Wanted: A President to Build a New University Around

It wasn’t your typical help-wanted ad for a job in San Marcos.

The job description called for someone who is visionary, creative, a leader, a team player, a salesman, a personnel administrator, a business manager, a financial planner, an effective communicator and an accomplished academician. Preference, as they say, will be given to those who can walk on water.

The ad ran once in a trade journal and, combined with a targeted direct mail campaign, helped generate 180 job applicants from throughout the United States. By June 13, one man or woman will be selected for the job that carries with it the title of president, California State University, San Marcos--at a site of a one-time chicken ranch.

On and around this person, a university will be built, the first new one in the California State University system in 20 years and, according to the American Assn. of State Colleges and Universities, the first one of its size and scope in 10 years in the United States.

The people making the search are confident that they won’t get a slouch for the job.

50 Presidents Among Candidates

The names of the candidates are not publicly disclosed, but among them are 50 current presidents of universities and colleges. They come from private schools and public ones, including from the California State University system itself.

“It’s the largest turnout, the largest showing of interest, we’ve ever had for any of our presidencies,” said Caesar Naples, vice chancellor for faculty and staff relations for the CSU system and the staff executive leading the search for the president.

“I’m impressed by the turnout, but I’m not surprised,” Naples said. “I can understand why almost anyone, from the East Coast to the West, north to south, large university or small, would be fascinated and captivated by the challenge of starting a new university. It would be the 20th campus in an outstanding public higher education system coupled with a wonderful location.”

Letters Also Sent Out

In addition to the ad that ran in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Naples sent letters about the San Marcos post to 1,400 college and university presidents and chancellors across the country, as well as 500-plus letters to heads of minority organizations involved in education, soliciting nominations for the job.

The 13-member search committee has since narrowed the list to 15 semifinalists based on the strength of their resumes and a reading of their one- and two-page cover letters.

Eleven of the 15 have already been personally interviewed by the search committee, which includes trustees, professors, alumni, a university staff employee and a student. The final four candidates will be interviewed May 24.

After the interviews, the 15 will be narrowed to three to five finalists whose names will then become public and who will be taken to the San Marcos campus site early next month for further interviews and meetings with university and community leaders. During the same period, background checks will be conducted on their home campuses, where a more accurate picture of the candidate may develop.

Finally, on June 13, the finalists will be interviewed again by the full board of trustees in Long Beach.

University trustees are expected to make--and announce--their decision that same day.

There will be little negotiation between trustees and the applicant; starting salary will be about $106,000 a year, plus benefits.

“All 15 people we’re interviewing now meet all the requirements. Obviously, they’re different people with different strengths--some are stronger in one area than another,” Naples said. “But we’re in the fortunate position of not having to say, ‘This particular person can’t do X, but he does Y quite well.’ In our situation, we have people who meet all the qualifications, and now it’s a question of the fit, of who will be best for our needs.

‘Finest Educators in Country’

“We’re looking at the finest educators in the country,” Naples said. “It’s my job to be aware of all the presidential vacancies in the country, and to see who is available to fill them. I can tell you we’re getting the lion’s share of the best people in our search for San Marcos.”

And who wouldn’t want the job? An offer to go out and build a university is a once-in-a-career opportunity. Hire your deans. Recruit your core faculty. Design a curriculum. Attract the students. Build a marriage between campus and community. Create a reputation.

It would seem, then, that the best man or woman for the job is the trustees’ for the picking.

Tom Day, president of San Diego State University, isn’t so sure.

Day contends that the best person for the job will have to be convinced to take it. Anyone less cautious about stepping into the unknown should be viewed warily, he said.

“When you’re looking for someone who is very good, as a general rule you’re looking at someone who is doing well where he is, and who probably wants to stay there, and is not desperate for a new job elsewhere,” Day said.

‘Don’t Come Looking for You’

“You could post almost any job and get 100 to 150 candidates. There are groups of people who will apply for anything, and may not be qualified,” he said. “When you’re in private industry, when you look for a CEO, you usually have to persuade that person to come to you. They don’t come looking for you.

“That shouldn’t be any different with a university president,” Day said. “The best people come from that small cadre who have to be persuaded they want your job more than they want their own. The shoe is on the foot of the CSU to persuade the right person to come. If they get down to three, four or five, hopefully you’ll be dealing with someone whose mind-set is that you have to persuade me that I want the job, that it’s better than the one I already have or is better than an offer I am considering elsewhere.”

Day was not asked to participate in the search for a president at San Marcos, although he might seem a logical choice, given that SDSU planted the seed for the campus when it opened its North County Center in Vista in 1979 with 148 students. Because of its success, and the population growth in North County, the state Legislature agreed that a full-fledged university should be built, and the 300-acre site in San Marcos was purchased. The campus will open in the fall of 1992 with upper-division and graduate students, and in 1995 will open to freshmen and sophomores as well.

But Day is not popular in the highest ranks of the chancellor’s office in Long Beach. His infighting with headquarters, characterized by some as a power struggle between him and Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds, is a poorly kept secret.

The leverage lacking with Day and his many local supporters--including State Assemblyman Bill Craven (R-Carlsbad)--was evident last year when they unsuccessfully argued to CSU trustees that the San Marcos campus should remain under the wings of SDSU as a satellite campus until at least 1995, to give it a running start. But trustees, at the recommendation of Reynolds, opted for the immediate establishment of the autonomous campus, partly so that, with its own president, it can begin formulating its own curriculum, core faculty and identity.

Opening Is 4th in 2 Years

The San Marcos presidency opening, Naples noted, is the fourth over the past two years within the CSU system, and through that repeated presidential search process his office has an extensive knowledge of who is, and isn’t, on the job market.

Naples won’t say whether the chancellor’s office has attempted to recruit specific candidates for the presidency of San Marcos. But the office has done it in the past.

A case in point is John Pfau, who in 1962 was a dean at the fledgling Sonoma State College, situated at the time in a row of garden apartments before a permanent campus was built about 70 miles north of San Francisco. Pfau, busily hiring faculty members and establishing a new curriculum in social sciences, was asked by the chancellor’s office to apply for the job as founding president of Cal State San Bernardino--a university that existed only on paper.

“I knew a college was opening up somewhere in Southern California, but I didn’t know they were starting the search for a president until I got a call from someone in the chancellor’s office who knew about my professional career,” Pfau said. He said he was flattered by the request that he apply for the job and he is unsure if he would have applied on his own.

He was founding president of Cal State San Bernardino until his retirement in 1982.

Pfau said he believes he got the job because, at the dean level, he had practical experience in building an academic department from the ground up. By extension, trustees decided, he could build an entire university.

Pfau later served on four presidential search committees--including the one that led to Day’s selection as president of SDSU. And, like Day, Pfau is an advocate of seeking out specific people for the job. But he also agrees with the chancellor’s office that the best candidate may simply nominate himself after reading the job announcement in a trade publication.

“There’s no question that, if you know somebody who has the right kind of background, skills and ability, you ask him to apply and you may end up with a good person,” he said. “But there are a lot of good people out there who you might not know, so you advertise and spread the word, too. You find a lot of good people that way.”

For his part, Day was a vice chancellor at the College Park campus of the University of Maryland when he took over as president of SDSU in 1978. “I was perfectly happy there and wasn’t looking around,” he said. But a friend nominated him for the SDSU presidency and he pursued it, partly because “I wanted to see San Diego. When it came to that stage of the interviews, I decided to fly out and look at the place.”

Day said visiting the campus convinced him he wanted the job, because of “its spirit, the atmosphere, the campus life and a tremendous faculty that was very alive and interesting.” Such sales points don’t exist when trying to persuade a university executive to commit to a non-existent campus, he noted.

Being a founding president “is too chancy,” Day said. “It could be a very attractive job if you’ve got the state giving you money for buildings and operations and the chancellor’s office is behind you and the board is behind you so when the inevitable foul-ups occur during the first few years, they don’t turn from you.

“But it can be an absolute quagmire, too,” Day said. “The faculty can harass you if you don’t hire this person or that. The funds can dry up.”

Day said he is especially doubtful that the search committee will find a sitting president in his 50s who wants the job. “It’s most unlikely that a really talented, good-working, sitting president of that age would want to start over again. You’ve already gotten the adulation of being called president. You won’t get anything new in being president of a small, unknown institution that you haven’t already gotten where you are. If an older president really wants it, I’d be worried about why.

Challenge for Younger Person

“For a younger president, 45 or 40 at the youngest, it may be a real challenge to start in mud and build a monument--and I might apply myself, if I was that young,” Day said. “But the trustees would have to persuade me. My frame of mind would be, ‘Show me why I should want it.’ ”

Others see it differently.

Ted Marchese, vice president of the American Assn. for Higher Education and author of “The Search Committee Handbook,” said a role as a founding president holds certain allure to people on a mission, including sitting presidents elsewhere.

“Here’s a chance to involve yourself in areas you really care about, but with a clean slate--increasing minority participation or improving faculty scholarship or better serving the host community or making the school more accessible to adult, part-time students. There’s no seat better to advance those things than as president of a new university,” Marchese said.

A founding presidency, he said, “is the kind of task that would excite the most talented individuals. Here’s a chance to start from scratch. It would definitely interest many sitting presidents who are frustrated in their current situations and welcome a chance to run with some of their own ideas in a fresh venture.

“I know a lot of presidents who are 50 or 55 and who are not burned out. They have lots of energy and still have fire in their belly,” Marchese said.

Reputable Dean May Surface

Others say a reputable dean, experienced in curriculum development and faculty hiring, may surface as the president.

Among the 15 semifinalists, according to search team members, are candidates who have, to one degree or another, been involved with establishing new colleges elsewhere and are familiar with starting from scratch.

The selection of a president will probably turn political at some point, Marchese said.

“There are many more competing interests and constituencies in a presidential appointment than there are in a simpler, inside appointment such as that of a dean,” he said.

“The governor will have an interest. The board members will. The alumni, the administrators, the faculty, the staff, the students, wealthy donors and even the surrounding community,” Marchese said.

Sandra Punch, coordinator of student services at the SDSU North County Center, was assigned to the search committee to lend a university staff perspective to the search. She says she is doing that.

Motivation of Staff

“We want someone who understands and is committed to affirmative action and believes in the continuing education and motivation of the staff, someone who is an open communicator with the staff and who will listen to the people working for him, sharing in our expertise,” Punch said.

Fellow committee member E. Nicholas Genovese, a professor of classics at SDSU, said he is looking for “a proven administrator with a record at a reputable institution--a university--who has an academic background of publication that would gain the respect immediately of every professor at the institution.”

Added Genovese: “I’m not disappointed in who we have before us. We have people who can do the job right.”

Genovese said he is not sure if any of the semifinalists have to be sold on the job, despite the position of his own university president. “Even if someone is satisfied in their current position, I’d expect them to see this as an extraordinary opportunity and not hesitate to come and be a founding president. The people I see are eager, not to escape somewhere else, but because they think this is really good for them.”

CSU Trustee and San Diego businessman Ralph Pesqueira is chairman of the search committee and said he brings the bias of a businessman to the selection.

‘A Dynamic Personality’

“I’m looking for a chief executive officer with a dynamic personality who will not only be able to communicate with the community, but with contractors, deans and faculty members,” Pesqueira said. “He’s going to have to have the ability to have a dozen things running through his mind at the same time, have a take-charge attitude and not spend a great deal of time in personal decision making. I want him to have confidence and be willing to make a mistake if he at least makes his decision quickly--and make adjustments quickly.”

Pesqueira said he has detected a difference among the candidates he has so far interviewed for the job.

“I remember one person making the comment that it would be a tremendous opportunity to do something fresh. With some of our candidates, you can see their independence. Others aren’t. The more independent ones are the ones really excited about building a campus,” he said.

Patricia LaCrowix, with the respected Los Angeles executive search firm Korn-Ferry International, said she has found during eight years of searching for campus administrators that finding a president for an established institution calls for different criteria than for finding one to start up a new campus.

It’s one thing to look for a presidential candidate “who can bring a certain level of sophistication to a well-established operation. Some people thrive on that,” she said. “But there are others who are excellent in start-up situations, a roll-up-the-sleeves, hands-on approach to setting up an institution from scratch.

“Some people would be overwhelmed by that, and others would be challenged and excited,” she said.

Ira Krinsky, who runs his own Los Angeles-based headhunter firm specializing in education, said one of the initial challenges of the San Marcos president “will be to convince people in town that the university is a good thing. He’s going to have to allay the fear of people who are against growth and who want to make sure this university won’t be a behemoth, the tail that wags the dog.”

Said Pesqueira: “Each of us on the committee has his or her own idea of what a president looks like, true or false. I am quite surprised at the caliber of the people who are applying for this job. I was overwhelmed.”

The search has been enlightening, Pesqueira said.

Some of the candidates looked “so good on paper--their resumes were far and away the best in the group--we wondered, ‘Why not hire this guy today? Why look further?’ But, in the interviews, the guy didn’t cut it. You ask yourself, ‘Is this the same guy we read about on the resume? What happened to him?’ ”

Conversely, he said, some applicants had sketchy resumes. “But, when they walk in and sit down, they command your attention and you think, ‘This guy is great!’ ”

Pesqueira said he expects to learn even more about the finalists when they are taken to the San Marcos site for still more interviews with others.

“I was told of a previous search where an excellent candidate passed the interview with the committee and had an excellent resume, but then he was taken out to the campus for interviews.

“At 12 noon he said he had to take a nap,” Pesqueira said. “Needless to say, he didn’t get the job. He didn’t have the stamina for it.”

These 13 Are Looking for Pioneer Educator

Thirteen people sit on the Presidential Selection Advisory Committee to conduct the search for the founding president of California State University, San Marcos.

Chairman of the committee is San Diego businessman and CSU Trustee Ralph Pesqueira, owner of the popular El Indio Mexican restaurants in San Diego, a member of the San Diego Planning Commission and an SDSU alumnus.

Other members are:

* Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds.

* Trustees Chairman Marianthi Lansdale and trustees William Campbell of Carlsbad and Martha C. Gallgatter of Bakersfield.

* Curtis L. McCray, president of Cal State Long Beach.

* E. Nicholas Genovese, professor of classics and chairman of San Diego State University’s University Senate.

* Harold Goldwhite, professor of chemistry at Cal State Los Angeles and recipient of its outstanding professor award.

* Sandra Wilcox, professor of psychology at Cal State Dominguez Hills and a founding faculty member there.

* Sandra Punch, coordinator of student services for SDSU’s North County Center in San Marcos.

* Lee Thibadeau, mayor of San Marcos.

* Ronald Kendrick, senior vice president of California First Bank and an SDSU alumnus.

* Elizabeth Cassidy, president of the Associated Students at the SDSU North County Center.