A Death in the Family

The funeral’s most emotional moment came when the three grown sons spoke in choked voices of what they had learned from their father and what he had left them. They listed many things, but mainly a legacy of values, of compassion and simple kindness.

The deceased was a state college professor I knew as a student. John Healey had welcomed me to Cal Poly 20 years ago. I don’t remember what he said that day. I do remember how he looked: a short, bald man with a cherubic smile, dressed in a Banlon shirt and poly-blend slacks. The effect was decidedly non-tweedy, in the image of both Cal Poly and the entire state college system.

John Healey retired more than a decade ago--”before it all fell apart,” as one of his friends put it before the funeral--and died two Saturdays ago. The eulogy I write today is partly for John, but more for the college system that brought us together.

Cal Poly and the state colleges came to full flower in the expansive Pat Brown era. Along with freeways and aqueducts, California conceived a system of higher education without parallel. Under the education master plan, almost every California child, rich or poor, future rocket scientists and carburetor specialists alike, would have access to a college.

At the low end, there would be community colleges--high schools with ashtrays, we called them. At the high end, with its endowments and high-powered research programs, would be the elite University of California, the UC. And in between would be the 20-campus state college system, later known as the California State University, or CSU.

The California dream by and large always was a middle-class proposition, the province of suburban mortgage slaves, and the state colleges were geared to that California. The CSU was a collection of cow colleges and teachers colleges. Commuter students were encouraged. Faculties were filled with pragmatists, rather than famous thinkers. Their mission was not to conduct research but to crank out graduates in workaday fields--teachers, sales managers, newspaper reporters. It was education of the middle, by the middle, for the middle.

My family was state college all the way. Our father often was on the road all week, selling, and eventually all five children attended a California state college. Four hold state college degrees and, had he not been seduced by the glamour of the Fresno Bee, so would the fifth. Another story.

With the state colleges, we did not need to worry about accumulating Stanford-esque savings accounts. No tuition was charged, only minimal fees. Still, it was not “free.” Over decades, our parents, grandparents and all California taxpayers had paid the bill. I doubt they dwelled on it much but they forged a real and remarkable legacy, and our part of the deal--though I never heard it explicitly stated--was to keep the same covenant with our children and our grandchildren. This we have not done.

After the funeral, the old Cal Poly hands muttered how John Healey “got out while the getting was good.” For 10 years at least, the CSU has been squeezed. Now, with the state in a jam, the squeeze has become more like strangulation. On every campus, employees are receiving layoff notices. Course offerings are cut. Tuition-sized student “fees” are proposed.

You attend, California’s students are told under this new deal, you pay.

So what went wrong? The greed of our times might be blamed. Sacramento politicians, who forfeited public trust and thus forced Proposition 13, might be blamed. CSU, seeking recognition as a full-fledged “university” system in the last boom days, added costly programs and high-priced professors. Sheer economics came into play. It was such an audacious proposition: That without tuition, endowments or any conventional means of university financing, a state could underwrite the higher education of its children.

“A marvelous idea,” said one professor, “but doomed to fail. You could not continue to promise the dream when there was no money to back it up and time just caught up with it.”

Now understand, there will be no official funeral for CSU anytime soon. The campuses, cutting like mad, will hack their way through the current crisis. No doors will be closed for now. But more and more they will swing open only for students with the most money, only for students with the best grades. And through this slow, ceaseless diminishment of a once grand dream, California will lose part of what made it California in the first place.