Cal State Candidates Narrowed to 4 : Education: Hoping to replace the retiring Jewel Plummer Cobb in Fullerton are three California college administrators and Cal State Bakersfield’s president.

The president of Cal State Bakersfield and top academic administrators at three other California colleges are the four finalists competing to be president of Orange County’s largest university.

Seeking the top job at Cal State Fullerton is educator Tomas A. Arciniega, president of the Bakersfield campus and widely regarded as an up-and-coming Latino administrator.

Also seeking the Fullerton position are: mathematician Milton A. Gordon, vice president for academic affairs at Sonoma State University, a prominent black administrator who has earned high marks as a major healing influence on the Northern California campus; mechanical engineer and educator Bob H. Suzuki, vice president for academic affairs at Cal State Northridge, who is highly regarded for his commitment to academic quality and to building ethnic diversity among the faculty and students, and physicist David L. Goodstein, vice provost of the Caltech in Pasadena and creator of the award-winning TV series, “The Mechanical Universe,” a 52-part course in freshman physics that used pioneering computer animation techniques.

The finalists, whose names were announced Friday, were chosen from more than 130 applicants and nominees after a two-month selection process to replace Cal State Fullerton President Jewel Plummer Cobb. She is retiring Aug. 1 after nine years of unrivaled growth on the 25,000-student campus.

“They’re all good, and they’re all so different,” said John Bedell, chairman of the Cal State Fullerton Academic Senate, which lobbied successfully for the right to help in background checks of the candidates. “What you have in this pool of candidates are very experienced people who offer the campus very diverse choices.”

Cesar Naples, vice chancellor for faculty and staff relations for the 20-campus California State University system, said Friday that the finalists will visit the Fullerton campus next week. The CSU Board of Trustees is expected to name a new president May 15.

The number of applicants--”one of the largest turnouts in recent years”--is “a measure of the respect that (the Fullerton campus) and its present leadership have generated across the nation,” Naples said.

The selection process created controversy because CSU procedures bar faculty representatives from assisting in background checks. More than once, the Fullerton Faculty Senate voted to withdraw three campus representatives from the presidential search committee if they were not granted that right. Embattled CSU Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds, who has since resigned under fire, made a rare appearance at the Fullerton campus to plead for their participation, anyway.

In the end, Bedell said, “the Fullerton way” prevailed when he and two other Fullerton representatives on the search committee were asked this week to make some of the background checks.

“What the Fullerton way means is that we have a strong tradition of collegiality and consultation,” he said. “I think the (CSU Board of) Trustees are to be applauded for being sensitive ultimately to our concerns.”

Gordon, 54, a Chicago native and father of three, has been a university-level mathematics professor for nearly 30 years, after teaching in hometown elementary and secondary schools. Nearly 20 years ago, he took over as director of Afro-American studies at Loyola University of Chicago and started a program for educationally disadvantaged students.

“That’s what really excites me, helping others to succeed,” said Gordon, who has been at Sonoma State since 1986.

Suzuki--also 54 and a father of three who was born in Portland, Ore.--began his academic career in USC’s School of Engineering. He said he switched to education after his involvement in the court-ordered desegregation plan for Pasadena schools, where his children were enrolled.

Ever since, he said, he has devoted himself to improving the quality of education and equal access to it for minority groups.

Suzuki is a veteran of the CSU system, where he been a professor and administrator at Cal State Los Angeles and at Northridge. He initially stirred controversy at the San Fernando Valley campus when he insisted on more research from a faculty loaded with teaching responsibilities.

Among the big challenges ahead for any CSU campus president will be to increase private financial support as a buffer in this era of tight state budgets, he said.

Arciniega, 52, has four children. Originally from El Paso, Tex., he has made educational administration a career after being a foreign service officer for the State Department in the Dominican Republic.

He has earned a reputation as an aggressive enrollment builder who succeeded in reversing declines at the 5,200-student Bakersfield campus, as well as increasing the number of minority students since his arrival in 1983.

If he is the trustees’ choice to head Cal State Fullerton, Arciniega said, he will emphasize continued development in technological fields, even greater emphasis on increased diversity of students, faculty and staff, and community outreach to build a base of support and funding.

The Brooklyn-born Goodstein, 51, has been on Caltech’s faculty since 1968 and has continued to teach physics while assistant to the college’s provost, the top academic officer on campus. He has been on many scientific and academic panels, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Advisory Council.

Goodstein could not be reached for comment Friday, but Bedell said the physics professor also helped to devise an outreach program in Los Angeles high schools in the middle 1970s to help prepare minority students for college.