The New Big Man on Campus : Robert Maxson Says Long Beach State Has the Potential to Overcome Its Problems and Become One of the Nation’s Top 5 Urban Universities

It’s a few days into the fall semester on the campus of California State University, Long Beach, and clearly there are a lot of kinks that need to be worked out.

A few surly, last-minute enrollees stand in line at the Administration Building, waiting to pay fees that are up 10% this year. Motorists glumly circle the campus, looking for somewhere--anywhere--to park. Here and there, students loll under towering eucalyptus trees, griping about overcrowded classrooms.

Enter university President Robert C. Maxson, 58, a slim, sharp-featured man with a dazzling smile that reveals teeth as white as piano keys. He’s on one of his frequent perambulatory dashes across the campus, dispensing high fives to students and loud greetings to faculty members.

“Just look at this,” he marvels to a visitor whom he has just hustled from his office to the busy South Campus, where students mingle and schmooze. “This is where it’s happening. Look at those fresh-scrubbed faces.”

After $36 million in budget cuts over the past four years, there are definite signs of distress here and there--like the battened-down parking structure that awaits $3 million in seismic retrofitting and the waiting lines in chemistry labs, where students must take turns using spectrophotometers and pH meters.

And where are the usual signs of autumn on this college campus? There’s not a single athlete with big shoulder pads and cleats. The $1.3-million-a-year football program was erased three years ago.

But three months into his tenure as the school’s president, Maxson is already catching the rhythm of the place and imposing some subtle changes of his own, increasing the tempo and focusing attention on recent accomplishments at the university.

In his quick-step tours, Maxson doesn’t see problems. He sees a campus brimming with youthful energy and academic excellence.

“He’s a glass-is-half-full sort of a person,” says Toni Beron, assistant vice president for public affairs.

“I won’t say we’re going to be one of the best four or five universities in the nation in the next 10 years, but I think we’ve got a chance to be one of the best four or five urban universities,” Maxson says with conviction.

An urban university, he explains, serves a large number of non-traditional students who don’t fit the mold of youthful, American-born high school graduates.

The urban university also assumes a mission of solving urban problems, Maxson says.

“There are 5 million people within a 20-mile radius here,” he says. “They have real social, economic and political problems, problems of safety. I see the urban university dealing with the problems of its metropolitan center.”

The high-powered Arkansas-born president arrived after 10 years at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with a reputation as a consummate fund-raiser with lofty ideals. He has set some high goals for himself and his new school, which is paying him $142,000 a year, $18,000 less than he earned at UNLV.

Under his leadership, Long Beach State will be a student-friendly place, with more on-campus residences and cultural programs, he says. “I submit that you can measure the morale of a university by the number of people you see on campus on Saturdays and Sundays,” he says.

There will be a vigorous athletic program--though not quite so vigorous as the star-studded basketball program at UNLV, where Maxson tangled with Coach Jerry Tarkanian in a highly publicized feud over recruiting violations.

Tarkanian recently blamed Maxson for a storm of negative publicity that led to his 1992 resignation and the school being placed on probation by the NCAA. Maxson now prefers not to talk about the feud, which divided the Las Vegas civic community.

Most important, Maxson envisions Long Beach State as an academic mecca, a gathering place for high school valedictorians and the school of choice for top students from all over the region. “I don’t think we’ll ever be a great university if we’re always the second, third or fourth choice for the students who come here,” he says.

He is also committed to raising $20 million in contributions to make up for some of the funding cuts.

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So far, Maxson’s brand of positive thinking is sweet music to the long-suffering faculty and students. When he addressed a convocation of faculty and staff a few weeks ago and described his vision of the 322-acre campus as a great university, a few people shed tears.

“He’s really one of the few people I’ve heard who truly believes that the university is here because of the students,” says Suzie S. Aramesh, president of Associated Students, the school’s student government organization.

“The message that he really cares about serving the students--it’s one that people really want to hear,” says Dorothy M. Goldish, chairwoman of the Academic Senate, the school’s principal faculty organization.

There’s a battle-scarred quality to members of the university community who have been around since 1990--like soldiers ready to dive for cover at the least sign of incoming fire. For the fifth year in a row, the school absorbed a cut this year--$1.9 million. After prior cuts of as much as $17 million, this was widely perceived as a good sign.

Nevertheless, the continuous shortfall has left in its wake:

* Rising fees. Students now pay $1,584 in annual tuition, up from $1,440 last year, and the CSU trustees are already talking about a 10% increase next year.

* Unrepaired buildings. In the history department, staff put plastic sheets over desks during the rainy season because of leaking roofs. In chemistry laboratories, experiments are often spoiled because faulty heating and ventilation systems lead to temperature extremes.

* Lack of parking. As 26,500 students try to fit into 10,391 parking spots, a new 2,800-space garage remains locked. After a Cal State Northridge garage collapsed during the Jan. 17 earthquake, seismic engineers recommended additional reinforcement at the Long Beach State garage.

* Crowded classrooms. There are still courses in which student demand is greater than supply. There is a widespread perception among students that it’s next to impossible to get a degree in four years because of the lines of students waiting to get into basic courses.

Worst of all is a pervasive sense of malaise. “You really have to stretch to find things to be cheerful about,” says Goldish, who is a chemistry professor.

Maxson says the dispirited talk has a ring of self-fulfilling prophecy.

“If I’ve got a youngster who wants to be a doctor or an attorney,” he says, “and he says it will take six or seven years to graduate here and classes are going to be large and in some way the quality has diminished--well, I’ll take out a second mortgage to send the youngster someplace (else).”

Besides, the perception of diminishment is mistaken, says the glass-is-half-full man. CSULB is a thriving university with an intriguingly diverse student body and a top-notch faculty, he insists. As for the budget problems, help is on the way, he says.

If anybody can jump-start the school’s sputtering engine, it’s Robert Maxson, according to his former associates in Las Vegas.

Elaine Wynn, a member and former chairman of the UNLV Foundation, still grieves over his departure from Las Vegas. “I’m sad that he’s gone,” she says. “I think this is California’s big break that they’ve got him now.”

The phenomenal transformation of UNLV under Maxson is almost legendary. Less than a mile from the Las Vegas Strip, UNLV was an academic 90-pound weakling, derided as “Tumbleweed Tech” and “Green Felt U” when Maxson arrived in 1984.

High-minded, folksy, tireless, Maxson spoke endlessly to civic organizations of his notion of the symbiosis between university and community. Gradually, the Nevada establishment got behind the school.

Maxson had a kind of Midas touch in Las Vegas, says UNLV Vice President John Irsfeld, who was Maxson’s deputy for four years before becoming a vice president in 1990.

“At one meeting, he said that one of his visions was a program to offer a full scholarship program to every valedictorian in the state,” Irsfeld says. “After the program was over, a middle-aged woman, nicely dressed, not flashy or showy, came up to Maxson and said she was really interested in the scholarship idea and wanted to know how much it would cost.

“He put his arm around her and said, ‘Well, ma’am, it would probably cost $1 million just to get started.’ And she said, ‘I think I can do it.’ ”

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The woman was Margaret Elardi, owner of a Laughlin casino. The scholarship program that she initiated--and was continued by Elaine Wynn and her husband, Steve, chairman of Mirage Resorts--has been extraordinarily successful. Last year, 43 of the state’s 56 valedictorians went to UNLV.

By the time Maxson left, enrollment at UNLV had doubled, to about 20,000, and there were 14 new accredited programs and 28 new degrees, to say nothing of 30 new buildings and five more in planning. UNLV officials say that under Maxson the school raised more than $100 million in private donations.

Maxson’s secret is salesmanship, Elaine Wynn says. “Like every good salesman, he knows his product and he’s responsible for his product,” she says. In other words, he delivers on his promises.

“If people didn’t see growth, increased enrollment and elevated quality of students and faculty, (the donations) would just dry up,” Wynn says.

The squabbles with Tarkanian may have disenchanted die-hard basketball fans, some of whom organized under the banner of Citizens for the Removal of Robert Maxson, but the president came out smelling like a rose in the academic community, Irsfeld says.

“About the time he left here,” Irsfeld says, “the faculty senate took a poll and Maxson got an 82% positive rating. That’s pretty good when you consider faculties are not given to generosity in judgment.”

The man who brought bona fide higher education to Las Vegas and hopes to rejuvenate a battered university in Long Beach is the second son from an Arkansas family of cotton farmers.

“I was raised in a middle-class family, with wonderful family values and work ethic,” Maxson says.

But the farming life was not for him. He went to the University of Arkansas at Monticello, earned a bachelor of science degree in education and psychology, then became a high school teacher in Florida. One of his students was Sylvia Parrish, whom he later began dating. They married in 1965 and have two grown children.

The next 19 years saw the Maxsons moving through a succession of positions at Southern universities, including two years at Mississippi State University, where the couple worked in the federal program to desegregate schools in Philadelphia, Miss. Five years earlier, three civil rights workers had been murdered there.

He and his wife “shared a passion about the civil rights movement,” Maxson says. “It gave us an opportunity to act on our strong convictions.”

Maxson earned a Ph.D in education from Mississippi State, and, between 1979 and 1984, became chancellor at the University of Houston’s Victoria campus and senior vice president for academic affairs. His arrival in Long Beach reunites him with CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz, who was chancellor of Houston’s main campus when Maxson was in Victoria.

The move to Las Vegas was a big change for Maxson. “I had never lived outside of the Deep South before,” he says. It was also a bit of a shock to his fervently Baptist parents, for whom Las Vegas’ reputation was one of excess and dissolution.

“I told my mother I had accepted a job at the University of Nevada,” Maxson says. “She said, ‘Where’s that?’ When I said it was in Las Vegas, there was just a silence at the other end of the line.”

Despite his reputation as an aggressive fund-raiser, Maxson is, by most accounts, the epitome of modesty and decorum, displaying a highly developed understanding of other people’s sensitivities.

“He would never say anything around a woman that anyone would have the slightest opportunity to call off-color,” Irsfeld said.

Sylvia Maxson says that her husband finds it difficult even to tell little white lies. “If my daughter is here and the phone is ringing, she might say, ‘Tell them I’m not here,’ ” she says. “He has a real hard time doing something like that.”

But the key to Maxson’s personality is his implacable optimism, Irsfeld says. “He’s the kind of guy who discourages depression,” Irsfeld says. “We talked about this on several occasions. We’d be up late on recruiting trips and get to talking about our early lives. He told me that he had just made up his mind when he was young that, to the extent that he was able to do it, he was just going to choose to be happy.”

Lately, there has been little cause for optimism at CSULB. But hard times have, in some cases, inspired improvements and constructive acts, Maxson insists.

For example, in the absence of state money, the science departments have initiated successful fund-raising drives of their own. The chemistry department got corporate and private donations to fund most of the $163,000 needed for laboratory and office supplies.

“Only about 10% of our operating expenses comes from the state,” said Kenneth Marsi, chairman of the chemistry department, 55% of whose graduates go on for postgraduate degrees. “We’re essentially running a private operation here.”

Despite budget cuts, the School of Business Administration has been able to tailor its faculty assignments so that for the first time ever it is guaranteeing students seats in all of the courses of their choice.

“They’ve done it with a sort of marketing flair,” Maxson says. “I think you’ll be seeing more of that.”

Perhaps most important for campus spirit, the Pyramid, the school’s new, $22-million cobalt-blue athletic center, will be open for the start of the men’s basketball season on Nov. 30.

“Intercollegiate athletics are probably our most visible window to the public,” Maxson said. “It’s phenomenally good for the school when it’s done well.”

Maxson’s predecessor, Curtis McCray, resigned in March, 1993, to head Millikin University, a small liberal arts college in Illinois, after shepherding the school through four difficult years. Karl Anatol, provost for academic affairs, served as interim president until Maxson’s arrival.

On a recent morning, the Food Court--the campus restaurant center--is jammed with students greeting each other with hugs, discussing classwork in tight huddles, basking in the morning sun.

Robert Maxson appears, jacketless, with a man in a dark suit in tow. The president shakes a hand here, conducts a quick head-to-head conference there and surveys the scene with a smile.

“Feel the energy,” he says, turning back to his guest. “This is what it’s all about.”

University Enrollment

1990: 33,991

1991: 32,339

1992: 30,071

1993: 27,073

1994: 26,500* *Estimated

Source: Cal State Long Beach