Cal State System Gets a Promising New Leader

With the recent departures of Chancellor Barry Munitz and Executive Vice Chancellor Molly Corbett Broad, the California State University system is losing its key leaders just as big challenges loom: The system must accommodate a tidal wave of students (enrollment in California colleges is expected to rise nearly half a million by 2005) while helping to train and credential thousands of new teachers for kindergarten through 12th grade to meet the demands of population growth and class-size reduction.

Fortunately, last week, the Cal State system found a leader to match these challenges: Florida State University system chancellor Charles B. Reed. He will take office March 1, replacing Munitz, who departs in January to become president of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The tasks in which Reed most distinguished himself during his 11 years as Florida State chancellor--meeting the needs of an ethnically diverse student population despite declining expenditures and explosive enrollment growth--are similar to those awaiting him at Cal State. And Reed succeeded better than CSU in controlling tuition hikes during the economic downturn of the early ‘90s.

Like Cal State, Florida also launched a new, high-tech campus. But while Cal State opened its Monterey Bay campus less than a year after it was green-lighted by the state, and ran into a predictable water shortage that severely limits enrollment, Florida spent six years planning its new campus. That foresight spared the campus from major problems, education experts say.

Reed needs to tackle some tough issues quickly when he starts his new job:

% Restoring faculty confidence. While most higher education leaders have hailed Reed’s appointment, some Cal State faculty rightly complained that they lacked a representative on the “stealth” search committee that chose him. They complained that the committee omitted “significant academic accomplishments” from its list of search criteria.

At FSU, Reed earned a reputation for working to prevent faculty disagreements from surfacing publicly. At Cal State, he should engage in more open dialogue with the faculty. A start would be involving faculty members in the system’s long and so far unsuccessful search for a permanent chief academic officer.

% Improving teacher education. “If you are going to improve public schools,” Reed told The Times, “you’re going to have to do it through the CSU system.” Reed should initiate specific reforms, like setting up a mentoring system similar to medical residencies, where teachers can be supervised on the job after leaving college.

% Making each of the system’s 23 campuses more accountable. Currently, all entering students are given math and English tests. But the system should also require graduation exams, which would be used as one of several factors in measuring a school’s performance.

Cal State, the nation’s largest university system, presents huge political and pedagogical challenges. Reed, described by Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles as “both a visionary and a problem solver,” should be able to embrace both challenges.