New President of Cal Poly Pomona Will Seek Change : Colleges: With an engineering and civil rights background and a dissatisfaction with the status quo, Bob Suzuki is confident he can steer the campus toward the 21st Century.

Bob Suzuki, the newly appointed president of Cal Poly Pomona, was 6 when his family was rounded up in 1942 and shipped to a World War II internment camp for Japanese-Americans.

He started school in the deserts of southern Idaho, hemmed in by barbed wire and guard towers. For several months, the family lived in stalls used to exhibit farm animals.

When the war ended, they moved to rural Washington and raised cucumbers, lettuce and strawberries. Sometimes, Suzuki recalls, the crops failed and there wasn’t enough to eat.

Encouraged by a mother who never went beyond eighth grade, he earned a doctorate in aeronautics and built a career in academia, most recently as vice president of academic affairs for Cal State Northridge.

But the 55-year-old Alhambra resident says he can never forget his days in the camps.

“More than anything else, that experience developed my commitment to civil rights,” Suzuki says. He was active in getting Congress to pass a law that provides reparation for Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II. In the early 1970s, he served on an advisory committee to desegregate Pasadena schools.

When Suzuki takes over as Cal Poly Pomona’s president in mid-July, at a salary of about $115,000, he will inherit a campus in transition, with simmering discontent among multicultural students and a need to move away from old-fashioned agricultural courses toward international, high-tech agribusiness, liberal arts and business administration.

And with a background that mirrors the school’s own traditions in engineering, science and agriculture, Suzuki feels confident about steering the 19,470-student campus into the 21st Century.

“I’m not the type of administrator who’s satisfied with the status quo,” says Suzuki, who has spent the last few months reading up on campus issues and sketching out plans. “I will push the campus toward change.”

At Cal State Northridge, and at Cal State Los Angeles where he served as dean of graduate studies and research, that meant recruiting more minority students and faculty and coaxing more research from a faculty devoted primarily to teaching.

Colleagues from both those schools describe Suzuki as a highly motivated visionary who felt most comfortable with centralized authority but who also solicited the ideas of others and liked reaching a consensus.

“He’s an ideas person,” said Margaret Hartman, an associate vice president for academic affairs at Cal State Los Angeles. “He is very committed to affirmative action, and he doesn’t settle for what sells. He’s always trying to push beyond that.”

But some faculty members criticized his hard-driving ways. “The ones who weren’t doing research felt he pushed a little too hard,” said Margaret Feiweger, associate vice president for academic programs at Cal State Northridge. But Feiweger added that others were pleased that Suzuki supported and encouraged research.

Suzuki says he doesn’t want a “publish-or-perish” mentality at Cal Poly Pomona. But he added: “I don’t see a dichotomy between teaching and research. They should complement each other.”

Marvin Klein, a former president of Cal Poly Pomona’s Academic Senate and a member of the search committee that recommended Suzuki, said he thinks the new president’s push for more research will be welcomed.

The campus that Suzuki will take over from Hugh O. LaBounty, who is retiring after 14 years as president, was founded in 1938 as an agricultural polytechnic in a rural community. In recent years, Cal Poly Pomona has found itself hemmed in by development and struggling to meet the needs of a growing and diverse student body, less than 1% of whom study agriculture.

One problem Suzuki faces is the emotional issue of preserving open space. About 600 of the school’s 1,400 acres are devoted to farming and livestock, and the campus is home to some protected species of birds and animals, as well as many dedicated environmentalists.

Against this, Suzuki must balance the need for more student housing, parking lots, administrative offices and faculty housing to keep up with growth.

“I wouldn’t want to lose” the rolling hills and fields that give the campus its rural charm, Suzuki says. But he added: “It could jeopardize the future if we don’t begin to look at ways to use some of that land.”

Multicultural education is another controversial topic on campus. An accreditation team recently criticized Cal Poly Pomona for not doing enough to reach out to minorities. The campus is about 45% Anglo, 25% Asian, 16% Latino, 5.5% Filipino and Pacific Islander, 3.5% black and 5% other races.

Last year, minority students demonstrated, accusing the administration of ignoring their complaints about harassment by campus security. Some also say Cal Poly Pomona isn’t doing enough to attract Latino and black students.

“The administration says this is a beautiful place where different cultures exist peacefully but the reality is that . . . we get repressed every time we have a protest or do anything,” said Miguel Arraraz, 24, a landscape architecture student who is president of the campus Multicultural Council.

Suzuki has already indicated that he will step up programs to recruit and retain minority students and he wants to set up task forces to conduct workshops and seminars on multicultural issues.

Another goal, Suzuki said, is to strengthen ties with local business and industry. He also intends to step up corporate fund-raising and seeking federal grants.

Additionally, Suzuki wants to develop new interdisciplinary studies. For instance, he can foresee a focus on “environment” studies that would tap such diverse topics as global survival, resource depletion and world hunger.

And he intends to review agriculture classes and may develop new ones to better meet the needs of today’s increasingly international and high-tech industries. He adds that he wants to consult with the faculty and staff before embarking on any plans.

Suzuki also wants to build faculty housing, much the way UC Irvine has done, to enable the school to recruit top faculty members as professors retire.

Cal Poly Pomona’s new president earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley and a doctorate in aeronautics from Caltech.

He then taught engineering at USC, moving to the University of Massachusetts to become an assistant dean in the school of education. He also helped train black and Latino teachers in the Bedford-Stuyvesant slum of New York City.

At Cal Poly Pomona, administrators and faculty say his varied experience is just what the school needs.

“Bob Suzuki is willing to make some difficult decisions that face this campus,” Klein said. “Agriculture has changed significantly, and Bob understands and appreciates that. I think he’ll be good for the university.”