, vice president for academic affairs at California State University, San Bernardino, said.

Detweiler, a former history professor and dean at San Diego State, praised Day for garnering substantial amounts of federal, state and private grants--about $38 million annually--to augment state support, almost more than the rest of the campuses combined.

“I very much admire what State has done, especially in becoming the first choice of a lot of students across the state when most Cal State campuses draw students only from their immediate service area,” Detweiler said. “People think it is a real option to send their children there, even though it may not always be the first choice, but they think of San Diego State in the same group as other major universities, and that is a basic achievement.

“But you’re always going to have the UC versus State comparisons because UC is perceived as being for the elite, and UCSD is certainly a world-class place in many ways.”

Among the exceptional programs at State often cited by observers: the nationally recognized School of Public Health, less than 10 years old; the School of Accountancy, rated one of the five best in the nation; the ecology research group headed by Professor Walter Oechel, which is on the cutting edge of ozone depletion research; the Western United States’ only program in training undergraduates in gene-splicing technology; a federally funded astronomy program at the university’s Mt. Laguna observatory; and a Japanese studies program that helps train professors from other universities in U.S-Japan issues.

Battled With Faculty

Day’s leadership during the last decade has not been without controversy.

Day arrived from a vice chancellor post at the University of Maryland at the height of California’s tax revolt, with the passage of Proposition 13 which cut into state money for education. He battled with the faculty over where cuts might have to be made, and some of those wounds healed only slowly.

Longtime professor of classical and Oriental languages E. N. Genovese said that, when Day arrived, “He did not have a good sense of the kind of faculty we were. I don’t think he was patient enough at first and didn’t approach things in the best possible way.”

Genovese, who next fall will chair the university senate--the faculty governing body--said that Day subsequently has worked well in enhancing the university’s academic reputation, “in particular by helping the institution get over the shock of turning into a real university.”

Genovese added: “Day has done as much as he can and has been very deliberate about publicly encouraging faculty achievement, getting us as much money as possible for research.

“I think he is constantly fighting limitations (at the state level) to letting us do what we are capable of doing as faculty. He makes sure that we don’t think small, that we think big.”

There does remain discontent among the faculty, though not directed at Day personally, but over the state’s reluctance to allow more time for research given the important role it plays in enhancing a university’s reputation.

Day said of his early years, “I didn’t consciously want to thrash around but I didn’t have much choice. Proposition 13 created a different world. . . . I felt like I had been parachuted into a forest fire with nothing to put out a fire.

“But I learned a lot--to be more politic, more polished, to know how to put out early warning signs. I may make mistakes, but I am educable. I think at first I was not as aware as I should have been of the level of commitment that the faculty had to scholarship. I hope to God that I have grown in my job, but that I still stick to a conclusion once I have reached it.”

‘Boxy and Ordinary’

Day solicits advice from both the faculty and the community much more today than when he first came, Lee Grissom, a State alumnus and president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, said. Grissom is also a member of the board of trustees that oversees the Cal State system and sits on Day’s community advisory council.

“I understand his concerns about the image and in some ways, I share them . . . it’s always bugged me when I compare the libraries: at UCSD, there is this beautiful architecture, this uplifting structure reaching to the skies, but at San Diego State, a Xerox copy type of library, without style and lines, but boxy and ordinary.

“But, in other ways, I think Tom is being overly critical of how State is treated. In the past, I don’t think that San Diego State has done a real good job in sharing its successes with the community, in telling about the extension program, all the various research grants, the role that the public administration school plays in training people who govern San Diego County.”

Grissom said that Day constantly fights for more money and programs from the system.

“I think there is some tension between San Diego State and (the system) headquarters in Long Beach,” Grissom said. “Tom Day would not know how to be a shrinking violet, even if had a blueprint. That is not his style; he meets everything straight up, he doesn’t procrastinate, he never bites his tongue, and that can rub the wrong way because San Diego is the biggest and the best.”

Day is far from satisfied with the present campus. He points to escalating problems with plant maintenance, especially the library.

“I think I would call it a crisis,” Day said. “We don’t have enough money to buy the number of new journals and books that we need. This has been a conscious and deliberate action on the part of state-level finance people to force us to become more efficient, but there is no way of converting faculty positions into library books, so we end up buying fewer and fewer, and the faculty goes crazy.”

Day said state administrators the past several years have traded librarian positions for computers, “which is a very bad mistake, since you still need the personnel despite all the fancy computers.”

Crowding on the campus, where there are lines for just about everything, not just the library, also bothers Day. Because of over-enrollment, there are more students than faculty budgeted to teach them, causing particular problems for freshmen and sophomores attempting to take lower-division general education courses.

Ethnic Makeup

However, the new North County campus in San Marcos, scheduled to open in the fall of 1992, will help stabilize enrollment on the main campus, Day said.

A more pressing long-range challenge will be to increase both the number of nonwhite students and professors so that the university’s ethnic makeup reflects more accurately the demographics of San Diego, Day said.

“Ten years ago I had a lot of hope for progress,” Day said. “But, although we have not had a great regression, we have barely held our own in terms of numbers while the increase (of minorities) in the population has gone up.

“It’s tremendously frustrating--not only here but throughout society--because, if we don’t have more black students, for example, we aren’t going to have more black faculty members, and if we don’t have more black faculty, we won’t have more black students.

“For a long time here, our principal interface was to look at 12th-graders, and we were not dealing with the problem at the source, which is to go to the sixth grade at Sherman Elementary (in Barrio Logan), for example, and do outreach, to talk to parents in small-group settings, to get students and parents to use the schools to their advantage.” Last year, Day promised parents completing a special parenting course at Sherman that their children would be guaranteed admission to San Diego State if they successfully graduate from high school.

Day also wants intercollegiate sports to continue to play a strong role on his campus, although some professors, aware of a time when State was known primarily for its athletic teams, would prefer that the emphasis on big-time sports diminish.

“It can be frustrating to know how good the work is within our own departments and to be cited as one of the nation’s top teaching universities, but then to talk to a merchant and hear only about the football team,” Don Hunsaker, a professor of biology, has said.

But Day said that competitive sports “is an area of contact with the community that is quite important and which has brought us the support of a large number of people whom we would not otherwise have.

“We will continue to be a place for student athletes and in particular for women athletes, and we can take pride in the fact that we were one of the few large universities willing to bite the bullet initially and commit fully to women.

“San Diego State has a hard-core group of supporters who have continued to see us through thick and thin with our athletic program.”

Tom Blair, editor of the Daily Aztec school newspaper when a student at San Diego State and now a columnist for The San Diego Union, said that Day has correctly not tried to separate athletics from the university.

“Day realizes how important having a nationally ranked team is in bringing publicity to the university, and, while some academic purists feel it goes against the concept of a first-class university, they aren’t paying attention to the Stanfords or Michigans, which can do both.

“I think, if anything, Tom has been too impatient in wanting winning teams.”

But Day confesses to wanting to try to win in everything he does.

“For me, the most interesting time is when things are not all smooth,” Day said, adding that he has few worries that he will encounter tranquil seas anytime soon.