Countdown to a New University

In a lot of ways, no one has a better feel for Ventura County’s budding Cal State campus than 64-year-old Dutch Grafner.

Forget about the architects with their fancy blueprints or consultants with their long-winded studies. Grafner was chief of operations at Camarillo State Hospital, which was mothballed last summer.

He knows every inch of the place by heart. And he can see exactly how, one day, a university will take root here and blossom.

Where there are now empty buildings, he sees a library and a bookstore, directly down the hall from the student lounge. He sees the old hospital chapel becoming a giant lecture hall, while an abandoned psychiatric unit will be where the technology center plugs in.

In all, four of the Spanish-style buildings on the 620-acre former hospital grounds are in line for face-lifts designed to yield the dozens of classrooms, laboratories and offices necessary to launch the inaugural phase of the university next January.

“It’s just like a place waiting to be reborn,” said Grafner, who put off retirement so he could be part of the team scrambling to piece together the long-awaited campus.

“It’s not hard to look out here and visualize what’s going into these buildings, to imagine students walking around with books or sitting under one of these pepper trees before going to their next class,” he said. “Oh, yes, I can see it. I have no doubt that it’s going to happen.”

After a protracted labor spanning more than 30 years, the countdown is on for the birth of a public university in Ventura County.

In less than a year, Cal State officials plan to convert the old hospital into the new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge, the first step toward establishing a four-year college at the site within the next decade.

Under that plan, the satellite campus will remain an extension of Cal State Northridge until it attracts enough students and funding to support itself and become the university system’s 23rd campus.

The next several months promise to be a pivotal period, one punctuated by key budget hearings and planning deadlines. Not only must planners transform the aging institution into a modern-day campus, they must find ways to generate the cash needed to eventually expand it into a full-fledged university, to be called Cal State Channel Islands.

To that end, they are working out plans to create a commercial hub and establish a range of other moneymaking ventures to help the college pay its way.

It is the first time that a developing Cal State campus has been forced to contend with such a pay-as-you-go reality.

“In terms of creating an entire campus this way, it’s a new idea,” said project manager Noel Grogan, a 20-year Cal State employee who is set to retire after throwing open the doors for the new campus.

“You can’t complain about it, really--it’s a smart thing to do,” he said. “The job of this group is to build Cal State Channel Islands under this strange new format.”

It is against this backdrop that a team of Cal State planners has set up shop in the hospital’s administration wing, taking over a row of offices deserted when the facility shut down.

If the hospital complex is the birthplace for the new university, this wing is its incubator.

In one room, oversized blueprints and drawings line the walls, a quick reference guide for anyone interested in learning how the campus is shaping up. Groups of people wash in and out all day: architects and developers, educators and engineers.

It is the kind of place where homemade baked goods make the rounds during weekly meetings of a staff handpicked by Cal State Channel Islands President Handel Evans, a staff well connected in the Cal State system--and well-versed at squeezing it in all the right places.

Leading the charge is Evans himself, a 30-year veteran of the university system who once served as president of San Jose State and who most recently headed the effort to convert an old Army base near Monterey into Cal State’s newest university.

So far, the work that he and the others have done here has yielded historic results.

Last year, Cal State trustees agreed to take control of the shuttered mental hospital and convert it into a college campus, ending the county’s decades-long wait. And earlier this year, Gov. Pete Wilson earmarked $16.7 million in his proposed budget to push forward with the conversion.

If that money survives a series of budget hearings, and no fatal flaws turn up in an environmental review, the initial phase of the project should be completed by New Year’s Day.

But Evans is quick to point out that’s only half the battle. His aim is not simply to shift the Ventura campus, which has 2,000 full- and part-time students, to Camarillo.

“My assignment,” he said, “is to create an institution, a university for the next millennium, and to try to set the foundation stone on which that university will grow.”

For the moment, though, “We sit here looking out our windows imagining students walking up and down the campus. . . . Really, we’re just getting started.”

*

It seems like everyone wants a piece of the project. Preservationists want to ensure that the hospital’s historic buildings are not harmed by the renovation. Chumash representatives will visit to ensure that culturally sensitive areas on the property go undisturbed. The state fire marshal is requiring that at least some portion of the renovated buildings be protected by sprinklers.

The new campus is expected to build its curriculum around the community’s assets--agriculture, biomedical and computer industries, Navy bases and the nearby ocean and deep-water port.

Some courses could be up and running even before the Northridge satellite campus moves to the old hospital complex: The Channel Islands campus could begin offering a master’s degree in social work this fall through a distance-learning program offered by Cal State Long Beach.

A master plan is being drawn up, meanwhile, to develop the income-generating portion of the campus, possibly including a senior citizen community, a high-tech business park and housing for students, staff and faculty.

“We’ve really got to get realistic with where we’re going with all this,” Evans said. “It’s one thing for consultants to talk about how to make money, and it’s another thing to actually go out and do it.”

Last week, two Cal State Northridge representatives, Dean Calvo and Debra Hammond, toured the complex to size up retail opportunities. A bookstore and cafeteria already have been built into the first phase of renovation. But Calvo and Hammond are considering the long term, looking ahead to a time when the university is bustling with upward of 10,000 students.

“I just see possibilities everywhere,” said Hammond, executive director of the student union at Northridge. “On our campus the student union is really the community center. We want to expand those kinds of opportunities for students out here. They can’t be in the classroom all day long.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Cal State Campus

In less than a year, Cal State officials plan to convert a former mental hospital in Camarillo into a college campus, complete with a bookstore, library and technology center. During the first phrase of renovation, four buildings at the shuttered hospital complex will receive face-lifts, yielding dozens of classrooms and administrative offices. The campus is scheduled to open in January.