CSUSM Told to Push for Innovation : Education: Consultants call new university’s success stunning. But they call for the school to distinguish itself in building a unique curriculum, even though the understaffed faculty is near burnout.

Cal State San Marcos is up and running in remarkable fashion, but its courses so far are lackluster and its staff near burnout, a recent report says.

The infant university’s success in assembling a new faculty and administration has been stunning, four academic authorities reported to campus leaders.

But now it’s time, they say, for the university to distinguish itself boldly, as the nation’s newest, by translating its enthusiastic rhetoric into innovative, even risky, curricula and organizational structures, unencumbered by traditions that inhibit other universities.

“The university recognizes some very large challenges for its future, but it’s a whole other set of activities to turn that into programs,” said Arthur Levine, chairman of Harvard University’s Institute for Educational Management and one of the four visiting consultants.

“Cal State San Marcos has no models to copy. They are pioneers in setting goals and pioneers in designing curriculum for the 21st Century, and it’s always easier to pioneer goals than to build a pioneering program,” he said.

“So what we’re telling the university is, ‘You’ve come reasonably far, and you’ve overcome the first challenge. And now you have a larger, more daunting and more exciting challenge ahead of you,’ ” Levine said.

Cal State San Marcos hired Levine and three others--for a $600 honorarium each plus travel expenses--to spend three days with students, faculty and administrators, then report back to the university with its observations and evaluation of how the campus has succeeded and failed so far, and where it should place special attention during the next few years.

Cal State San Marcos, the 20th and newest member of the California State University system, was born in a business park three years ago and is now completing its second year of studies for upper-division and graduate students. This fall it will move to its permanent, 300-acre site--a one-time chicken ranch on Twin Oaks Valley Road in San Marcos--with an enrollment of 2,600 students. Freshmen are to be enrolled in 1995, by which time enrollment will hit 5,000.

“The progress boggles the mind,” Levine wrote in his report to university President Bill Stacy.

But, although the four evaluators showered praise on the young university, their reports warned of problems:

* The faculty, staff and administration are dangerously near burnout. “They have been running at a sprint pace, but they are entered in a marathon,” Levine wrote. “With limited resources, how can CSU San Marcos keep them alive and vibrant? At the moment, each department I visited is understaffed.”

* As the campus grows, a “we versus they” attitude is emerging between the faculty and administration, each vying for limited dollars and jealously perceiving that one segment of campus staffing is benefiting at the expense of the other.

* Even within the ranks of the faculty, there are signs of infighting, with newcomers saying they feel disenfranchised and shunned by the founding faculty members, and the relative old-timers saying they feel their work so far has gone unappreciated by the newcomers. These feelings will dissolve with time, the consultants say.

* The town-and-gown marriage between North County and the university is only partly successful. Although the city of San Marcos and some other communities have bonded tightly with the campus, other North County communities, including Oceanside and Vista, seem to have little use for the university.

* Although the campus has succeeded far beyond national norms in hiring an ethnically diverse faculty, attention now needs to be placed on recruiting an equally diverse student body to reflect the university’s commitment to multiculturalism.

* The university’s current course offerings lack a shared theme and are generally traditional and unimaginative, reflecting little of the charged talk of innovative core classes and electives.

* Although there was much discussion about linking the various majors together through interdisciplinary studies, there is little evidence of that so far--and the idea will become increasingly difficult to implement as the university grows and the traditional walls between academic disciplines inevitably develop.

If one theme surfaced among all others among the four evaluators, it was that the campus has an opportunity unlike any other university in the nation to craft curricula that can embrace new approaches in higher education.

“This is a very fortunate university in that it has managed to put together people who want to build something new, and we want to encourage them to take some risks,” Levine said. “There are no entrenched interests. Here’s a chance to do something differently. Not flaky, but different.”

And with that comes the burdensome knowledge that others will be watching over the university’s shoulder, he said.

“The nation hungers for educators of vision. There’s a particular urgency today for new models to guide the future, and that’s what San Marcos offers,” Levine said. “The university already has done some interesting things, by involving everyone--staff, faculty, students--in planning and budgeting, giving everyone a sense of ownership and developing an incredible morale.”

Besides Levine, the consultants were June M. Cooper, vice chancellor for the California State University system; Kenneth O’Brien, former director of the state’s Post-Secondary Education Commission, and J. W. Peltason, chancellor of UC Irvine.

Stacy said he welcomed the outsiders’ view of the campus’ progress and was pleased by their generally laudatory response.

“We all have a little bird on our shoulder that whispers, ‘Don’t blow it,’ and it’s reassuring for us to hear that we’re doing so well. We’ve been doing so much so quickly, and we see so much that’s still left to do, it was time to wonder, ‘How are we doing so far?’ ”

Stacy has circulated the reports to his staff, faculty and the advisory University Council, and each group is now dissecting the findings and preparing its own responses.

Some of the university’s founding faculty members say they were unsurprised by some of the criticisms, especially about weakness in the curricula, but that in time the critics will be silenced.

Psychology professor Pat Worden said the first faculty members were simply pressed for time in developing opening-year courses, and fell back on conventional classes “as place holders” until more innovative ones could be designed and implemented.

“It was hard to ask any one person to write any kind of curriculum--let alone a wild and crazy and innovative one--that fast,” Worden said. “That’s why the first courses have looked familiar and traditional. And I didn’t think it was appropriate for me as one person to forge ahead with a vision of the (psychology department) program before the rest of the faculty came here, so I crafted something very generic.

“I disagree that opportunities have already been lost to build innovative and unusual curricula,” Worden said. “And I predict that, in the next five years, we’ll see quite a bit of revisions.”

Already, she said, the psychology department is embarking in areas of instruction that will distinguish it from other universities. For instance, San Marcos is putting more emphasis on placing psychology students in “real-world experiences”--by studying animal behavior at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, working with youths at boys and girls clubs, and studying health psychology at V.A. Hospital in La Jolla.

Carolyn Mahoney, another of the founding dozen faculty members, said she is working to craft a mathematics program more sensitive to computer scientists, despite the traditional lobbying efforts by scientists and physicists that mathematics instruction cater to their needs.

“We’re not necessarily saying our curricula will be different . We’re saying we won’t be limited by what’s been done elsewhere,” she said.

“We may make a conscious decision to teach something the way it’s been taught for 100 years because it’s still elegant,” Mahoney said. “In terms of mathematics, we need to balance what has traditionally been taught with what now needs to be taught.”

The university already stands alone in the country, Mahoney believes, in requiring its students to pass a computer-literacy test after their first semester.

“This is a radical requirement,” she said. “And, if this was seen just as a survival skill for the 21st Century, we wouldn’t require this kind of computer competency until graduation.

“But we as instructors want to make a basic assumption that students know how to use a computer, and not be distracted by wondering who can or can’t use a computer to do their classwork.”

Cal State San Marcos also has its Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents. Anchored by a growing collection of more than 6,000 Spanish-language text and reading books, the center is the only one of its type in the world that is available for perusal and research by students, teachers, parents and other publishers and authors, said its director, Isabel Schon, another founding faculty member.

“We’re having Ph.D students from New York University, Columbia--from all over--coming to study here,” Schon said. “Not even the Mexico City library has such a collection. We’re the only ones that exchange with Cuba, for instance, because I think we need to know what Cuban writers are writing, and what Cuban children are reading.”

In October, Schon will host a conference at the San Diego Convention Center that, she said, will draw publishers, educators, authors, librarians and others from throughout the world.

Despite such progress, the university still recognizes where it has stubbed its toe so far, Stacy says.

Burnout is a serious problem, he realizes. He says he finds staff members in their offices at 2 in the morning finishing reports because that’s the only time the phone isn’t ringing.

A multicultural student body needs to be established by courting minority students now in high school or even grade school, he says.

Yes, there’s tension between faculty and administrators--and between old-time faculty and newcomers on the scene, he acknowledges. And he’s not surprised.

“We have a world of stuff yet to do,” Stacy said. “But we’re in a good transition state. There’s a clear sense of what needs to be done.

“It’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty.”