FULLERTON : CSUF Faculty May Shun Leader Search

Dissatisfied at not winning a greater role in the search for a new Cal State Fullerton president, faculty leaders are recommending that the Academic Senate vote today to withdraw from the process altogether.

“Withdrawing our faculty from the presidential search committee is a serious and regrettable action,” the CSUF Academic Senate’s eight-member executive committee said in a statement released Wednesday.

But unless campus representatives can help collect background data on job candidates and make final recommendations on a replacement for university President Jewel Plummer Cobb, participation on the search committee is “of limited value,” said Jack Bedell, president of the campus’s Academic Senate and one of three CSUF members now on the committee.

Cobb, 66, is retiring July 31 after eight years as president of the 25,000-student campus. The 12-member search committee is to recommend a candidate before the CSU Board of Trustees’ May meeting. Trustees will make the final choice.

Fullerton’s faculty and students have sought greater involvement in selection of a successor to Cobb for the last few months. In frustration, the nearly 50-member Academic Senate passed a resolution March 8 threatening to recall their committee representatives if Cal State University Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds failed to give a “positive response” to their request.

Reynolds, in a letter received Monday, said existing procedures have proven effective, and that the Board of Trustees is unlikely to change them. Some students and professors caution that withdrawal from the president search committee could leave them without any voice in choosing their future leader.

Lawrence B. de Graaf, a history professor at CSUF since it opened in 1959, said:

“If the faculty boycotts the presidential selection, whoever the poor soul is that is chosen as president has the stigma of having been chosen without faculty consultation. That, I think, would be an unfortunate way to begin any presidency.”