County CSU Campus Loses Key Planner

At a time when Cal State officials are trying to craft a cutting-edge curriculum for the county’s newly anointed public university, the campus is losing a valuable member of its academic planning team.

Robert Peyton, 62, will leave his post as senior academic planner early next month to return to Northern California where his wife has been battling a serious illness.

Since arriving in Ventura County last spring, Peyton has scoured the county to identify educational needs and develop academic programs designed to launch the new campus, to be called Cal State Channel Islands, into the next decade.

“It is with a tremendous amount of regret that I leave,” said Peyton, a 20-year veteran of the UC and Cal State systems who will go on to become special assistant to the president at CSU Hayward.

“It has been a great experience, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come down and help with this,” he said. “There are so many projects I’ve got my heart into here.”

Channel Islands President Handel Evans said that although he is sorry to lose Peyton, he already has lined up other staff members to pick up where the academic planner left off.

Barbara Thorpe, a professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills who heads the largest distance-learning nursing program in the western United States, will join the staff Oct. 1.

Already familiar with the area through her work on the Ventura County Public Health Community Advisory Board, she will be on loan for two years to help push the university’s academic programs toward completion.

Evans said he intends in coming months to bring another academic planner on board as well as a staff member to oversee fund-raising and other support activities.

“We are sorry to see Robert go; he made a vital contribution over the last year and a half and leaves a legacy to be proud of,” Evans said. “But this can’t stop, we have to move on. What we are doing now is expanding on Robert’s work, beginning to make priorities for the academic program and start moving along those lines.”

Evans said that is especially important in light of last week’s decision by the Cal State governing board to convert the closed Camarillo State Hospital into the university system’s 23rd campus.

Although the 630-acre hospital complex initially will become the new home for the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge, plans call for the off-campus center to evolve into a free-standing university within the next decade if enrollment and financing goals are met.

Central to that effort, CSU officials said, is the creation of a curriculum that will set Channel Islands apart from other campuses, drawing students from across the state to the bucolic setting.

In fact, Cal State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed said after last week’s vote that there is no goal more essential as the university steps out of the shadow of Cal State Northridge to become a full-fledged, four-year campus.

“What we need to do now, and take time doing, is plan the academic programs,” Reed said. “We know we’re going to have to step that up.”

Much of the foundation has already been laid.

Under Peyton’s guidance, the university has started offering a master’s degree in social work under the Channel Islands banner, using two-way audio and video hookups at CSUN’s Ventura campus to pipe in the three-year program from Cal State Long Beach.

Peyton has worked closely with officials at Ventura County’s three community colleges, exploring academic programs that will dovetail with community college courses.

For example, Cal State officials have agreed to make 6,000 square feet of classroom space available on the new campus to support Moorpark College’s biotechnology program.

In coming months, planners will step up efforts to identify educational needs in Ventura County and find ways to shore them up.

The goal, officials said, is to make the curriculum a vital part of Ventura County.

Peyton is just sorry he won’t be around to see it all happen.

But he said as it is, he travels to Northern California most weekends to be with his wife. And he said the next phase of academic planning will require a greater commitment than he will be able to give.

“I think this project deserves someone who will be there full time,” said Peyton, who is staying long enough to see the hospital complex formally change hands Oct. 1 and become the property of the Cal State University system.

“I don’t think anybody is indispensable,” he said. “Really, I walked in at the end of 30 years of other people’s work. And it has been a great thing to be a part of the enthusiasm and energy surrounding this project.”