Swords-Into-Plowshares Department : In a trying time, some creative ideas from CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz

Creative thinking is sometimes a matter of looking at a worm and seeing silk. Sometimes it is a matter of distinguishing which among several ingredients is the active one. Sometimes, finally, it is a matter of discerning when what you can’t have is what you don’t need.

Considerations like these are prompted by the news that the Ft. Ord Army base, near Monterey, may become a new campus of the California State University.

By some time in 1994, the Army will have vacated the giant, 28,000-acre base, whose closing was announced months ago. CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz, with the backing of Gov. Pete Wilson, thinks that within two years the base--the buildings as well as some of the land--can go into service as a campus, saving the state the $800 million that construction of a campus from scratch would cost.

Thanks in part to Leon E. Panetta, President Clinton’s budget director and formerly congressman from the 16th District, which includes Ft. Ord, $135 million is budgeted for conversion of the base to civilian use. Though some of this money will be spent on toxic cleanup, Munitz thinks the federal money will essentially cover the conversion.

A further up-front savings could come from a student aid program modeled on the G.I. Bill. That fabled program provided federal student aid to military veterans whose service to their country had come before, not after, their college years. Munitz thinks paying prospective students apprentice wages for work on the Ft. Ord conversion and giving them sweat equity to trade in for free tuition at the school they helped build would provide a more mature student body as well as an effective aid program.

Ft. Ord, though it has a gymnasium, living quarters and classrooms, doesn’t have everything a campus has. It doesn’t, for example, have a library. But John Scully of Apple Computer is consulting with Munitz on how to find an electronic alternative to the 500,000-volume “overnight” library that can scarcely be had even if you were willing to pay for it. Electronic access may well be supplemented by an expanded version of a McGraw-Hill pilot project at Cal State Long Beach. That project uses on-demand, high-speed printing of books (and sometimes chapters of books or journal articles) while still managing to pay royalties to the authors whose works are copied.

Can it all come to pass? Legislation has already been written for the transfer of the land from the federal government to the state. The University of California wants to come aboard with a research park at the same site. Ft. Ord State is not yet a dream come true, but it is at least a dream, and for that we applaud the dreamers.