Cal State Trustees Approve New Campus at San Marcos

Trustees of the California State University system voted Wednesday to establish an independent 20th campus on a former chicken ranch in northern San Diego County rather than maintaining through 1995 an existing San Diego State University off-campus center that currently serves the area.

The Legislature is expected to endorse creation of the new campus next year. Cal State officials said they hope that a nationwide search for a president of the new university will be completed within 12 months, giving the executive time to establish staff and a core faculty before the campus formally opens in the fall of 1992 to upper-division and graduate students.

The university, to be called Cal State San Marcos, would become a full-service, four-year school beginning in 1995.

Incredible Growth

The San Marcos site was selected because of incredible growth in the northern San Diego County region and the overcrowding of San Diego State, which with more than 35,000 students is the largest in the Cal State system. University officials said, however, that they expect one-third of the students attending the new campus to come from southern Orange County.

The San Marcos campus would be the first to open since Cal State Bakersfield in 1965. Trustees, meanwhile, are still studying plans for a new campus in Ventura County.

The new San Diego County campus would grow out of a thriving upper-division and graduate student off-campus center that San Diego State has operated in northern San Diego County since 1979. San Diego civic and business leaders, politicians and current San Diego State students had hoped to continue San Diego State’s relationship with the new campus until 1995. They argued that the San Marcos campus would fare better in recruiting new faculty, winning state funding and building student credibility if it could continue to draw on San Diego State’s prestige as one of the state university system’s leading campuses.

Recruit Staff

But trustees, meeting in Long Beach, voted 13 to 4 to accept the recommendation of an ad-hoc trustee committee that advised that the San Marcos campus become autonomous immediately so that the new university could recruit its own staff, win its own funding and forge its own mission, independent of San Diego State.

“We have an opportunity to create a university,” said Trustee William Campbell. “I do not think the people at San Diego State should be involved in any level in what will be a $150-million project ultimately,” because the problems of trying to disengage the new campus from San Diego State in 1995 would be “overwhelming.”

State Sen. William Craven (R-Oceanside), who had shepherded preliminary legislation authorizing the study for a new campus and the resulting purchase of its 300-acre site--but who had staunchly argued that the campus remain linked to San Diego State until 1995--said he might voice his opposition to fellow legislators.

“There’s no question in my mind that we would have been better off to stay under the umbrella of San Diego State University,” a disgruntled Craven said after the trustee’s vote, which followed an hourlong discussion of the issue.

He said it was financially imprudent to authorize the recruiting of an executive staff when Thomas Day, president of San Diego State, had offered to oversee the campus through 1995.

Much of the debate over the San Marcos campus focused on a feud between Day and W. Ann Reynolds, chancellor of the CSU system. Some interpreted Wednesday’s vote as a sign of support for Reynolds as much as a decision on the merits of the issue itself.

‘Stacked Deck’

“It was clearly a stacked deck,” complained Ken Lounsbery, who chaired the San Diego State North County Advisory Council, a committee of civic, business and education executives who unanimously had favored San Diego State’s retention of the campus for another seven years.

The San Diego State off-campus center in San Marcos currently serves nearly 2,000 upper-division and graduate students, operating out of leased offices in a business and office park. University officials previously had decided to open the new campus in the fall of 1992, regardless of whether it was independent or an extension of San Diego State. After admissions of lower-division students in 1995, enrollment is projected to reach 5,000 full-time students by the year 2000, and 15,000 to 20,000 full-time students by the year 2020.