Satellite Campus Is on the Move

How do you move a college campus?

If you are an official at Ventura’s Cal State Northridge campus, you enlist the help of a retired Army officer--a man who has moved tank squadrons and infantry divisions during his 20-year military career--to clear the path for the satellite center’s transition to Cal State Channel Islands.

CSUN history professor Stephen Bourque is commanding officer for the big move, setting up classrooms and faculty offices for the first wave of students and teachers due to roll in at the end of the month.

The transition began this week, when moving vans pulled up to the former Camarillo State Hospital complex with new computers, desks and other furniture. And it shifts into high gear next week, when the contents of CSUN’s Ventura center will be packed and trucked to the new campus.

It is a mammoth undertaking, the first concrete step toward opening Ventura County’s first four-year public university. With his eye for detail and affinity for discipline, Bourque has been assigned to direct traffic every step of the way.

“This move is what we in the Army call a deployment,” said Bourque, who will teach a course at the campus when it opens Aug. 30 as the new home for Ventura’s CSUN center. The satellite campus is scheduled to evolve in two years into the autonomous Cal State Channel Islands.

“It’s a controlled crash--we’re going to be thriving on chaos for the next few weeks,” Bourque said. “The key and the challenge is to make it transparent to the students so they don’t see all the behind-the-scenes scrambling.”

There has been plenty of that. Construction crews have been busy since November converting the old state hospital into a state-of-the-art college campus, renovating mothballed patient wards and medical offices into the dozens of classrooms and offices that will make up the first phase of the new campus.

The transformation has been startling. Old hospital rooms, once dark and bare, have been brought back to life with new carpet and lighting and fresh coats of paint. Sprawling courtyards, once weed-choked patches of bronze and gold, are green and thriving again.

There is plenty left to do. So much, in fact, that CSUN faculty members--at the campus this week to prepare for the move--often found themselves bumping into contractors hustling to complete unfinished rooms and hallways.

“Right now it’s a lot of juggling,” said Dan Wakelee, assistant director of the local CSUN campus. He has gone through this before, when the off-campus center moved in 1988 from Maple Street in Ventura to its current site, a coffee-colored office building overlooking the Ventura Freeway near Seaward Avenue.

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Back then, the satellite facility was operating on a shoestring budget, forcing administrators to rent moving trucks with their personal credit cards. This time, the state is picking up the tab up front.

“It was definitely a smaller scale back then,” Wakelee said. “But we’re going to be ready for students on the 30th.”

For many of the CSUN faculty members--on hand this week to do whatever was needed to prepare for the move--there was a sense they were taking part in something special.

They spent much of their time pulling chairs and desks from boxes, setting them up in neat rows in one classroom after the next. And they did it while maintaining all of their other duties, making sure the Ventura campus continued to run smoothly. That is especially important now when an estimated 1,800 students are registering for the fall semester.

“The clock is ticking, so as each classroom is completed we run to the next,” said administrative services coordinator Maria Tauber, who was in charge of ordering all the new furniture for the campus. “But there is an overwhelming sense of excitement. This is really history in the making. It has been 30 years in the making, but nonetheless, it’s a new beginning.”

Indeed, there have been proposals for more than three decades to build a public university in Ventura County. But while those plans have been delayed over the years by community opposition, CSUN’s satellite center has helped fill the academic void.

It was launched with 75 students a quarter of a century ago, and has grown into the largest satellite campus in the CSU system and one of the largest in the state.

So while there is plenty of community support for the developing Channel Islands campus, there is also fond sentiment for the off-campus center as it barrels toward its final days in Ventura.

Assistant librarian Loretta Wagoner was so saddened by the closure that she scheduled a pool party--billed as a wake for the Ventura campus--at her Oak View home.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” said Wagoner, 60, who arrived at the campus as a returning student in 1990 to finish a bachelor’s degree she had started decades earlier in Indiana. She had hoped to parlay her degree into a job with the county library system, but by the time she graduated five years later she was working for the Ventura campus.

“I needed it for closure,” Wagoner said of the pool party. “I needed it for myself.”

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Come Monday, the first moving trucks will arrive to transport the contents of the 30,000-square-foot center to Camarillo.

Already, hallways and office cubicles are stacked with boxes, each color-coded to correspond with a classroom or office at the new site. And then there is Bourque, trying to plan a curriculum for the upcoming semester and pack his own office at the Ventura campus while fielding a flurry of questions on the move.

In February, Bourque had set up a flow chart to plot each step of the move. And he handed out weekly updates on the transition. But those things were discarded as the move got closer.

Now he relies on the instinct of a man who has moved more than 30 times since graduating from high school.

“One of the things the military does for you is make this stuff rather routine,” he said. “Like I always say, as long as no one is shooting at us, it’s not that difficult. I don’t get stressed, I just get busy.”

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About This Series

With the first phase of Ventura County’s public university set to open Aug. 30, officials are scrambling to ready the new campus for its first crop of students and teachers. “Birth of a University: Countdown to a Cal State campus” is an occasional series chronicling the creation of the Channel Islands campus at the former Camarillo State Hospital complex. This installment focuses on efforts underway to move the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge to the new university.