County Says Soka Courses Violate Permit

Soka University in Calabasas has been notified by Los Angeles County zoning inspectors that it is illegally operating a non-religious school under permits allowing religious training only.

County planning and zoning officials said Tuesday that a notice of violation was delivered to the Mulholland Highway campus Monday during a celebration for the opening of a new research center. The university’s written invitation describing the purposes of the new center prompted the county to review current use of the entire campus, county officials said.

Officials concluded that the university can continue to hold classes only if it can prove they are part of a religious training program.

Rudy Lackner, administrator of the land-use regulation branch of the county Department of Regional Planning, said a special permit granted to a previous owner allows operation of a seminary or monastery on the land, which is actually zoned for agricultural use.

Soka University, an offshoot of Soka University in Japan, is an English-language school for about 100 students. University administrators have announced plans to expand into a 5,000-student liberal arts college.

Jeff Ourvan, a spokesman for the university, said administrators were surprised by the letter and did not really understand its intent. He said that about 90 students are studying English there now and 42 more are expected in mid-April.

“We’re going to try to set up a meeting to find out what’s going on,” Ourvan said. “It’s the first we’d heard of it.”

The county has the power to shut down the institution, although whether such action is warranted will be the subject of negotiations between county and college administrators beginning today, county officials said.

“We have to talk to them to see what course of action they can take and then what action we will take,” Lackner said.

The property was first used for religious purposes in 1952, when the Claretian Fathers obtained county permission to operate a seminary, Lackner said. The Church Universal and Triumphant bought the site in 1978 and held it for eight years.

Lackner--who was the zoning inspector in the Calabasas area while the church owned the property--said he never could prove that it “was not some type of monastery or convent, training their people to be persons of the cloth.”

The need for Soka University to prove a strong religious affiliation creates a paradox for university administrators, who have consistently downplayed the institution’s ties to a controversial Buddhist sect known as Soka Gakkai in Japan and Nichiren Shoshu of America, or NSA, in this country.

With the help of NSA, Soka University bought the core property in 1986 and doubled its size last year to nearly 600 acres, at a total cost of more than $40 million. The school began offering English-language classes in 1987 to exchange students from its four-year Tokyo campus.

The invitation to the opening of the Pacific Basin Research Center on campus was sent directly to the county officials, Ourvan said. It described the center as an institution “to foster international understanding” that will focus on issues ranging from peace and the environment to economic development. The director is a Harvard University professor who is considered an expert on Japan.

“In the past, I guess we really didn’t know exactly what they were doing out there,” Lackner said. “But you couldn’t be any more clear than that” invitation.

However, Ourvan said plans for the new center should not affect the county’s view of existing courses on the campus because it is nothing more than “an office and a roll of stamps right now.”

State and federal parks officials, who have long coveted the university site as a park headquarters, said the county action throws into question past university assertions that their current permits allow 1,500 students.

“It certainly puts to rest their argument that they have all these entitlements to use the land and it’s just by their largess that they aren’t pumping more students in there right now,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state parks agency.

But Ourvan said the 1,500-student estimate was not based on Soka’s permit. Instead, he said, it was based on the capacity of the campus buildings, as calculated using a formula supplied by the building and safety division of the county Department of Public Works.