Educator’s Prospects Elsewhere Offer Little Surprise

Blenda J. Wilson had been the president of Cal State Northridge for all of two months, and Bill Clinton the U.S. president-elect for two days, when rumors began to swirl in November 1992 that Wilson was up for a presidential appointment.

Although she was indeed contacted later by Clinton staffers, Wilson said recently, she told them she wasn’t interested in a Washington job, and her name was never on any Clinton short-list. But there has been the sense almost since she arrived that Wilson would not be at Northridge long.

So much so, in fact, that when word came late Tuesday that she was one of five finalists to be president of Wayne State University in Michigan, it was received with only a modicum of surprise by many in higher education circles.

“I’ve told the Board [of Trustees] for a long time that we were going to lose her sometime,” said Barry Munitz, chancellor of the Cal State system, who just a week prior announced that he would be leaving to head the J. Paul Getty Trust. “She was just too good.”

Some local critics disagree, as Wilson’s relations with the campus and community have become increasingly strained during a series of controversies in the past year. But nationally, the 56-year-old New Jersey native is widely viewed as someone with nowhere to go but up--perhaps higher than Wayne State, a public research university in downtown Detroit that enrolls 31,000 students.

The latest rumor: She could be a top contender to replace Munitz as overseer of all of Cal State, the largest university system in the nation.

Wilson is a “natural choice” to head Cal State, said Harold M. Williams, the current chief of the Getty Trust and a former member of the UC Board of Regents.

Wilson, though, says she isn’t interested, having worked in higher education at a system level as the executive director of Colorado’s Commission on Higher Education from 1984 to 1988. “I’ve done that, I’ve been there,” she said. “I don’t want to do that again.”

Despite her high profile, Wilson, one of the few African American women to lead a U.S. university, remains something of an enigma on her own campus. Those who have worked with her for nearly five years are hard-pressed to say anything specific about Wilson beyond her public persona and confess to knowing very little about her personally.

Some insiders deride her as a “media hound,” while others call her the most effective, genuine pitchwoman a university could have dreamed up. Generally reluctant to criticize her openly, some faculty members privately accuse her of seeking faculty or public opinion as a public relations ploy, only to forge ahead with her own plans--as she has been doing with the proposed North Campus shopping center. Others, meanwhile, can’t believe she’s stuck around for as long as five years--the average tenure of university presidents today.

“She gets chased all the time” for other posts, Munitz said.

Beyond the 353-acre campus and the surrounding community, however, there is notably little disagreement over Wilson’s reputation. What the outside world sees is that enrollment has returned to its pre-earthquake levels two years earlier than predicted, that Wilson’s administration just forged a partnership with the San Fernando Valley’s exploding entertainment industry to train students for lucrative jobs and that the school is actively pursuing private money as other sources of funding grow ever tighter.

“She’s personal, decisive and easy to work with,” said Bill Hauck, vice chairman of the Cal State Board of Trustees, echoing the sentiments of many state and national higher education leaders. “She clearly is a rising star in academic administration circles.”

While fostering the very image Hauck described, Wilson has also cultivated powerful allies, including Universal Studios’ Steve Lew and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, a friend who was chancellor at the University of Wisconsin when Wilson was chancellor at the University of Michigan at Dearborn before coming to Northridge.

Wilson is one of 15 trustees of the $4.2-billion Getty foundation, the richest arts and humanities foundation in the world. (Wilson said she voted for her boss, Munitz, to take the Getty helm, along with all the other trustees.)

She also sits on the board of the well-known James Irvine Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based philanthropic foundation, to name a few of her varied associations.

Those ties have served her institution well. After the earthquake in January 1994, the Getty made a rare donation to a public institution when it gave Cal State Northridge $1 million to help restore arts equipment and several academic programs. The Commonwealth Fund chipped in $25,000 to help out.

But her connections also have provided fodder for those who contend that Wilson is so busy with outside commitments that she too often leaves others to mind the store. She was at an Irvine Foundation meeting June 11 and could not be reached for comment when the university made the highly controversial announcement that it would be cutting four men’s sports programs for budgetary reasons and to comply with gender-equity laws. The teams have since received one-year reprieves.

“There are three reasons that I’m on boards,” Wilson said last week. “One is just straight-up community service. . . . The second is for the ways in which my associations can benefit the university. . . . The third reason is my own mental health. I have a long-standing and abiding interest in health care in the United States,” she said, explaining her work with the health-focused Commonwealth Fund and other such groups over the years.

One of four children born to Horace and Margaret Wilson, who also raised a foster child, Wilson was brought up in Woodbridge, N.J. Her father had trained as an electrician but could not get an apprenticeship to qualify for a license, and so worked for a cleaning company. Her mother, who had studied in the South to be a schoolteacher, worked at a variety of office jobs.

One sister became a nurse, another a sheriff’s deputy, and her brother become an arson investigator. Wilson went to college, eventually receiving her doctorate in higher education administration from Boston College. She quickly moved into academic administration at Rutgers, then Harvard, where from 1975 to 1982 she was senior associate dean in the Graduate School of Education.

From 1984-88, she worked in Colorado under two governors, Richard D. Lamm and current Gov. Roy Romer. It was during this time that she met then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton, an acquaintance that still fuels gossip at Northridge.

“Even now we get rumors: ‘A possible Cabinet appointment!’ ” said university spokeswoman Carmen Ramos-Chandler.

In 1988, Wilson became president at the University of Michigan’s 8,000-student Dearborn campus.

She is married to Louis Fair Jr., a transportation consultant and a former Detroit airport director.

When she took over at Northridge in 1992, Wilson “was fairly well known, although her presidential experience was limited,” said David Merkowitz of the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C.

“Within the world of higher education, as a black woman heading the campus of a major university, that gave her some prominence to begin with,” he said. “But that only gets you so far. Once you’re in the position, you have to do something with it. And that’s where she’s excelled.”

Ironically, it was the most costly natural disaster in American history that raised Wilson’s profile to its current level. When the Northridge earthquake struck early on the morning of Jan. 17, 1994, Wilson found herself quickly in the national spotlight.

Her administration has been taken to task more than once for earthquake-related problems. In 1995, for example, it was revealed that a husband-and-wife team of administrators at the university who played pivotal roles in the campus’ recovery had allowed workers from one quake contractor to perform work on their home for free.

Bill and Jane Chatham were cleared by the state ethics office of violating any conflict-of-interest laws, but the affair caused an outcry. Then this spring, three years after the temblor, university officials decided they couldn’t repair the two wings of the Oviatt Library after all, and instead would have to tear them down and rebuild them--a process that will extend the campus’ recovery for two more years, until 2000.

Other embarrassments have cropped up: the men’s sports controversy earlier this spring and a couple instances of financial mismanagement at the campus that, although largely resolved, brought their share of negative publicity. In one, Cal State Northridge officials acknowledged garnishing nearly $70,000 in students’ state income tax returns for alleged tuition debts, even though it turned out the students owed no money at all. In another, the university was unable to account for nearly half a million dollars it supposedly paid out in advances to employees who said they never received the money.