CSUN Graduation to Inaugurate New University Site

Giddy as a schoolgirl, 37-year-old Wendy Novak slipped on her cap and gown last week at the campus bookstore, eager to get on with a graduation ceremony that promises to change everything.

Not so much for her.

In fact, the mother of two will go on guiding a third-grade class at McKevett School in Santa Paula after picking up her teaching credential this week from the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge.

Rather, it’s the ceremony itself that signals a significant shift.

For the first time since Cal State University trustees agreed to convert Camarillo State Hospital into a college campus, graduates will claim their diplomas in an outdoor ceremony at the old hospital site.

Granted, the students have never taken a course at the new campus. And as graduates of the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge, their diplomas will come from CSUN rather than Cal State Channel Islands University. But there is excitement just the same as the budding campus plays host to its first graduation.

“Just to be part of the first graduating class at the new campus is a great honor,” said Novak, a straight-A student selected to speak Friday on behalf of the more than 300 black-robed graduates.

“This is meaningful in so many ways,” she said. “This new campus will offer fabulous opportunities for generations of students to come.”

Indeed, the Class of ’98 will usher in a new era for Northridge’s Ventura campus, propelling a drive to transfer the off-campus center to the shuttered hospital complex and eventually turn it into a full-fledged university.

Toward that end, Northridge officials are scrambling to expand academic programs and boost enrollment at the center, the first step toward shifting the entire operation to Camarillo, perhaps by year’s end.

The birth of the university has been a protracted labor spanning more than three decades.

And although there is solid community support for the new campus, there also is fond sentiment for a satellite center that has filled that void in the meantime, feeding a steady academic diet to a region that has longed for its own public four-year college.

In that way, the commencement means much more than the delivery of diplomas.

It is the celebration of a center--

launched with 75 students nearly a quarter of a century ago--that has grown into the largest satellite campus in the CSU system and one of the largest in the state.

And it is a nod to a place that has helped set the standard for higher education in Ventura County, laying the foundation for a Cal State campus, then keeping that dream alive.

“I think it’s a splendid move, signaling yet another milestone in the odyssey to bring a four-year college to Ventura County,” said Joyce Kennedy, who retired last spring after 23 years at the Ventura campus, the last 15 as its director.

“It’s another one of the many signs of progress,” she said. “And it’s certainly a time to bridge both the past and the future.”

Moving a Campus

With less than eight months to go before the campus is scheduled to settle into the mothballed mental institution, planners face a puzzle: Just how do you move a college campus?

Although the facility isn’t large, the question yields no easy answers.

Shoehorned into 30,000 square feet, the center takes up the second story of a coffee-colored office building overlooking the Ventura Freeway near Seaward Avenue.

It has two computer labs and a 15,000-volume library. It has 16 classrooms and four faculty offices and a staff of 11, which is expected to grow to 15 this fall.

There is a student lounge lined with vending machines selling everything from Blue Books to instant cappuccino to something called a tuna salad lunch kit.

And there is a bookstore that sells everything from CSUN coffee mugs to graduation announcements. It does not yet stock Cal State Channel Islands paraphernalia.

The bulk of the 15,000 full- and part-time students are older and hold down jobs, attending mostly evening classes. As a result, there is little bustle during the day, producing a silence broken only by the steady swoosh of freeway traffic.

“I just absolutely love this place,” said 59-year-old Loretta Wagoner of Oak View, who staffs the library part time while also working in the office.

Her story is typical. She arrived as a returning student in 1990, needing one year to finish a bachelor’s degree started decades ago in Indiana. She hoped to parlay that into a job with the county library system. But by the time she graduated five years later, she was working for the Ventura campus.

She is now pursuing her master’s degree and hopes to staff the library as the satellite campus evolves into a university.

“The people here are like family to each other,” Wagoner said. “And it has been a dream for all of us to see the new university come about.”

To Take or Not to Take

Of course, there is more to the move than boxing up office supplies and renting a fleet of U-Hauls.

There is a simple question of what to take and what to leave behind. For example, many of the computers in the existing labs may not make the move, as new equipment is expected to fill a computer center that will be created at the Camarillo campus.

At the same time, officials at the Ventura campus are working to expand course offerings, with an emphasis on offering more daytime courses to draw a broader student base.

Starting in the fall, for example, undergraduate students in the liberal studies, psychology and sociology majors will be able to take advantage of new daytime courses.

By the fall of 1999, CSUN officials say, they would like to offer at least four new degrees in fields such as computer science.

Then there is the question of when the move will take place. The target date remains January, but that is by no means set in stone. The only thing for certain is that CSUN’s lease at the Ventura site expires in August 1999.

And there is $16.5 million in the state budget to renovate the hospital facility and operate the off-campus center there. That money should be available this summer, but whether the campus will be ready by the end of the year is still anyone’s guess.

Whenever the move takes place, planners figure they need at least four or five months of lead time to set it in motion and write class schedules that reflect expanded offerings at a new location that is yet to win formal approval.

And they need to do all of this while continuing the academic program at the current site.

With so much swirling at once, campus director Steve Lefevre sometimes is rendered sleepless trying to keep track of all the details.

“We need to be careful that nothing falls through the cracks,” said Lefevre, hired late last year from the Texas state university system to head the center and guide its transition to Camarillo.

“It’s kind of like moving from an apartment into your own house,” Lefevre said. “We have got our own place now so there are a lot of new possibilities. But we want to make sure we do everything right.”

Lefevre found out early on just how complicated it can be.

Moving the library, he thought, would be a simple matter of boxing up books and shipping them from one place to another. But he quickly found out there is a science to such a move, one that requires professional advice and oversight.

Library officials from the main Northridge campus have been called in to help with the move and figure out how to fill the space at the new campus.

“It gives us an opportunity to turn our attention to what’s in that collection, update it and make plans for the new facility,” said Susan Parker, associate dean of the Northridge library. “The move itself is not so complicated because it’s just moving one collection into another space. But our goal is to look toward building a facility and collection that match the vision of what’s projected for Channel Islands.”

The off-campus center has had to move once before.

It started as the Ventura Learning Center in 1974, a joint educational project between the Cal State and University of California systems. At one time, there were seven off-campus centers operating out of an office building off Maple Street in Ventura.

But in 1988, the Northridge center split off and moved to its current location. Joyce Kennedy remembers the event as if it were yesterday.

“It was a holy terror,” she said. “We were very naive, sometimes renting moving trucks on our own credit cards. But we were excited then, younger and idealistic. Most of all, we were burning with enthusiasm at the progress.”

Assistant Director Dan Wakelee was around then, too. Today he’s handling many of the details for the move to Camarillo, visiting the campus once or twice a week to review plans with Channel Islands officials.

The new campus will provide more than three times the space as the current site, Wakelee said, and it’s important that all of it be put to good use.

“Right now we’re still at the point where we’re trying to figure out what it is we’re doing in these buildings,” said Wakelee, who earned his doctorate from UC Santa Barbara by writing a dissertation on why it took so long for the local Cal State campus to be created.

“We have been able to provide a lot of opportunities through the off-campus center,” he said. “But beyond a certain point, there are real advantages to having an independent institution.”

Going Out of Business

In some ways, the off-campus center is trying to put itself out of business.

As it grows and draws more students, it will at some point evolve into Cal State Channel Islands, its academic programs and student services swallowed whole by what is to become the 23rd campus in the CSU system.

A number of groups are helping guide that transition, including the 14-member Ventura Campus Advisory Board.

“All the signs are very good and I think it’s going to be fantastic,” said Robert J. Lagomarsino, a former Ventura congressman who sits on the advisory panel and who will attend graduation ceremonies Friday.

“This is long overdue,” he said. “But I see everything that’s happening now as another endorsement that this campus will finally become a reality.”

Part-time professor Marcos Vargas said students are excited about being part of this historic shift to the new campus, keenly aware that they are involved in a significant event 30 years in the making.

“This is something this county desperately needs,” Vargas said. “It’s a beautiful place and I think it’s going to be one of the most beautiful campuses in the Cal State system.”

On Friday, university officials say, the public is invited to come to graduation and see for themselves how beautiful the place is.

The ceremony will be at 10 a.m. on the south quad, deep in the shadow of the hospital’s historic bell tower and adjacent to the four Spanish-style buildings set for renovation as part of the inaugural phase of the campus.

“It will be a good opportunity for people to get an idea of what the campus will look like in the future,” said Angela Hayes, a Port Hueneme mother of two who will receive her bachelor’s degree in sociology. “I think it’s great to finally have this here.”

So does Wendy Novak. After returning to college in 1994 at the main campus in Northridge, it took her two years to realize that the Ventura campus was available to her. But once she did, the Ventura resident was able to cut out the commute and speed through her course work to earn her teaching credential while working part time.

Her only regret is that she wasn’t able to take classes at the Camarillo campus. But she said she may remedy that by returning once the new campus is open for business.

“I know I wouldn’t be graduating now if it weren’t for the local campus,” said Novak, who planned to visit the Camarillo site for the first time this weekend to get her bearings before the big day. “It made a tremendous difference for me, and I think it will continue to do so for many other students.”

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About This Series

With less than eight months to go before Camarillo State Hospital is scheduled to become the new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge, the focus has turned to how to pack up and move the satellite center. “Birth of a University: Countdown to a Cal State Campus,” is an occasional series chronicling the campus’ development. This installment looks at the CSUN campus in Ventura, which for the first time will hold graduation ceremonies at the fledgling campus in Camarillo. Graduation will be Friday at 10 a.m. at the shuttered hospital complex, 1878 S. Lewis Road.