Occidental Adopts Guidelines for Future : Education: The small liberal arts college’s sweeping plan is designed to attract women and minority students to the school and strengthen its ties to Eagle Rock.

The Board of Trustees of Occidental College has adopted a sweeping set of proposals aimed at making the campus more culturally diverse and strengthening its ties to the Eagle Rock community and urban Los Angeles.

The comprehensive plan, intended to guide the private, liberal arts college into the next century, includes measures such as conducting a multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign, raising teachers’ salaries, solving a burgeoning financial aid problem, and diversifying science programs by attracting more women and minority students.

The plan emerged from a two-year planning process known as “Occidental Tomorrow.” More than 200 administrators, teachers, students and alumni made scores of recommendations and presented them to trustees last week in a 61-page report.

Now, school officials say, comes the hard part: implementing and paying for the measures.

“The biggest challenges are finances,” said Occidental President John Slaughter, who initiated the long-term, strategic planning process shortly after he took office in 1988. “We’re worried about doing all of this at a time when the economy is shaky . . . when the University of California is in an expansionist mode . . . when the demographics are such that fewer and fewer students are coming out of high school and looking for a college education.

“It’s not optimum in terms of time,” Slaughter said. “But we’ve got a lot of ingredients to overcome a lot of the roadblocks that are out there.”

The trustees decided to finance the initiatives by setting aside 1.5% of the school’s education and general expenditures budget--about $500,000--each year, starting in 1991. The trustees also agreed to begin within five years a multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign. A 13-year campaign that raised $100 million ended just two years ago, but the school’s $150-million endowment needs an additional $100 million to be competitive, Slaughter said.

In addition, the trustees approved forming a Planning and Priorities Council to determine which of the plan’s recommendations should be implemented first. Administrators, teachers and students now are being appointed by Slaughter and others to serve as council members, said Jeff Coons, student body president.

The plan has two general themes: encouraging cultural diversity and strengthening the school’s ties to the community.

It recommends increasing the number of minority students and teachers, changing the curriculum to better address the interests of a varied student body and getting ethnic groups to work together in multicultural programs.

Although 40% of this year’s freshmen are minority students, Occidental must continue recruiting more minority students and teachers, particularly in the sciences, the report says. Minorities made up 23% of the school’s about 1,600 students last year, and about 20% of the teaching staff.

The plan also recommends sending students as volunteers to local schools and parks, and establishing the campus as a center for the arts in an effort to develop stronger community and metropolitan ties.

“No other liberal arts college with which Occidental compares itself is so severed from its surroundings,” says the report, which proposes that school officials consider actions such as building near the campus a “college village,” or small shopping center to be used by students and the community. The report also recommends that the school appoint an administrator to oversee community relations.

“We believe that strengthening ties to Los Angeles really begins with strengthening ties to Eagle Rock as a part of Los Angeles,” Slaughter said. “I mean, we’re a small school. We’re not going to be able to have a significant impact throughout the city, nor should we ever assume that we could. But we can have an impact in a few miles’ radius around this campus.”

Specifically, the plan’s proposals include:

* Reducing the proportion of the college’s about $38-million annual budget that is spent on financial aid.

* Hiring at least 15 instructors in the next six years, raising faculty salaries, and removing caps on the number of instructors who can be granted tenure.

* Strengthening the school’s science programs. This could include constructing a new building for geology and physics, offering summer institutes for students and attracting more minorities and women into such fields, the report says.

* Creating new offerings, such as a Public and International Affairs Program, and imposing tougher general requirements, such as higher levels of competence in foreign languages.

More than 65% of Occidental’s students now receive financial aid, accounting for about 25% of the school’s budget. That has significantly reduced funds available for faculty salaries and academic programs, school officials said. They want to reduce the amount spent on financial aid to 20% of the budget by 1992.

Slaughter and other administrators said they do not intend to cut financial aid, but instead want to find new sources of money to fund scholarships and loans and revise the distribution of such aid to make sure it goes to those students most in need.

Shifting the burden of financial aid to the state and federal governments may not be easy. Funds for financial aid have dwindled in recent years. Occidental, which charges about $14,000 per year, has the fifth highest tuition in the state. And its biggest competitor for students is the UC system, which charges about $1,600 in tuition for California residents, Slaughter said.

To finance the hiring of additional instructors, the budget for academic programs would have to be increased by 1% each year for 10 years, according to the report.

“In down-to-earth reality, we have to find the money,” said David Axeen, dean of the faculty, who helped develop the plan. “We want to continue to improve salaries. They’re very good now and we want them to be excellent. But there are going to be trade-offs when it comes time to do that.”

Many of the ideas included in the plan were being discussed at Occidental before Slaughter arrived, administrators and teachers said. But Slaughter, who succeeded Richard Gilman as president, is largely credited with acting on those ideas by initiating the long-term plan.

For instance, students had been fighting for a new campus center for at least 10 years, Coons said. But it was Slaughter’s planning process that triggered the formation this year of a committee to help design the center, he said. Building the facility is one of the recommendations of the plan.

“By no means should it be construed that a new way of thinking is sweeping across the campus,” Slaughter said. “My method of managing has always been to help people set goals for themselves, work hard to give them the tools to achieve them, then get the heck out of the way.”