Final 4 Audition for President’s Job at CSUN : Education: The four candidates each spent a day on campus, being questioned and interviewed, meeting students, faculty and executives and taking a tour.

Each of the four finalists jockeying for the top job at Cal State Northridge spent one day this past week in an exhausting daylong audition, meeting advisers, executives, support staff, students, department heads, deans and finally the faculty.

By the time the candidates toured the campus--with some relief--at the end of each afternoon, their hands had been repeatedly gripped and grabbed, their voices pressed into nonstop service, their faces frozen into artificial smiles and their minds subjected to the same questions again and again, and once more again.

The next president of the 30,000-student campus will face a host of issues that swirl in the twilight of outgoing President James W. Cleary’s 23-year tenure--the longest in the Cal State system.

After Cleary’s retirement June 30 at age 65, his successor will be left to deal with the pressures of an ever-shrinking budget, the challenge of an increasingly diverse student body, the controversial decision to push CSUN into the highly competitive world of Division I athletics and the choice between focusing tight resources on high-profile research or on enhancing the quality of undergraduate instruction.

The four candidates were selected from a pool of nearly 100 applicants. It has not been determined when the new president--who will probably earn between $116,000 and $124,000--will take office.

Each of the finalists this week fielded questions on all of those issues during numerous question-and-answer sessions. Listeners were then given the opportunity to rate the candidates in brief questionnaires, which are to be reviewed by the search committee of the Cal State system’s Board of Trustees.

The 13-member search committee will select two or three names to forward to the full board, which is scheduled to meet for two days in Long Beach at the beginning of next week. The selection will be announced May 21.

Ronald H. Stein

Content with his current job, Ronald H. Stein wasn’t “in the market to be a president” when, through what he called a series of accidents, he was tapped as a finalist for the top post at CSUN.

But if he winds up with the position, he said, he would try to duplicate his most satisfying accomplishment at the State University of New York at Buffalo: pushing the university into the upper echelon of the nation’s public research institutions and selling SUNY Buffalo’s attributes during the five years he’s been vice president for university relations.

“I’m a very happy person. I like my job,” he told a group of faculty members who quizzed him as to why he would want to leave Buffalo. “I’m here because I really think there’s a tremendous opportunity at Northridge to take this university and move it into the ranks of the very best in the country.”

To do that, the bespectacled Stein, 49, suggested that he would leave the nuts and bolts of running the campus to a powerful assistant while he acted as an ambassador and messenger taking word of CSUN’s accomplishments and potential to wealthy business leaders and influential alumni.

But his vision for the role of university president received mixed reviews from some faculty members and students who questioned him during his visit Tuesday.

“He was very charismatic when he talked about money,” said Kristen Duerbig, 19, a sophomore active in student government. “He’d be a real go-getter, going out and drumming up money. But his relationship with the students I thought would be a little more aloof.”

William F. Eadie, a professor of speech communications, said, “We need a president who’ll be good at telling our story to the community.”

But, Eadie said, “we also need a president who will work with the faculty. The faculty don’t want an absentee president.”

However, Stein pledged to work with professors and called the faculty the key to CSUN’s success. “The road to greatness for public universities is to attract and retain the best possible faculty,” he said.

Stein arrived at SUNY Buffalo in the early 1960s as an undergraduate and never left. He received his doctorate in philosophy, taught educational psychology and served as an administrator for more than 20 years--six of those as assistant to then-President Steven B. Sample, who now heads USC.

During his time at Buffalo, he has raised millions of dollars and enhanced the university’s reputation nationally. As president of CSUN he said he would raise money and improve the university’s image by tapping the “fabulous” corporate community in Los Angeles, hosting national and international academic conferences and gaining coverage in major publications, newspapers and academic journals.

He said CSUN was obligated to serve the needs of a student population that encompasses 23 ethnic groups.

“The student body is multicultural. You have an obligation to teach and attract those students,” he said. “The whole purpose why the public university system was set up in the first place was to serve the non-traditional student” who could not attend pricey private schools in the East.

But several student leaders and some faculty members said that during his visit this week Stein frequently invoked his experiences at Buffalo but was short on offering specifics about what he would do at Northridge.

Claire Van Ummersen

If Claire A. Van Ummersen becomes president of CSUN, she said she would cut through the clutter of committees, commissions and advisory boards that have been appointed to tackle campus problems. Although the soft-spoken but articulate head of New Hampshire’s state university system favors a team approach to management, she also believes in streamlining.

“There seems to be a committee and task force for just about everything that moves on campus,” she said dryly on Wednesday, to a ripple of laughter from her audience of CSUN deans and administrators. “Maybe it’s just an impression I have, but a lot of committees seem to lead nowhere. I’d like to have fewer committees, of higher quality.”

She said she sought the job as CSUN’s third appointed president out of a desire to return to a campus setting after six years as chancellor of New Hampshire’s state university system, which encompasses four colleges that serve nearly 18,000 undergraduate students.

One professor said she appreciated Van Ummersen’s many years of experience on both sides of the fence in higher education, as an instructor as well as an administrator.

“I was very positively impressed with her. She seems to understand a university from a faculty point of view,” said Elizabeth Berry, a professor of speech communications. “From a faculty member’s point of view, it makes me very comfortable.”

After an hourlong question-and-answer session with the candidate, political science professor Ram Roy said, “She could certainly reinvigorate the academic environment.”

“She was very direct and open,” said Anthony Ashhurst, 35, a graduate student. “She seemed to be very involved and decisive.”

Students and instructors described Van Ummersen, 55, as impressive and poised--a demeanor that apparently helped her several years ago when dozens of students at the University of Massachusetts at Boston confronted her and other administrators over a controversial decision to deny tenure to a female black professor.

She was able, she said, to reason with the demonstrators and calm them down, partly because of her low-key manner and quiet voice, which forced the hostile students to fall silent in order to hear her speak.

“That taught me not to use a bullhorn,” she said in characteristically measured tones, a glimmer of a smile crossing her face.

Regarding the challenges posed by a multiethnic student body and society, Van Ummersen agreed that students should be exposed to a variety of cultures through their course work.

“As part of the educational core, there need to be foundation courses that incorporate that diversity into the university,” she said. “The faculty at Northridge have a good deal to do yet in developing a multicultural curriculum.”

She said current requirements allow students to graduate without taking a single course that explores a foreign language, another culture or the works of ethnic minority writers.

But Van Ummersen acknowledged that the Cal State system’s current financial straits would necessitate budget cuts at CSUN--even, perhaps, in its academic program, which she said forms the “core of the institution.”

“We keep hoping tomorrow will be better,” she said. But “that’s not going to be in the cards for higher education.”

Despite the grim fiscal realities, the university should also be a cultural resource for the surrounding community, she said, defining the role of president as not only a campus and academic representative but as a community leader as well.

Blenda J. Wilson

As chancellor of the University of Michigan at Dearborn--a predominantly white institution once headed by a segregationist--Blenda J. Wilson counts her proudest achievement as finally persuading officials to pledge the university to recruiting students from nearby Detroit, home to youths of many races.

She said her commitment to minority students would make addressing the challenges of a multicultural student body one of her top priorities.

But Wilson, 51, an articulate speaker who on Thursday answered questions with laughs as well as with long, thoughtful responses, also warned students and professors that the path to multicultural education was not easy and would require foresight and planning.

For example, hiring more minority professors would help foster diversity in the curriculum more than a sudden introduction of a literature course including minority writers, she said. “We need a long-term strategy for this, not a quick political fix.”

And she elicited several nods from faculty members when she blamed the university’s failure to address multiculturalism partly on the fact that she and other educators of her generation were not trained to deal with the issue. Few actually resist or deliberately ignore opportunities to present pluralistic views in their courses, she said.

“I am very highly credentialed, but I am very undereducated, and that is true of most of the adults in this institution,” said Wilson, a self-described “first-generation college student” who would be the university’s first female and first African-American president.

“What seems to me imperative is to find ways to help faculty members and administrators learn what they were not taught,” she said.

Her humor, her detailed answers to questions, her honesty at points in saying, “I don’t know” and her willingness to challenge assumptions endeared her to several professors and students during her daylong visit.

During a session with about 50 faculty members, one male professor asked if she would characterize herself as a feminist. If so, he continued, would it affect her performance as president and, was it even appropriate for him to pose that question?

“If you define what you mean by feminist , then I think it would be an appropriate question to ask me,” she replied, to a burst of laughter and applause from the audience.

She also reiterated to the faculty her support of the university’s emphasis on undergraduate instruction over research, as outlined in the Cal State system’s blueprint.

“If we lose our emphasis on teaching, we’re losing our strongest suit,” she said, adding that CSUN should not simply mimic schools in the University of California system.

Referring to the Cal State system’s traditional emphasis on undergraduate instruction, she said the contribution teachers “make to our society is more important than the contributions of a few elite research universities.”

Several students--whom she unapologetically calls CSUN’s “customers”--also enjoyed her candid style.

“She obviously had a good rapport with students,” said sophomore Duerbig. “I immediately felt comfortable with her. She made us laugh right away.”

“She got hit by a lot of tough questions, and she didn’t flinch,” said Bruce Najbergier, 29, a graduate student in history. The university does not “always relate very well with the community, and she seems to have the insight, sensitivity and poise to do that.”

Although much of her outlook has been molded by her experience as an African-American woman, Wilson said she opposed any abridgment of free speech and expression on campus out of an effort to maintain “political correctness.”

“The university is the place where people wrestle with their values. If we all thought the same and became robots of either a politically correct or a politically incorrect view, we would not have an environment” appropriate to a university, she said.

H. Ray Hoops

H. Ray Hoops said “worst-case scenarios” have rarely materialized in his life, which makes him more optimistic than many when it comes to a looming CSUN budget crisis.

But he doesn’t have stars in his eyes.

“No one in this day and age can aspire to be the chief executive officer of a university without expecting” to encounter severe fiscal problems, he told administrators and faculty members during his visit to the campus Friday. “Virtually all institutions, public and private, are going to have to begin to exploit all the resources available to them.”

If appointed to CSUN’s top post, Hoops, 52, said he would launch an ambitious fund-raising drive to raise millions of dollars in just a few years to bolster the university’s ailing finances.

“This is an institution that now . . . can begin to lay the infrastructure for a major capital campaign. The good news is, you have the basic elements for such a campaign,” including a pool of alumni “who are very satisfied,” he said.

But Hoops, an unassuming man who was nonetheless straightforward in his comments, acknowledged that spending cuts at CSUN appeared inevitable.

He declined to speculate about what would first feel the scythe under his leadership, but he said any long-term strategy should protect the university’s academic program. To do so, he said, may require a redefinition of CSUN’s mission through a “comprehensive, rigorous, soul-wrenching review.”

His commitment to academics, especially undergraduate teaching, is evident in his current post as vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Mississippi. And to Sal Damji, president-elect of the associated students, that was comforting.

“He is committed to academic excellence,” said Damji, an engineering senior. “He’s ready to hear out students, but if students are going to come in and say, ‘We want easier programs,’ he won’t stand for that.”

Student leaders were impressed with his knowledge of CSUN, the San Fernando Valley and the dramatically shifting demographics of the campus and the area.

“The great strengths of this university are its location and makeup,” he said. “Certainly the great academic activity of the next two decades will be in urban universities.”

Hoops counted the diversity of the student body as an asset but said it can also present problems because of the greater demands placed on the university by students with special needs. “It’s a wonderful opportunity, but it’s a very great burden,” he said.

To recognize the multiethnic flavor of the campus, he recommended broadening the general education requirement to include courses exploring the literature and history of other cultures. He also called for recruiting more minority faculty members and for encouraging students to consider a career in academia in the face of what he says is a potential dearth of qualified professors across the country.

“I don’t see how we’re going to be able to hire quality faculty--or any faculty--with the kind of shortage we can expect in the middle of this decade,” he said. “At the beginning of the next decade you could fire a cannon down the hall and not hit a quality faculty member.”

He briefly discussed his short-lived presidency at South Dakota State University nearly a decade ago, from which he stepped down rather than fire a young faculty member for political reasons at the order of the governor. His resignation caused an uproar.

The governor later ran for the U.S. Senate but lost, and blamed his failed campaign on Hoops and the scandal at South Dakota State. “I hope he’s right,” Hoops said with a chuckle.

Profiles of CSUN Presidential Candidates

H. Ray Hoops

Current Title: Vice chancellor for academic affairs, University of Mississippi

Ph.D. Audiology and Speech Sciences, Purdue University, 1966

Age: 52

“Your . . . great strength is the diversity of the student body and the mechanisms you’ve developed and are developing to deal with that. You are way ahead of other universities, but you’re way behind where you ought to be--where all universities ought to be . . . “

Priorities:

* Would emphasize undergraduate teaching but gradually increase role of research.

* Would mount a major fund-raising campaign.

* Would assemble a strong administrative team.

Ronald H. Stein

Current Title: Vice president for university relations, State University of New York at Buffalo

Ph.D. Philosophy, SUNY at Buffalo, 1972

Age: 49

“Undergraduate instruction is the highest priority--the business of the business is teaching. The most important people of a university are the faculty and the students, and everyone else is in a service role . . . There’s a tremendous opportunity at Northridge to take this university and move it into the ranks of the very best in the country.”

Priorities:

* Would emphasize raising money and increasing the university’s visibility nationally.

* Would seek to expand CSUN’s role as a research institution.

* Would give the deans of the major schools on campus greater authority.

Claire A. Van Ummersen

Current Title: Chancellor, University System of New Hampshire

Ph.D. Biology, Tufts University, 1963

Age: 55

“Higher education is going to have to learn to do things differently . . . There is going to be more pressure for accountability; there is going to be more pressure to educate more students with less resources . . . You can say, ‘Let’s just all sit down and say woe is me,’ or you can figure out how to deal with it. It can be quite exciting.”

Priorities:

* Would emphasize undergraduate teaching.

* Would seek a more active role for CSUN in the community.

* Would adopt a collegial management style, with fewer committees and advisory boards.

Blenda J. Wilson

Current Title: Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration, Boston College, 1979

Age: 51

“I believe politically correct speech or even harassing speech is better than controlling thought. The university is a privileged community in which the free flow of ideas is part of our obligation to society . . . If there is no place else where words and thoughts and terms are unfettered, it ought to be the university. I am against speech codes.”

Priorities:

* Would address the issue of multiculturalism by educating faculty and recruiting more minority professors.

* Would emphasize undergraduate teaching.

* Would overhaul the campus budget process in order to set spending priorities and to involve faculty and administrators.