Gradual Change Backed at Chapman : Education: President’s sweeping strategy for college’s future is revised in talks. Faculty cutbacks are fewer and liberal arts emphasis will be spared.

A controversial five-year game plan for Chapman College that stirred widespread faculty and student outrage against the new campus president has been revised and refined so that even its most grudging opponents can live with it.

The new plan will still change the focus of the 2,200-student liberal arts college to an increasingly specialized mid-size university, and it will still eliminate faculty positions.

But the emphasis on professional programs will not come at the expense of traditional liberal arts courses that the faculty consider essential to a quality education. To that end, the reorganized college would have a school of arts and sciences at its core.

And the number of professors will drop to 95, not 87, and the reductions will come as people leave or retire over the next five years, not through layoffs over 1 1/2 years, as originally proposed by President Allen E. Koenig in early February.

Significantly, the plan was drafted by a faculty task force that negotiated with Provost Harry Hamilton, the second-in-command for academic affairs, not Koenig, who still faces a student referendum on his performance this week.

The new plan was approved overwhelmingly by a voice vote of faculty at a meeting last week, said political science professor Arthur Blaser, chairman of the faculty.

“It represents a good first step and it is a reform of the institution rather than a radical restructuring,” said Fred Smoller, an associate professor of political science at Chapman since 1983 and one of many who had deep reservations about the original plan.

“I think it’s going to provide us the flexibility we need to respond to changing student demands,” said Smoller, referring to the college administration’s concern about stagnant enrollments and increasing costs, problems plaguing many private colleges across the country.

“What’s important about the plan is that it retains the balance between the liberal arts and the professional programs,” Smoller said.

Koenig, too, is pleased with what he prefers to call the “consensus plan.”

“I’m comfortable with every aspect of it; that’s why I signed off on it,” Koenig said. “I think the faculty did an excellent job. . . . It also took real courage for faculty peers to make a lot of the recommendations they made--particularly advocating a cutback in the full-time faculty, academic reorganization and adjustment of the faculty workload. All those were courageous steps.”

And all those things are necessary, the president said, if Chapman is to demonstrate excellence on the academic side while at the same time ensuring a “good financial bottom in the 1990s.”

When Koenig took over this 2,200-student college nestled in Orange’s historic Old Town in October, 1989, it was with the vision of transforming Chapman College into a comprehensive university, and a name change to go with it.

The college has been through several transformations. It began as Hesperian College in Northern California in 1861, a coeducational college founded by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). It later moved to Los Angeles County, then again to Orange County. It was renamed in 1934 for its chief patron, Charles Clarke Chapman, founding board chairman of the Bank of America.

It has grown beyond its campus in Orange. In addition to the 1,600 undergraduates and 600 graduate students in Orange, another 5,000 or so students attend courses at 51 academic centers in the western United States and throughout Pacific Rim countries. These are mainly soldiers and their dependents.

Tuition for the coming year was just raised to $12,975, with room and board pegged at just over $5,000 a year. About 46% of the students live on campus.

Freshman come to Chapman with a B average from families whose income averages about $45,000 annually. More than 60% of the students at the Orange campus receive some sort of financial aid, including grants, scholarships, loans and part-time employment.

When Koenig proposed his strategic five-year plan earlier this year, he said its elements were critical if Chapman is to hang on to its share of the dwindling pool of college students and survive economically, particularly when surrounded by lower-cost public universities such as UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, Cal Poly Pomona and Cal State Long Beach.

Koenig’s reorganized university would have concentrated on professional programs in business, economics, psychology, teacher education and communication arts. Class sizes and teaching loads would have been increased. Sabbaticals and research opportunities would have been strictly limited, and cost-of-living pay increases not based on merit would be eliminated.

The most striking element was a proposed 20% reduction in faculty, and almost all of the cuts would have come in the liberal arts faculty.

The faculty reacted angrily, with some calling it an “all-out assault” on the liberal arts. Koenig, it was widely said, was trying to turn Chapman College into a trade school.

There were calls for his ouster and complaints to the college’s Board of Trustees, some of whom intervened to forestall a no-confidence vote and to encourage further talks.

The rancor was palpable. In a Feb. 11 meeting with faculty, Koenig endorsed formation of a joint faculty-administration task force to revise his strategic plan. But after that conciliatory gesture, he criticized professors, some by name, for voicing their concerns about his plan in the media, prompting some faculty to charge the president with creating a “climate of fear and intimidation.”

In the end, many faculty members credit the quiet diplomacy of Hamilton, the provost, for helping to reach a consensus on a plan that they see both protects the quality of the undergraduate program and still positions Chapman to compete. However, many decisions will have to be made as the years progress, including which of the myriad majors offered at Chapman will be eliminated.

“No one is really thrilled with this plan, but it’s a starting point,” said one faculty member who asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

“My interpretation is that we will go slower or change in a more evolutionary sense during this five-year plan,” he said. “There will be fewer faculty reductions. But at the same time, we will be able to obtain greater academic focus for the institution.”

The revised strategic plan will go to the Board of Trustees on April 15. But they will actually only cast votes on specific items from the plan, such as whether to rename the university, and fiscal decisions on the $28-million campus operating budget. A trustees’ subcommittee has already approved of the plan.

Koenig said he expects trustees to approve the name change. But don’t expect to hear of Chapman University before next fall at the earliest.