Changes in Store for Cal State Campus

In some ways, Gertrude Stein’s often repeated refrain about Oakland--”there is no there there”--describes Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson.

Opened almost 30 years ago, the school still has no student union center. On-campus housing consists of one building for 350 students. Of the 346 acres to which the university holds title, fewer than 100 have been developed.

Robert Detweiler plans to change all of that.

A 21-year-veteran of the California State University system, Detweiler recently took over as head of the 8,100-student campus, becoming its fourth president in only six years.

He replaced Richard Butwell, who suffered a fatal heart attack in February, 1987, two weeks after California State University Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds suggested he find another job. John Brownell, who recently retired, served as the school’s interim president.

Detweiler, 50, says he plans to move forward with several major construction projects that he hopes will give the campus some added vitality and enhance its attractiveness to prospective students.

“We’ve got to get a student union,” Detweiler said in an interview. “And I don’t know if you’ve seen our cafeteria, but it is very modest. It is very modest.”

Even a few more pizza or other fast-food joints near campus would be a welcome sight, Detweiler said.

But presiding over the building of new facilities may be the easiest task he faces.

Detweiler arrives at the university at a time when it is still trying to recover from problems that date back to Butwell’s tenure, including a dramatic enrollment drop and poor showings by students on a state qualifying test for teachers. Progress has been made on both fronts, university officials say, but more needs to be done.

Moreover, Detweiler inherits a campus that suffers from poor morale among some faculty members and has failed to establish a strong identity for itself with the South Bay communities it serves, according to school and Cal State officials.

Indeed, Detweiler says area residents probably know more about Cal State campuses miles away in such places as Northridge or Fullerton than they do about Dominguez Hills.

“Bob’s job will be to carve out some kind of image” for Dominguez Hills, said Tony Moye, deputy vice chancellor for academic affairs for the 20-campus Cal State system.

“The campus has suffered from this perception that their academic standards are unclear or lacking,” Moye added.

Said Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert, who serves on a Dominguez Hills’ advisory board comprising local business and political leaders: “I think it has an undeserved image problem. . . . People drive right by and go over to (Cal State) Long Beach.”

Detweiler, a former history professor, most recently served as vice president for academic affairs at Cal State San Bernardino. Both the San Bernardino and Carson campuses are similar in that they serve a large number of part-time students who are older than typical college students and hold down jobs during the day. The average Dominguez Hills student is 28 years old.

The two universities are also alike in that many of their students are the first in their families to attend college. Detweiler, the son of farm laborers who was the first in his family to go to college, says he feels like a kindred spirit to these students.

“I find some personal satisfaction in a place that helps a lot of first-generation college students,” said Detweiler, who left home at the age of 13 and supported himself by working on dairy farms around Sacramento.

Detweiler said an immediate goal at Dominguez Hills is to break ground next spring on the long-planned student union building. The center, which is expected to cost $9 million and take 18 months to complete, will be constructed where a soccer field now stands.

Other Buildings

Also in the works is a proposal to construct 300 more housing units on campus, Detweiler said. The units could be completed by the fall of 1991, and the university hopes to build another 300 units soon afterward, he said.

Another plan, still in the early stages, calls for development of 56 acres of vacant land on the school’s west side near the velodrome that was built for the 1984 Olympics. The land might be developed in conjunction with a private developer, with a portion used for educational purposes, he said.

Detweiler and other college officials said the university has been striving to improve the scores its students receive on the California Basic Educational Skills Test, the statewide test given to prospective teachers.

Dominguez Hills received a spate of bad publicity in 1983 when two-thirds of its baccalaureate students who took the exam failed to get a passing score. Last year, 52% passed the test. The statewide average among Cal State campuses was 74%.

“It is still a challenge for us,” Detweiler said. “Our intent is to grab these students as early as possible . . . and start gearing them into the right classes.”

Faculty Concerns

Although he has only been on campus since Aug. 1, Detweiler said he has heard--and believes--that morale among some faculty members is low. Dick Williams, a computer science professor and head of the college’s Academic Senate, said faculty members are “a little bit lost in their identity here.”

“The faculty and staff in administration are enormously well-qualified, but they have been disillusioned,” Williams said.

The high turnover in the president’s chair has probably led to some of the disenchantment, Detweiler said. Also, because of the school’s enrollment problems, it has not been able to hire new teachers that would keep faculty members already on staff challenged. Some departments have not hired any new teachers for a decade, he said. The school has 256 full-time and 315 part-time teachers.

“People have been looking too much at how can we protect ourselves, how can we sustain the institution . . . rather than thinking about what new programs can we start or what new activities might be launched,” Detweiler said.

Enrollment Recovery

Increasing enrollment is the key to lifting the college out from under a “sense of being somewhat beleaguered,” Detweiler said. During the four-year period from 1982 to 1986, enrollment declined by 16% at the college, but has been steadily increasing in recent years. The current enrollment of 8,100 is just slightly lower than the number enrolled in the early ‘80s.

Detweiler said he will be disappointed if enrollment does not grow 3% annually under his leadership. Although he has no easy answers on how to attract more students, Detweiler said he plans to mount an aggressive effort to strengthen the university’s ties with local community colleges. An estimated 80% of the university’s new students hail from such colleges.

Detweiler said he also intends to mount an aggressive community outreach program to promote and “sell” the school to political and business leaders--something he believes the school has failed to do sufficiently in the past.

“I intend to be seen personally, and have a small coterie of ambassadors,” he said.

Despite the negative publicity Dominguez Hills has had to endure in recent years, Detweiler said he believes the school does not suffer so much from a bad image as from no image at all.

That view is shared by Moye, the deputy vice chancellor, who believes parents and their children probably do not “think of Dominguez Hills first or even second” when they choose a college. It is up to Detweiler to change that, he said.

“I know he knows what he got into,” Moye said.