New Leader Enjoys Widespread Support

James L. Doti knew last Saturday that Allen E. Koenig would step down as president of Chapman College and that his own name would be submitted less than two years after he was passed over for the job.

But the rest happened so quickly it took the 44-year-old economist by surprise, he said in an interview in his cramped office Wednesday morning, just an hour after his appointment was announced on campus.

Doti, who had accompanied Chapman board chairman George L. Argyros on a trip to Washington over the weekend, said Argyros told him Saturday that Koenig and the board had “come to agreement” on the embattled college president’s resignation. Argyros didn’t say when Koenig would resign, but he “asked me if I was interested in being considered for the job and I said I would be.”

The millionaire developer told Doti that he would submit his name to the college’s trustees “and that was it.”

Doti said he left the Chapman campus Tuesday afternoon, before Koenig’s resignation at an emergency trustees meeting was announced. He delivered a speech to the Orange County Industrial League, returned to his office on campus to do some late evening work on the economic forecast he is delivering this afternoon, “and then I went home and my wife told me the phone had been ringing off the hook all evening because Koenig had resigned.”

The phone rang again that evening, and when Doti picked it up an excited Argyros told him that he had been unanimously named to the top spot.

“It’s amazing,” Doti said Wednesday morning. “I’m president, and I haven’t even appeared before the board yet.”

But what the trustees already knew is that Chapman College’s new president is credited with putting the small private school on the map with his annual Orange County economic forecasts and insistence that the school’s business department cultivate strong ties with county businesses.

And as president of the 2,200-student, liberal arts college, Doti is likely to continue pushing for a close relationship between the school and the community from which it draws its students and financial support.

Doti also will be point man in the college trustee’s drive for national recognition of the school, once known mainly as a teachers college. To that extent, he is a great choice for the top job, said Philip Inglee, president of Liberty National Bank in Huntington Beach.

Inglee, who has known Doti for years, said he “has a great deal of credibility in the private community, and that’s the community that supports private colleges.”

Doti “speaks our language, unlike a lot of academics, and that and his status in the community and his reputation because of what he’s done with the economic forecasts will really help him and the college,” the banker said.

Doti, who lives in Anaheim Hills with his wife, Chapman economics professor Lynne Pierson Doti, and their two children, arrived in California in 1974.

He came to be an assistant professor at Chapman, fresh from graduate school at the University of Chicago and an interim job teaching at a small private Roman Catholic college in his native Illinois. What he brought was a determination to make his mark in the field of economics.

He had worked in the accounting department at a candy firm in Chicago while attending college and had become interested in forecasting sales and budgeting for the company.

At Chapman, recalls colleague Esmael Adibi, Doti began teaching a course in econometrics, the then-new science of building and using computer models to predict economic trends.

In 1978, Doti and his students unveiled what is still the nation’s only econometric model for a single metropolitan area, and Doti began issuing annual forecasts of the national and Orange County economies.

Doti became director of the Chapman Center for Economic Research from its inception until he was named dean of the college’s school of business and economics in 1985, a post he held until becoming acting president in 1988.

As Chapman’s president, Doti’s friends and associates say, he is expected to be open and eager to find common ground with those he works with.

Said academic associate Randy Martin: “He’s just an extremely pleasant man to work with.”