Wilson's Star Shines Far Beyond CSUN

By ERIC SLATER

July 27, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NORTHRIDGE —

Blenda J. Wilson had been the president of Cal State Northridge for all of two months, 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 long for Northridge.

So much so, in fact, that when word came late Tuesday that she was one of five finalists for the presidency 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 earlier 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 up 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 head of the Getty and a former member of the University of California’s Board of Regents.

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

Despite her high profile, Wilson, one of the few African American women to lead an American university, remains something of an enigma on her own campus. Those who have worked with her for nearly five years now 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 the San Fernando Valley’s only 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 some Northridge residents contend 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.

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

Wilson has cultivated powerful allies, from Universal Studios’ Steve Lew and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, a friend who was chancellor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison when Wilson was chancellor at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, before coming to Northridge.

She is one of 15 trustees of the L.A.-based, $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 boards 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 connections have served her institution well. After the Northridge earthquake in January 1994, the Getty made a rare donation to a public institution when it gave CSUN $1 million to help restore arts equipment and several academic programs. The Commonwealth Fund chipped in $25,000 to help out.

But they 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 on 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 fifth 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, so he 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 became an arson investigator. Blenda went to college. She eventually received her doctorate in higher education administration from Boston College and continued her career in academic administration at Harvard, where from 1975 to 1982 she was senior associate dean in the Graduate School of Education.

From 1984 to 1988, she worked in Colorado under two governors, Richard D. Lamm and current Gov. Roy Romer. It was during that time that she met then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, an acquaintance that still fuels gossip on the Northridge campus.

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

In 1988, Wilson became president of 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 CSUN 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,” Merkowitz 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 the morning of Jan. 17, 1994, with its epicenter almost underneath the CSUN campus, Wilson quickly found herself in the national spotlight.

“Leadership reputations are often forged in crisis,” Merkowitz said. The earthquake “was an extraordinary situation [and] there were nothing but kudos for her performance.”

In truth, Wilson’s 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 CSUN administrators 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’ total recovery for two more years, until 2000.

Other embarrassments have cropped up: the men’s sports controversy earlier this spring and a couple of instances of financial mismanagement that, although largely resolved, brought their share of negative publicity. In one, CSUN 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 a half-million dollars it supposedly paid out in advances to employees who said they never received the money.

But as has been the case with Wilson since her arrival, the criticism has remained local.

Indeed, 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 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.

National leaders--from President Clinton to Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt to James Appleberry, president of the American Assn. of State Colleges and Universities--have offered nothing but praise, and jobs.

“Presidents will usually have a honeymoon period for a year or two,” said Appleberry, who was president of Northern Michigan University when Wilson was at Dearborn. “In Blenda’s case, that was perhaps extended a bit because of the earthquake and her handling of it. Just now you’re getting some of the [local] criticism that is typical of a university president who is active.”

But on a national level, Appleberry continued, “she’s very, very well recognized . . . for common-sense leadership.” He said he has approached Wilson several times during her tenure at Northridge with other job possibilities that he, like others, declined to specify, only to be told that she was not ready to leave. “She’s had plenty of opportunities in the past. But she will pick one where there’s a contribution to be made. And she’ll make it.”

On her way to the airport this past week to visit family in New Jersey and then to interview at Wayne State, Wilson, speaking by car phone as she often does, chuckled at the idea of her being a hot commodity.

“You have to take into account that I’ve been in higher education administration for many years,” she said. “I was president of the American Assn. for Higher Education. I speak a lot at major national conferences. So people know me.”

She paused. “I don’t know that that makes you a hot ticket, but it means people suggest your name.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Blenda J. Wilson

A 14-page resume includes the following highlights:

EDUCATION: B.A., English, Secondary Education, Cedar Crest College, 1962

M.A., Education, Seton Hall University, 1965

Ph.D., Higher Education Administration, Boston College, 1979

BOARDS: J. Paul Getty Trust, trustee

Center Theatre Group, director

James Irvine Foundation, trustee

Commonwealth Fund, director

Northridge Hospital, director