2 Emerge From Visits as the Favorites to Lead Cal State San Marcos

With four finalists more clearly defined and two front-runners having emerged in a consensus of North County civic leaders, trustees today are scheduled to appoint the founding president for the new California State University campus in San Marcos.

A fifth candidate, Jane Milley--the controversial former chancellor of a North Carolina art school who resigned after staff criticism--withdrew her name from the presidential race after the most recent round of candidate interviews, a CSU spokesman said Monday.

The selection, culminating a four-month search that attracted 187 candidates, follows a series of meetings, interviews and receptions last week in San Marcos with the finalists. That drill--which, along with background checks of the finalists at their current and previous campuses, is said to be the most important element of the search--gave faculty, staff, students and community leaders their first personal look at the candidates.

Moreover, it allowed officials to measure how well the finalists interacted with interest groups, both one-to-one basis and in large groups.

Campus Will Open in 1992

The trustees’ choice will be asked to take over July 1 as head of the CSU system’s 20th campus, and the first new one in more than 20 years. The campus will open in the fall of 1992 to upper-division students and in the fall of 1995 to freshmen and sophomores.

Just 10 days ago, members of a North County citizens’ advisory committee were expressing concern that none of the candidates brought to San Marcos had the qualifications they had hoped for. Today, they are decidedly more impressed with at least some of the finalists.

“We’re quite a bit more comfortable,” said Frank Aleshire, a member of the committee and the former city manager of Carlsbad. “We were favorably impressed with all of them.”

Other advisory committee members, including some who did not want to be quoted for attribution, said one candidate clearly didn’t pass muster--Milley, who resigned amid controversy as chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts and previously was a dean of the school of fine arts at Cal State Long Beach and served as an arts consultant to CSU Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds.

But CSU trustees will not evaluate the controversial candidate today, since Milley withdrew her name from consideration after last week’s round of interviews in San Marcos, said Steve MacCarthy, a CSU spokesman.

Neither Milley nor Caesar Naples, CSU vice chancellor for faculty and staff relations and coordinator of the presidential search, could be reached Monday for comment.

Although her reasons for withdrawal remain unclear, Milley had been under intense scrutiny following her abrupt exit from the North Carolina school. Criticism of her managerial style began almost as soon as she became chancellor, but it intensified last fall with faculty members, students and administrators publicly voicing their nearly unanimous lack of confidence in her administrative ability.

Some of the Complaints

Among complaints were assertions that she had discouraged advice from colleagues, didn’t delegate tasks, and was abrasive to her staff and insensitive to the school’s supporters.

Indeed, even Sen. Bill Craven (R-Carlsbad)--who played an instrumental role in gathering legislative support for the new CSU campus--expressed doubts about whether Milley would be suitable.

According to persons closely involved with the search, two candidates clearly surfaced as front-runners after last week’s session, in which each candidate spent from 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. in San Marcos, in small group meetings as well as community receptions.

‘Eating Out of His Hand’

The two are Carol Guardo, a psychologist and president of Rhode Island College since 1986, and Paul Weller, a chemist who has served as president of Framingham State College in Massachusetts since 1985 and who, for the seven previous years, was vice president for academic affairs at Cal Poly Pomona.

The two other candidates, falling in the middle of the small pack, are Bill Stacy, a speech communications professor and president of Southeast Missouri State University, and Victor Wong, a physicist who is provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan.

Stacy was generally described as “too folksy” for the post. Wong, although generally considered the strongest academician among the finalists, was characterized as not possessing the outgoing personality considered valuable for a founding president.

Both Weller and Guardo received high marks from faculty and students, but Weller--who unlike the other candidates received a toast at the conclusion of his public reception--was said to be more charismatic and gregarious in a large group than the soft-spoken Guardo.

“He had people eating out of his hand,” said one person who attended the reception.

Weller also was favorably reviewed because of his background. He now is president of a publicly funded university, within a statewide higher education system, in a high-technology suburb 30 miles outside of Boston that operates in the shadow of more prestigious institutions. A parallel can be drawn with San Marcos and San Diego. Furthermore, he has experience within the CSU system, given his job at Cal Poly Pomona.

Today, trustees will interview each of the four for an hour and receive reports from the search committee, be presented with the results of background checks on each and get written opinion from students, faculty, staff and community leaders as to their preferences.

In a process criticized by some for being too hurried, the trustees will then meet immediately afterward in private to make their selection.

Among the 24 trustees, five participated on the search committee, which was headed by Trustee Ralph Pesqueira, a San Diego businessman.

Lee Thibadeau, the mayor of San Marcos and a member of the 13-member presidential search committee appointed by CSU trustees to aid in their search, said he would have preferred that the search committee, which did not rank the five finalists by preference, had been given one last chance to whittle the list before the trustees’ action today.

Felt Hurried

“Now that we’ve seen them all in our community, meeting with the various groups, I would have liked to have discussed our recommendation one more time before giving it to the trustees,” Thibadeau said. “I’ll have written my own, independent report, but I wish we could have done it as an entire committee.”

Other members of the search committee said privately that they, too, felt hurried and wondered how trustees could give due consideration to the constituent groups and the candidates, and make their decision by this afternoon.

CSU officials, on the other hand, say the search and screening has proved itself successful over and over again, and are pleased by the quality and background of the San Marcos candidates.

Aleshire said the value of last week’s sessions with the candidates in San Marcos was the opportunity to see how well they interacted with community leaders and university faculty, staff and students.

“I felt they all were pretty equal as far as their academic background, and all had reasonably good experience,” Aleshire said. “What separated them was in terms of how they seemed to fit in the community, the chemistry, the sense of how they would be received in the North County community.”

Aleshire said he wouldn’t identify the top two candidates, but said: “The two we picked on top would go over big in our community and fit in well, we think.

“We feel strongly we need someone who’s more than just a top academic scholar. We need someone who will go out into the community, show the flag, develop support and, in general, be more public than would be a president who would be coming to an established university and who could be more academically oriented,” he said.

“That’s how we, the advisory board, made our cut, and we don’t have reservations with the top two,” Aleshire said.

Bill Bollins, president of the student council serving the North County center of San Diego State University, which gave birth to the new university, said student leaders also scored Guardo and Weller highest of the five.

“Of the bunch, the chemistry was best with those two,” he said.

Questions to Finalists

Questions put to the finalists ranged from their success in rallying faculty support for new programs to whether they would support the sale of condoms on campus. To that question, Stacy said he does not allow the sale of condoms on his campus and Wong, Weller and Guardo do.

The candidates also were asked what they would most--and least--enjoy doing as president of San Marcos.

Weller said he most looks forward to developing community support groups, and he most dislikes dealing with the “nitty-gritty” details of campus construction.

Guardo said she, too, is most excited about building community support for the university, but dislikes being a “ceremonial presence” at functions.

Wong said he most enjoys developing curriculum plans and recruiting faculty, and he dislikes having to resolve personnel disputes.

Stacy said he most looks forward to community interaction, and he most dislikes the drudgery of paper work.

Times staff writer Gene Yasuda contributed to this story.