Nucleus Group of 10 Named to Faculty at Cal State San Marcos

The first 10 faculty members at the new state university in San Marcos were named Friday by President Bill Stacy, a core group of academicians who will define the university’s scholastic mission and, from the outset, brand it with at least two areas of speciality.

One of the incoming professors has established a research center on gerontology, which he will relocate to San Marcos, and another is developing a library of Spanish-language literature for children and adolescents.

The charter faculty members were enlisted from such places as Stanford University, the University of Illinois, Pomona College, the University of California at Irvine, and from three campuses within the California State University system: Chico, Fresno and Fullerton.

The founding faculty also represent a San Diego flavor of sorts. One of Stacy’s hires, Isabel Schon, a professor of reading education and library science at Arizona State University, maintains a home in La Jolla. Another, Patricia Worden, who is chairman of the department of psychology at Cal State Fullerton, earned her Ph.D from UC San Diego and lives in Del Mar with her husband, attorney Dwight Worden.

‘As Good as Any’

“This group is as good as any faculty nucleus that could be found in the nation,” said Stacy.

The 10 were culled from more than 1,270 applicants from around the country who sought the tenured faculty positions at the new university, which will field its first classes in 13 months in temporary classrooms until the campus’ first permanent structures are completed by the fall of 1992.

The new faculty members will begin work in San Marcos in early September, and be paid from $60,000 to $64,000 a year--the upper limit for professors in the CSU system. They are:

- Therese Baker, director of the urban studies program at De Paul University before moving eight months ago to Stanford, where she is assistant to the vice provost. Baker has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.

- Larry Cohen, a professor in an endowed chair in biology at Pomona College near Los Angeles and a specialist in genetic engineering who also has taught at Rutgers University and UCLA, where he earned his doctorate in biology.

- Joan Gunderson, a professor of colonial and American history at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where she is also the director of women’s studies. She earned her doctorate in history from Notre Dame.

- Bernard Hinton, a professor of organizational behavior and management at Cal State Chico and a former professor at Indiana University. Hinton got his doctorate in management from Stanford.

- William Liu, now a distinguished professor and director of the Asian-American Research Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned his doctorate in sociology from Florida State University and is establishing a research center in Hong Kong on the aging of the Asian population.

- Newton Marguiles, a former dean and now a professor of management at UC Irvine’s graduate school of management. He got his doctorate in engineering management from UCLA.

- Kenneth Brooks Reid, chairman of the department of mathematics at Louisiana State University, who also has taught at The Johns Hopkins University. He got his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Illinois.

- Isabel Schon, professor of reading education and library science at Arizona State University, who earned a doctorate in elementary education and reading from the University of Colorado and who wants to establish the Spanish-language library in San Marcos.

- Kenneth Seib, chairman of the department of English at Cal State Fresno, who was a Fulbright professor of American literature at universities in West Germany and Norway. He got his doctorate in English from the University of Pittsburgh and did post-doctorate work at UC San Diego in 1978.

- Patricia Worden, now chairman of the department of psychology at Cal State Fullerton. She earned her doctorate in experimental psychology from UC San Diego, where she had a postdoctoral fellowship at its Center for Human Information Processing.

In addition, Stacy said Friday, he hired Dorothy Lloyd, a professor of education at San Francisco State University, to serve as a consultant to him on curriculum development in education. Lloyd had not originally applied during the search process for the core faculty and was specifically recruited by Stacy for the job. She earned her doctorate in education at UCLA.

Finally, Stacy hired Marian Reid, the former associate director of the Louisiana State University Library, as interim director of the new university’s library.

Of the dozen hired by Stacy to help develop the university’s curriculum and scholastic reputation, six are women and three are members of ethnic minorities: a Chinese, a Latino and a black.

Stacy said he hopes to hire, within days, two more core faculty members with specialities in education--one from the University of South Carolina and one from UC Riverside. Both are women, and one is black.

As Good as a UC Faculty

Stacy said he also is looking to hire consultants in specific areas of science, engineering and the fine arts.

“This group is better than I had hoped for,” Stacy said of his first dozen. “We’ve pulled together faculty who are not only typical of the best professors in a system like ours, but are as good as a UC faculty where the focus is on research and professional degrees.

“Between them, they’ve written nearly 150 scholarly books, literally hundreds of juried or refereed journal articles and hundreds of scholarly presentations to national conferences. They’ve held nearly 50 editorships of major journals and represent 80 terms of leadership in learned societies.”

Those professors who could be reached Friday for comment echoed the sentiment offered by Baker, reached at her office at Stanford:

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to start a new university. There aren’t many chances like this.”

Baker said that, with proper planning, Cal State San Marcos should be able to develop a curriculum most appropriate for the community and California’s changing demographics.

“I’m at a major institution--Stanford--that is having to refashion itself in several ways to address concerns about how effectively it is serving minority students. But San Marcos can start from the beginning in recognizing it will have a large number of minority students. We can build a curriculum and a faculty to address those issues right from the start,” she said.

She said she is also interested in how higher education can better address the specific challenges presented by women and older students as well as whether universities should prepare students in liberal arts or for specific careers.

Central Issues

“These are the kinds of central issues that will be critical as we establish the new university,” Baker said.

Schon called her appointment to the new university “the most exciting thing in my life, although there’s always apprehension when you start something new.”

Schon said she plans to continue a project she started at Arizona State to develop what may become the world’s largest collection of Spanish-language literature for young readers. It is to be made available as references, research or possibly for lending.

“As recently as two years ago, children could not check out books from the children’s section at the National Public Library in Mexico City,” she said. “School libraries in Mexico are non-existent, and most children cannot afford to buy their own books.”

The San Marcos collection, she suggested, will be made available to teachers, parents, researchers and other librarians who, in turn, can then order specific copies of what they like from the publishers. The books would not only be valuable to Spanish-speaking readers, but of use to the English-speaking who are learning to speak and read Spanish and are searching for reading material other than Spanish-language magazines and textbooks.

Larry Cohen was on a genetic engineering research trip to the Netherlands and could not be reached Friday for comment. But his wife, Eleanor, who served on the Claremont City Council for 10 years--two as its mayor--and who is on the faculty of UCLA’s public policy program, said she is ready to move to San Diego County.

“We’re already in escrow on a home in Vista,” she said. “We used to live in Pacific Beach years ago, and it’s exciting to be moving back to the county. The place has grown.”