ORANGE : Chapman College Renaming Sought

Say “Chapman University.” It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

But if Chapman College President Allen E. Koenig has his way, the school will have a new name by 1992. And it is only one of the changes in store for the shady campus in Orange.

Chapman College, a private, four-year, Christian institution of 2,200 students, boasts a 130-year history, small classes and an ecumenical sense of morality that pervades its curriculum.

Koenig, the school’s 11th president, created a stir on the quiet campus when he came to Chapman in October, 1989, after a decade as president of Boston’s Emerson College. He left the East Coast as a controversial, pro-growth president criticized for his efforts to move the school from its urban home and arrived at Chapman with a long list of plans to expand and improve academic programs.

Some at Chapman worried that Koenig’s goal to make the school a “medium-sized university” would lower the quality of education, with classes taught by professors who spent more time in the research lab than the classroom. Off campus, residents of the surrounding neighborhood feared that the school’s growth would encroach on Old Towne, Orange’s historical district.

Koenig says Chapman is already a university in everything but name, and while he hopes the student body will grow to 3,000 in the next decade, he assures critics that growth will be gradual.

“I don’t consider us to be small now,” Koenig said recently. “That is a stereotype perpetuated (by the media). We’re really like a smaller university or perhaps a medium-sized university.”

The name change would be a way to “emphasize that we are small enough to be personal but large enough to be interesting,” he said.

Koenig also believes a new name could help enrollment and will recommend the change to the Board of Trustees, but he said that if he does not have sweeping support, he will drop the issue.

Meanwhile, he has implemented other, more substantive changes.

More than 50 administrative positions were cut or reorganized this summer so that funds could be freed to establish a center for ethics and values and a center for international studies. The school’s Center for Economic Research is nationally recognized.

In October, the faculty approved a new general-education curriculum that emphasizes “education for the global citizen.”

This month, groundbreaking took place for a new dorm, and construction of a student/faculty center is scheduled to begin in July.

Traditionally, community leaders have fought construction at the college. They are protective of the area’s early 20th-Century architecture and say Chapman has not included them in planning expansion of the campus.

But Carole Walters, a community leader in the Chapman neighborhood, said working with the Koenig administration has been “like night and day.”