Hello, ‘Mr. Chips’ : Cal State Professor, 74, Was Present at Birth of the Campus, and It’s Still His Baby

Miles McCarthy insists that he really was going to retire this time. Really. Honestly. Truly. This would be it. Lock the doors and turn out the lights. Goodby. Sayonara. The man who was present at the creation of Cal State Fullerton 30 years ago, who was one of the founders of the university, who has a building named for himself--this man says he was ready to walk away.

Forget it.

McCarthy, 74, was there this week in the classroom and he will be there next week and in weeks to come, teaching a course on heredity to people who need the class to get their schoolteacher’s certification. Then in the fall, when he could be indulging his twin loves of sailing and gardening, he will be teaching again, this time lecturing an embryology class for a colleague who asked his help.

Somehow, it always comes back to the teaching.

McCarthy has been chairman of the school’s biology department, dean of what then was called the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, vice president for academic affairs, even acting president in 1981 while the school awaited the arrival of its new president, Jewel Plummer Cobb.

But whenever he could, he has always managed to teach.

“The only year I haven’t taught . . . ever since I got out of school, was the year I played president,” he said. “I just couldn’t manage it. All the time I was vice president (four years) I taught six units every semester. . . . I lived for those six hours.”

McCarthy has been teaching for more than half a century. For those of a certain age, he is referred to on campus as “our Mr. Chips.” For those a bit younger, like his students, he is known as a good teacher and a first-rate adviser.

An energetic man whose foot keeps bobbing up and down during an interview, who smiles frequently and often laughs aloud, McCarthy takes special pride in the Health Professions Committee, a group of 10 professors who work with students to prepare them for admittance to medical, dental or other schools that train health professionals.

Over the years, the committee, which McCarthy established, has had remarkable success. McCarthy said that in an average year, between 20 and 30 students will be recommended to a medical or dental school. Most years, nearly every student recommended is accepted. An idea of what the competition is like can be gleaned from the UC Irvine Medical School, where each year more than 3,000 students apply for about 90 openings.

McCarthy attributes the committee’s success to being careful in its selection and following up to make sure that the students do well after getting into school. Another reason, he said, is that many students who plan to go to medical school after graduation switch to new dreams as the college years go by.

“A lot of kids who want to go to professional school have no (legitimate) reason,” McCarthy said. “They look at (the television show) ‘MASH,’ or their dad tells them, or their Aunt Tillie. So they really don’t want to go, basically, but they can’t admit this.”

The committee, however, is more than willing to tell a student with poor grades that he has no chance of getting into medical school.

“There are people who will tell you--and I always hesitate to deal with these people--’God has ordained me to be a physician.’ I mean, there are people who really believe that. And they are very difficult. They might be straight C students, and no way are they going to get into professional school.”

But overall, McCarthy said, “I really think and hope (that students) are getting better,” especially those planning on medical careers.

He said that most doctors indicated that they chose medicine “to make money, to gain power, gain prestige in the community and to serve people. And I maintain that’s the wrong order.” But he said that today’s premed students seem to be putting service to patients first, as they should.

McCarthy said doctors of the future won’t make money the way they once did, pointing to attempts by corporations, insurance companies and consumer groups to put a lid on the cost of medical care. As a result, would-be doctors “have to be committed to serving people,” he added.

McCarthy himself sits on the Admissions Committee to the UCI Medical School and is able to help Cal State Fullerton students by using his personal friendships with officials of medical schools across the country.

Three of his former students are now medical school deans, and he jokes, “That doesn’t hurt either, because you can call them up and say, ‘Hey, you know, this kid’s better than you were.’ ”

When he attends a convention of the Assn. of American Medical Colleges, he makes a point of visiting medical schools in the area, taking along copies of the Cal State Fullerton curriculum and promoting the school’s program.

Once, during a year’s sabbatical, he piled his wife and two children in a van and drove across the country, visiting all the professional health care schools he could find.

He figures that of 127 medical schools nationwide that would accept Cal State students (some schools limit admissions to residents of their own state or have other restrictions), he has personally visited 80. “So I built up a good rapport with a good many out-of-state schools, and that’s very helpful.”

One former student from McCarthy’s teaching days at Pomona College is Dr. Robert E. Tranquada, dean of the USC Medical School. Tranquada calls McCarthy “a terrific guy” and “an excellent teacher.”

“He had then and always has had a very deep and real interest in his students,” Tranquada said. “He’s an unusual man who sees his role as teacher as greater than imparting knowledge, but also being a real associate and counselor to his students.” Tranquada said that McCarthy treats his pupils as “associates” in the learning process, rather than someone dispensing knowledge from above.

Tranquada said that while medical school admissions committees pay close attention to a student’s marks in college and scores on medical school admissions tests, recommendations from committees such as McCarthy’s “play a significant part in admissions.”

McCarthy’s road to Fullerton began in Pennsylvania, where in 1936 he received a bachelor of science degree from what is now West Chester State College. He applied to the University of Pennsylvania, planning to study physiology there. Instead, “lo and behold, I got accepted to medical school.”

He stayed there for seven years, teaching zoology and obtaining a Ph.D. in the research and treatment of burns but not bothering to get a medical degree. He jokes that he regrets the omission now and then: “When I walk out of (UCI) Medical School with my colleagues down there and they get into their fancy toys and I still drive a 10-year-old Volkswagen, I say, ‘There’s something wrong here.’ ”

And yet: “They remind me every once in a while, ‘You know, you love what you do, and we’re bored to death.’ ”

In 1946, a supervisor at the University of Pennsylvania asked McCarthy if he had ever considered teaching at the college level and if he had ever heard of a college in California called Pomona. The answer to both questions was “no.” But when the boss said Pomona was a good place and needed a teacher, McCarthy went to the library to do some research, learning that “it did exist and it was a decent place.”

Looking around him in Pennsylvania and seeing men who were still assistant professors at age 50 and 55, McCarthy decided to check out Pomona. “I liked what I saw. And they offered me a job. I came.”

He stayed for 13 years, becoming head of the zoology department, doing more research and sending students off to medical schools across the country--right up until the day that William Langsdorf called.

Langsdorf, a former president of Pasadena City College, had been named first president of what was originally known as Orange County State College but quickly became Cal State Fullerton.

“Bill Langsdorf called me . . . to ask me if I was interested in coming over to start a state college,” McCarthy said. “I remember we had lunch down at Cocos, down there on Commonwealth Avenue and Euclid. We talked and talked . . . and finally I said, ‘Well, just what do we have to work with?’

“He said, very matter of factly, ‘Right now, all we’ve got is a state car and a couple of fountain pens.’ ”

Still, McCarthy went with Langsdorf to a hill nearby to view the campus. What they saw was “nothing but orange groves in all directions. . . . And he said, ‘There it is.’ And I said, ‘Where?’ And he said, ‘Where the orange groves are.’ So that was my first introduction to campus.”

When he went home, McCarthy said, he told his wife that he had turned Langsdorf down. “My wife was brighter than I was. She said, ‘You know, you don’t start an institution every day.’ ” So the next morning he called Langsdorf back and said, “Can I come over to talk some more? So indeed, that’s how I came to be here.”

There wasn’t much there in the early days. Four buildings, in fact, one of which McCarthy commandeered. For his research, at one house he turned the back porch into a rat colony and the kitchen into a veterinary surgery lab.

McCarthy said that he, Langsdorf and the others who started the school wanted to provide the kind of education available at good private schools such as Pomona, Occidental and Whittier for students without the money to attend those schools. They also wanted “as much as possible to personalize the education, try to treat the students as persons and not motives,” he said.

As the university has grown (it now has more than 20,000 students), some of the personalized contact has been lost, McCarthy conceded. Yet, students who have him as an adviser say that he is there when they need him.

Barry Love, a 21-year-old junior biology major hoping to become a veterinarian, said that McCarthy is knowledgeable in various scientific fields and keeps current with various schools’ admission requirements. “He knows what courses you should take” to be accepted by graduate schools, Love said, and steers students toward those courses.

Cobb, the university president, called McCarthy “undoubtedly the best-loved person in the history” of Cal State Fullerton. “His most remarkable quality is that he genuinely cares about others,” she said, and his first concern is his students. McCarthy said he “retired” twice from the school, but “I actually never left.” Once, back around his 65th birthday, “I went to a retirement dinner. I got one of those mugs, all that kind of business.” He wound up coming back to teach, though, when the school asked him to. The second time he nearly retired was when he hit age 70, but again he opted to stay in the classroom.

McCarthy, the father of five--all of them grown--and the husband of Martha, a human resources analyst for the city of Santa Ana, gives no indication of when he might hang up his academic robes for good. In September of 1984, Cal State officials changed the name of the Science Building to McCarthy Hall. It was only the second time in the campus’ history that a building was named after a person (the first was Langsdorf Hall).

“To me, it’s still the Science Building,” he said with a laugh, even as he remembers a student telling him how nice it was to see a building named for “someone who’s alive.”

He walks past the building every day to reach his office and sees his name prominently displayed there. “It’s embarrassing,” he says offhandedly, “as well as a very nice feeling.”