FULLERTON : Cal State Picks Dean of Student Services

Concluding a national search that lasted nearly two years, Cal State Fullerton has hired a dean from Skidmore College in New York to oversee services for the campus’s 24,750 students, the university announced Wednesday.

Robbie L. Nayman, dean of student services at Skidmore, was chosen CSUF’s vice president for student services from a field of more than 150 candidates. Her appointment to the $70,000-a-year post is effective May 21.

“She has a sense of mission that will provide the vision and agenda for moving student services through the 1990s,” CSUF President Jewel Plummer Cobb said of Nayman, an associate professor of psychology at Skidmore and dean for student affairs at the Saratoga Springs campus since 1988.

In Fullerton, Nayman will oversee a $6-million budget and a staff of 170 that provides students with such services as career development, financial aid, housing, health, counseling, testing and international education.

Nayman, 52, said she is “extremely excited” about the challenge facing her at Fullerton, where most students commute to school and where the lack of student involvement in the campus has been of great concern to Cobb.

“I think a commuter campus has a whole sense of different challenges. . . . But I think (commuter campuses) are probably going to be more the model for the future, and it’s up to people like myself to try to make the time students are on campus as meaningful as possible,” she said.

Nayman said her experience at Skidmore, a small liberal-arts college 25 miles north of Albany, will be valuable at a large commuter school such as Fullerton.

“I think smaller institutions do a very good job of keeping in touch with the pulse of students. And I would hope we can replicate that kind of communication at Fullerton.”

Nayman, a native of Dallas, has a doctorate in counseling and behavioral studies from the University of Wisconsin. At Arizona State University from 1983-88, she was director of counseling and also worked for the vice president of student services. Previously, she was an assistant professor of psychology and education at Colorado State University. She also did her graduate dissertation work in Turkey, as well as consulting work at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.

The search for a student affairs chief was one of five under way for top posts at the Fullerton campus, including that of Cobb, who retires July 31. Searches also are under way for deans of the schools of engineering and computer sciences, natural science and mathematics, and business administration and economics.

Nayman replaces T. Roger Nudd, who stepped down in July, 1988, after 16 years in charge of student services on the campus. Nudd was reassigned to the career development center’s counseling staff at a time when Cobb was placing heavy emphasis on improving student services and creating more of a community atmosphere on campus, campus sources said.

Charles W. Buck has served as the acting vice president since August, 1988.