OPENING THE DOOR : Cal Lutheran, with $1 million in recruiting assistance, goes all out to give blacks and Latinos a chance at higher education.

If you go looking for cultural pluralism at California Lutheran University, you may not see it right away. In a county that is one-third minorities, nine of 10 students and professors are white. The surrounding city of Thousand Oaks, 84% white, is among the most homogeneous in Southern California.

Yet this 1,600-student private campus may harbor the best new hope that Ventura County’s Latino and black students have for a university education.

Over the last four months, administrators at Cal Lutheran have begun spending a landmark $600,000 grant to recruit and support more minority students, many from Ventura County schools. And on March 11, the faculty approved a new set of curriculum requirements giving greater weight to non-European history and culture.

When a related $450,000 federal grant and a 2-year-old $100,000 scholarship program are added, the campus commitment exceeds $1 million.

“That’s a lot more than any other institution has done. It’s a lot of money,” said Warren Furumoto, acting associate vice president for academic services at Cal State Northridge.

“There really isn’t any choice in the matter,” said Chris Munoz, Cal Lutheran’s vice president for enrollment. “There are two things that are in play here. One is being a responsible university: For the well-being of our community, we need to have an educated populace. . . . The other part of it is . . . it’s good business. It’s self-serving, and I don’t mean that in a negative sense.”

There is plenty for Cal Lutheran to spend its money on.

Ventura County’s public schools produce about 7,000 graduates each year, but there is no home-grown public university to receive them. State records show that this area’s graduates are less likely to reach California’s public universities than their counterparts statewide. And Ventura County’s minority graduates face the longest odds of all.

“There are still those stereotypes that if you’re black, you’re brown, you’re Asian, you’re not going to make it,” said Rosa Moreno, Cal Lutheran’s educational equity officer.

Other campuses have their own recruiting efforts. But at the Ventura County Community College District and the Ventura satellite campus of Cal State Northridge, administrators acknowledge that their recruiting budgets don’t compete with Cal Lutheran’s. CSU officials say they hope to build a Ventura County campus by 1994, but only if state money is available.

Which leaves Cal Lutheran, a private school taking on a public responsibility, but still homogeneous enough to make some students uncomfortable.

“I can deal with being uncomfortable, for a degree,” said Reggie Ray, a 21-year-old junior who is president of the campus African-American Students Assn. “It’s a very small price to pay.”

Diversification Team

When Chris Munoz came to interview for his job at Cal Lutheran in January, 1989, a faculty committee sat him down in a classroom and asked how he would seek out a more diverse student body. His answer, as he remembers it:

“Do you really understand what it’s going to take?”

In 30 years as an independent university, Cal Lutheran had built a strong academic reputation, a tidy, grassy campus, and a student body with little resemblance to California’s real population. Of 1,556 students on campus then, just 167 were nonwhite. The faculty was, and is, even more homogeneous: three minorities in 112 jobs.

Munoz, then director of admissions at Humboldt State, already had a reputation as an adept multicultural recruiter. He told the Cal Lutheran committee that diversification would require money and major changes in policy--from recruiting to curriculum. But with support, he said, he could deliver more students of color and raise admission standards.

“On this, you’ve got to be really forthright,” he said later. “You can’t fool people.”

Two years into the job, Munoz leads a team of Latinos hired to work for campus diversification. Rosa Moreno, who arrived a year before him, is another member. And student support services director Joe Ramirez, who arrived in October, is a third.

Describing the effort, the 43-year-old Munoz clearly draws on his days as a 20-year-old drama major at Cal State Fullerton. Facing a visitor at his desk, his smile is broad and his sales pitch is well-crafted.

“By the year 2000,” Munoz said, “I think that probably 50% or more of the students will be of color.”

Which is where the James Irvine Foundation comes into the picture.

In the fall of 1989, university fund-raisers learned that the foundation, one of California’s wealthiest philanthropic groups, was launching a statewide effort to make private universities “more responsive” to California’s population.

Cal Lutheran won a grant, as did Stanford University, Occidental College, Santa Clara University, CalArts in Valencia and several other private universities.

In the case of Cal Lutheran, “the fact that Chris Munoz was hired to come on board there, to really do a job on that front, was really compelling to us,” foundation President Dennis A. Collins said.

Collins said he was also “very taken” by the argument that Cal Lutheran, despite its low minority numbers, is the only university within easy access for many Ventura County students.

“Their lack of people of color on that campus is due to the fact that this is a very young institution that is undercapitalized,” Collins said. “The problem is that obviously they need money to bring these kids onto campus.”

Some $450,000 of the $600,000 Irvine foundation grant will go to scholarships, a vital measure for a school with fees of more than $13,000 a year.

Starting April 22, Munoz said, the university will have a new bilingual recruiter.

In addition to the campus’ multicultural curriculum requirements, faculty development workshops are being arranged to help instructors “infuse a multicultural perspective into our traditional course offerings.”

Moreno, the educational equity officer, has built a countywide network of recruiting contacts.

And this spring’s crop of Latino and black applicants may double the size of last year’s--a statistic that relieves the officials at Cal Lutheran who have made ambitious pledges to land the Irvine foundation grant.

“We said we would almost double the number of incoming freshman (minorities) this year--that we would go from 35 to 60,” Munoz said. “And the following year, we’d go to 70. And then to 80.”

Students’ Challenge

For the students behind those numbers, arrival at Cal Lutheran is only the beginning of their challenges.

Depending on who is doing the exploring, the territory can seem either friendly or alien.

“When I came here, I felt more comfortable than I did at Moorpark High,” said Juan Ponce, an 18-year-old freshman.

“At Moorpark, it was who’s Mexican, who’s white, who’s bad, who’s not. Here, everybody comes to study. They don’t come to be bad.”

Ponce’s father, a ranch foreman, has no formal schooling.

And he said his mother has about a sixth-grade education.

Ponce, commuting from his parents’ home to the campus, earned a B+ average in his first semester of college work.

For Alfredo De Leon, a 21-year-old transfer student from Oxnard Community College, the struggle has been harder.

He said he has heard racial remarks while running in the university’s Thousand Oaks neighborhood.

On campus, he said, the students and faculty seem evenly divided between those who make him feel welcome and those who don’t.

And classes can be difficult.

“It’s a big change from a community college. It’s more complicated,” said De Leon, who arrived at Cal Lutheran in the fall of 1989.

Until last fall, Cal Lutheran had no specialized support program for such students.

But in September, the school began drawing on a three-year, $450,000 federal grant--separate from the Irvine foundation money--to help first-generation college students and students from low-income families.

Joe Ramirez, who graduated from Fillmore High School in 1971 and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education in 1990, is director of student support services.

Additional money pays the salary of an academic counselor and several part-time peer counselors.

This semester, about 10 students gather weekly for “The Write Stuff,” an extracurricular seminar designed to boost writing skills.

Other services range from help on term papers to casual counseling on campus survival.

“I’m constantly going in there,” De Leon said of the support services office.

That, for Ramirez, is a good sign--and one he hopes will be repeated more often in coming years, if Cal Lutheran can reinvent itself as a place for pluralism.

“If you’re coming from a totally different environment, you have to make a lot of adjustments,” Ramirez said.

“You ask yourself, ‘Why am I so different?’ And sometimes abilities come into it and you ask yourself, ‘Do I really belong in school here?’

“When we talk,” Ramirez said, “the answers are always, ‘Yes, you do belong here, or you wouldn’t have been admitted. You have the skills to do this.’ ”