Satellite Campus Set to Launch : Education: After years of planning, former Camarillo State Hospital opens doors as CSUN branch for 1,800 students today.

Come along with Joyce Kennedy and watch a dream unfold.

Roaming through the building that serves as the cornerstone for Ventura County’s first public university, she marvels at the classrooms and offices all set for the arrival today of the first students and teachers at the new campus.

She pokes her head into the student lounge, then walks up to a rooftop terrace, where students will soon be eating and drinking coffee and cramming for tests.

“Oh my, my, my, isn’t this beautiful,” said Kennedy, 65, the former director of CSUN’s Ventura campus and a driving force behind the creation of the new Cal State campus.

“It will simply be a marvelous, monumental day for the county--nothing short of that,” she said of opening day. “It just took so bloody long to get here.”

This will be no ordinary first day of school.

For Kennedy and others, it culminates a decades-long dream to deliver a four-year college to a region where generations of students have had no choice but to leave if they wanted a state college degree.

For nearly a year, construction crews have worked to transform three Spanish-style buildings at the former Camarillo State Hospital complex into the dozens of classrooms and offices necessary to launch the inaugural phase of the Cal State Channel Islands campus.

That phase officially kicks off today when the campus opens as the new home for the 1,800 students at CSUN’s satellite center. The center shifted operations two weeks ago from Ventura to the new campus near Camarillo.

In two years, if financing and enrollment goals are met, the satellite facility will evolve into an autonomous institution and welcome its first freshman class.

“Really, this represents a lifetime of planning and dreaming for so many Ventura County residents,” said state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), who has spearheaded the legislative effort to funnel start-up money to the new campus.

“And it’s only the beginning of tremendous opportunities for local residents,” O’Connell said.

Noise, Inconvenience to Be Part of Scene

The new campus is a work in progress.

Its first students will contend with some noise and inconvenience as construction crews scramble to complete renovation of rooms and hallways inside the historic bell tower building, where the campus core is laid out along interior corridors on two floors.

In fact, students were told last week during orientation that large sections of the red-tiled, mission-style building would remain off limits to anyone without a hard hat.

“For the next couple of weeks, you’ll hear a lot of banging and hammering as we try to finish up the first phase of construction,” Channel Islands President Handel Evans told nearly 300 students gathered at the campus Thursday morning for a tour of their new school.

“It’s not a common thing to start a university, so we are all learning as we go,” Evans said.

Students were eager to get started.

Camarillo resident Nancy Boyce walked through the freshly painted corridors at the old mental hospital, amazed by its transformation into a college campus. After spending many years raising children, the mother of nine intends to fulfill a longtime dream of earning a university degree at the new campus.

“The fact that I’m one of the first students here is so exciting to me,” Boyce said. “There’s just so much excitement in Camarillo for this new campus. Everywhere you go, people are saying this new campus is going to change things.”

The changes are just as exciting for students who had been attending CSUN’s Ventura campus.

Nichole Frias, who will graduate in May, has taken classes at the off-campus center since the fall of 1998. In addition to a full load of courses, she works 20 hours a week for CSUN’s local campus and is vice president of the Associated Students organization.

“I am so excited to be part of all this,” said Frias, taking a break from leading student tours. “I can’t wait for school to start. It feels like a real campus. It feels like a real university.”

Well, it’s not a real university yet.

Not even the library--to be housed in an old laboratory where psychiatrists once studied mental disorders--will be open for business when the semester starts, though it is next in line for a face-lift.

For now, its 15,000 volumes will remain locked in storage on campus.

“But the key things are in place,” said Steve Lefevre, who took over as director of CSUN’s satellite center after Kennedy retired in 1997. “The bathrooms and water fountains work. The telephones work. The classrooms are ready. It will be touch-and-go, but I think we are going to be able to function.”

Campus Planned for Up to 17,000 Students

In many ways, the new campus is just getting started.

Much attention has focused on opening the doors at the university, but that is simply the first step in a much larger process.

Cal State University officials hope to create over the next 25 years a university for as many as 17,000 students. Plans call for converting 300,000 square feet of empty buildings at the old state hospital into academic space.

The Channel Islands campus, however, will be built like no other. University trustees have made it clear the only way the campus will expand into a full-fledged, degree-granting institution is if it generates enough cash.

Toward that end, Cal State planners are proposing to build a self-contained community around the campus core, complete with 900 houses, a small retail center and a research and development area.

Those projects are intended to generate the $300 million needed to build out the university over the next quarter of a century. University planners are working with county officials to refine the blueprint on that development for review by the county’s Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors.

If all goes smoothly, university officials hope to have final approvals in place by early next year and break ground on the development by spring.

In the meantime, CSU planners are creating an academic plan for the emerging university and continuing to press state lawmakers for establishment of permanent operating budgets for the new campus. Legislators will be asked to set aside $10 million for the Channel Islands campus for fiscal year 2000-01.

“There’s still a long way to go; it won’t be over until the first freshman sits down in a classroom,” Evans said.

“But what’s happening now is of enormous significance,” he added. “Suddenly, once-empty buildings will no longer be empty and that’s a very important signal that the university is coming. I think it sends a message to nonbelievers, to people who thought it would never happen, that it’s going to happen.”

Local CSU a Dream for More Than 30 Years

There were plenty of people along the way who had doubts. And with good reason.

A local state university has been on drawing boards for more than three decades, when then-Gov. Pat Brown authorized a study for potential Ventura County sites for the campus.

In 1969 the state bought 425 acres in Somis for a campus, but sold the land seven years later.

Nearly two decades later, Cal State officials targeted several hundred acres near the beach in Ventura, but opposition from nearby residents thwarted that project and university officials abandoned the site.

Cal State planners then looked north to Taylor Ranch, a sweeping hillside site overlooking the Pacific Ocean near the Ventura Freeway and California 33 junction. Once again, local opposition prompted Cal State officials to back away.

Those were perhaps the darkest days for university boosters such as Ventura farmer and business leader Carolyn Leavens, people who had worked for years to establish a local Cal State campus and thought Taylor Ranch the perfect location.

“In the back of my mind, I always knew it was going to happen,” Leavens said. “It was just a question of how soon we would be able to realize our dream because we needed it so badly.”

In fact, that is what Leavens told university trustees in September 1998, when she led two busloads of university supporters to Long Beach to urge Cal State University trustees to take possession of the closed mental hospital and convert it into a college campus.

Leavens said her persistence was spurred, in part, by the fact her own pursuit of a university degree had been interrupted years ago, when college took a back seat to helping run her family’s citrus ranch.

“I want more options for people who find themselves in the same place I was,” she said. “Our county is going to benefit in so many ways. All of a sudden, students will have available to them a window to the world they never imagined.”

At this emerging university campus--the 23rd in the Cal State University system--the same holds true for instructors who have spent years working out of a cramped, coffee-colored office building overlooking the Ventura Freeway near Seaward Avenue.

Dozens of the 119 instructors who will teach at the new campus toured the new facility last week during a faculty orientation, including music education instructor Dorie Knapp.

Knapp, 63, has been with the CSUN system 20 years, the last 18 at the satellite center in Ventura. Her classrooms there did not have much elbow room. When her students would break out in song or belt out a tune on woodwind recorders, the melodies would drift throughout the satellite center.

She won’t have to worry about that anymore. Knapp’s new classroom is the state hospital’s old gymnasium, a cavernous wood-floored structure with its own restrooms and changing rooms and showers.

“Oh, I love it, I just love it,” she said, already thinking about how to station chairs and blackboards. “It’s going to be fabulous. This entire campus is going to be a showplace.”

Telethons Held to Fight Budget Cuts

Although Kennedy won’t be there with them on opening day, she said she will be thinking about those first students and teachers when they arrive today and all the work that went into getting them this far.

She remembers how hard everyone at CSUN’s Ventura campus worked just to keep the place open during the recession of the late 1980s, holding telethons and selling cookbooks to beat back budget cuts that gripped the entire university system.

She remembers the heartbreak she felt when the Taylor Ranch proposal fell through and the euphoria she felt when university trustees embraced the conversion of Camarillo State Hospital into a four-year college.

Ironically, after all the effort to keep CSUN’s satellite center open, she spent her last years on the job basically trying to put the center out of business, knowing something more vital would emerge.

“We always knew that the Ventura learning center was a temporary solution to a very complex deficiency in our community,” Kennedy said.

“I’ve often thought of our operation as the little engine that could. And now after all these years, we’ve made it.”