Ground Broken for New University : Education: Optimism prevails at ceremony heralding Cal State San Marcos, which will take shape on the site of a former chicken ranch.

Dispensing enough attaboys to satisfy a Super Bowl winner, state educators and civic leaders Friday ceremoniously broke ground for Cal State San Marcos--a campus that one day is expected to grow as large as the flagship San Diego State University, which spawned its birth.

The ground breaking, beneath an arch of balloons and an intensely blue sky, attracted about 200 people to the site of a former chicken ranch. Several hundred yards away, rock-crushing machines rumbled where one day a row of instructional buildings will create something akin to--the architects say--an Italian hillside community.

An autumn, 1992, completion date is expected for the first phase of campus construction--including the William A. Craven Hall, the six-story administration, faculty and temporary library building named for the state senator who was all but knighted Friday for his lobbying efforts cum laude that led to the state’s approval of the new university.

In the meantime, and starting this fall, upper-division and graduate students, first numbering only in the hundreds, will attend classes in leased buildings about 2 miles away, where San Diego State University has maintained its North County Center.

It was the success of that satellite campus and the projected growth of North County that persuaded state legislators and California State University trustees to authorize construction of the San Marcos campus, the 20th in the CSU system and the first new state university in 25 years.

“We’re planning a university to empower our students to succeed in the 21st Century,” pronounced a beaming Bill Stacy, the founding president of the university who, with other officials and civic dignitaries, donned scholastic mortarboards instead of hard hats to turn the first shovels of dirt.

Stacy announced that a fund-raising effort not even one month old to develop an endowment for the university already has fetched nearly $100,000 in private donations--and more checks were turned over to him on Friday as civic boosters talked of North County coming of age.

“San Marcos used to be the butt of everyone’s jokes,” said Assemblyman Robert C. Frazee (R-Carlsbad) from the podium. “When people used to ask us where we wanted to go to college, we’d say SMU and they’d say, ‘You mean Southern Methodist University?’ This (new university) is one of the last things we ever thought would happen.”

Said CSU Trustees chairwoman Marianthi Lansdale, “To the students, the education you’ll receive in the classrooms and labs that will soon fill this hillside will be the best we have to offer.”

Added Craven, referring to the future of the rustic, undeveloped acreage of the one-time chicken ranch, “I see it as an illustrious, multifaceted jewel set in the diadem of northern San Diego County.”

Classes for the first 500 upper-division students will begin this fall with majors in biology, business accounting, business management, English, history, liberal studies, mathematics, psychology, sociology and social studies; graduate students can pursue a credential in elementary education.

About 3,800 students are expected by the fall of 1992, when the campus will feature Craven Hall, two academic buildings and support buildings. Lower-division students will be enrolled starting in the fall of 1995--by which time the first phases of a permanent library and gymnasium will have been completed, as well as additional instructional buildings.