University Plan ‘Poison,’ Conservative Group Says

At a time when boosters are trying to maintain unified support for Ventura County’s first public university, an evangelical Catholic college instructor has launched a campaign to block the Cal State campus on grounds that it would be a second-rate, politically correct institution.

Richard Ferrier, who heads a conservative group called Concerned Citizens for Quality Higher Education, believes the campus will become a “new age polytechnic,” a university devoted to job training and advancing a liberal agenda rather than the loftier pursuits of higher learning.

Although civic leaders have stressed unity so as not to derail the long-awaited campus, Cal State officials said the campaign should have no effect on efforts to launch the four-year university.

“I think the support in Ventura County is very, very high,” said Handel Evans, president of the developing Cal State University Channel Islands. “Listening to Mr. Ferrier and his group, I haven’t heard anything that has persuaded me that what we are doing shouldn’t be done.”

For the past four months, Ferrier’s group has pounded a steady drumbeat of opposition to the new campus, hammering out letters to Cal State trustees while holding community forums to whip up like-minded support. He counts 50 supporters.

The campaign represents the first organized opposition to the university, a campus that has been planned for three decades but has been thwarted by public indifference and a lack of organized community support.

Ferrier hopes to persuade residents that the issues he has raised need a closer look before the university moves any closer to reality.

“What they offer us is not a university but a poison,” said Ferrier, an instructor at Thomas Aquinas College who helped lead last fall’s statewide campaign to abolish affirmative action in college admissions and government employment.

“I would like to make sure we don’t have a bad university,” Ferrier added. “My fear is that this would be an educationally mediocre facility that we don’t need and that would not be good for us.”

But university boosters dismiss Ferrier and his followers as a small band of troublemakers who in no way represent the mainstream view in the county.

“There is overwhelming support for this university,” said longtime supporter Carolyn Leavens, whose husband in 1992 helped wrest leadership of the county’s Republican Central Committee from Ferrier and a faction of conservative Christians pushing an anti-abortion agenda.

“I believe his stand on this issue will highlight just how far out of the mainstream he has put himself,” she said of Ferrier. “This just may prove he’s one of those gadflies way out on the fringe.”

Cal State officials say there is room for debate on curriculum and other university-related matters.

They say Ferrier, however, has jumped to wild conclusions about the university’s academic program, assumptions that are premature especially since trustees have not even decided where to build the college campus, much less what to teach once it opens.

“The attitude that is being reflected here is a very narrow one and extreme,” said Evans, who on Tuesday will go before the Board of Supervisors to showcase the developing campus.

“I think Mr. Ferrier is getting ahead of himself,” Evans said. “All we’re trying to do at the moment is increase access to higher education for a whole bunch of people who don’t have access.”

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But the debate fueled by Ferrier is not whether Ventura County needs a public university, but what kind of university the county needs.

Thomas Aquinas College, a small Catholic institution near Santa Paula, bases its curriculum on the writings and classical texts of western civilization’s greatest thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Einstein.

Ferrier suggested perhaps the county’s Cal State campus could follow in that tradition. That is the kind of new university he would rally behind, he said.

Yet, Ferrier has also tapped into a larger debate over a trend on many campuses, both public and private, to move away from traditional academics.

Instead, schools such as Cal State University’s newest campus at Monterey Bay are developing educational programs designed to prepare students for an increasingly multicultural, diverse and global society.

At Cal State Monterey Bay, controversy swirls around a curriculum that includes courses in community participation, culture and equity, and “vibrancy,” which is defined as the “understanding of the interrelationship between intellectual, psychological, spiritual, aesthetic and physical health as it applies to one’s own life.”

Academic goals include preparing students to be “cross-culturally competent citizens.” That is described in campus literature as gaining the skills and knowledge “to establish respectful and constructive relationships with people who differ from themselves . . . and participate actively, constructively and ethically in a culturally diverse society.”

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Ferrier and other like-minded critics dub this “new age” academics. They say it rubs against the grain of a university’s mission to cultivate the mind and develop character and citizenship.

Worse yet, Ferrier sees “diversity” and “multiculturalism” as code words for a politically correct agenda being advanced by the political left.

And he sees the same people who helped build Cal State Monterey Bay--namely Evans of the Channel Islands campus and Cal State University Chancellor Barry Munitz--at work building a university in Ventura County.

“The program put into place at Monterey Bay reflects, perhaps with mild exaggerations, the tendencies and designs of the leadership of the Cal State University system,” Ferrier told members of a conservative group earlier this year.

In speeches before other groups, including the two Ventura County chapters of the Christian Coalition, Ferrier also has warned against creation of a “polytechnic” institution more devoted to serving the job market than providing a well-rounded general education.

He is particularly troubled by the business ventures being forged to help subsidize the new university, and by the commitment of Cal State officials to build a university responsive to the economic needs of the region.

“I think it’s distressing, shocking, that our fellow citizens are asleep on this matter,” Ferrier said. “What they’re going to get is not a university. They’re going to get a cancer--a cancer on the political and social life of this county.”

So far, Ferrier has won a few converts.

Coleen Ary, chairwoman of Simi Valley-based Citizens for Truth in Education, came on board after learning about educational reforms at other campuses.

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“There must be some irreversible resolution that will hold that this university will be strong academically, that it will serve the needs of Ventura County not the needs of the Cal State system,” Ary said.

“It’s not really our goal to stop it,” she added. “We just want to stop their version of it.”

Cal State officials counter that the campaign to block the Ventura County campus is steeped in misinformation. They say there is no reason to believe that Cal State Channel Islands will be anything like Cal State Monterey Bay.

If anything, officials say, its academic program will very likely resemble that of Cal State Northridge, especially since the first step will be to transfer Northridge’s off-campus center in Ventura to the currently favored site on the grounds of Camarillo State Hospital.

Furthermore, they say, it is erroneous to assume the Cal State University system somehow dictated the academic program at its Monterey Bay campus.

Oxnard College President Steven Arvizu was the first provost at the Monterey Bay campus and helped establish the curriculum there. He said a task force of more than 300 community leaders helped mold the campus’ educational vision.

And while many of the academic programs are innovative, Arvizu said critics fail to mention that the core curriculum remains grounded in general education requirements such as English, science and the humanities.

“You don’t have to wipe away one base of knowledge as you’re introducing others,” Arvizu said. “But these people are grasping at straws, they want to provoke controversy. What they want to do is restrict the curriculum to only what they value.”

Moreover, Arvizu said those who object to “diversity” and “multiculturalism” often have a political agenda of their own.

“What this group means by multiculturalism is that they don’t want minorities, they don’t want people of color and they don’t want low-income people around,” Arvizu said. “But if you’re going to have a public institution, and public dollars are going to support it, that institution has to serve all of the public, not just a few favored segments of it.”

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For his part, Evans sees the developing Cal State campus as a place to meet a range of divergent needs.

It can be a place that prepares students for the job market, while supplying an educated work force that meets the needs of the regional economy in the 21st century, he said. And it can be a place where employees go to sharpen their skills and advance in their jobs.

Evans said it can also be a place where students, from all economic backgrounds and walks of life, can study Machiavelli and mechanical science, where they can benefit from the teachings of de Tocqueville while learning the latest advances in technology.

“I don’t think we’re going to be all things to all men, but the university can be a place where many of these things come together,” Evans said. “But to get into this debate of whether mine is better than yours is incredibly parochial and does nothing to provide educational opportunities to people who don’t have them.”