Charles B. Reed

The former home of Camarillo State Hospital is beginning to look a lot like a university--the four-year public university that Ventura County residents have dreamed of and worked to create for 30 years.

Already the 1,700 students of the Cal State Northridge satellite campus have moved from Ventura to the Camarillo site and are attending classes in the buildings that will soon house the independent Cal State Channel Islands.

A world-renowned architect has agreed to design a library and media center. Plans for a K-8 public school on campus are in the works. Curriculum and faculty decisions are being made with the intention of completing the transition to CSUCI in 2002.

As the state legislature begins the lengthy process of crafting a budget for the coming fiscal year, California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed spoke with editors of The Times Ventura County Edition about what needs to be done next.

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Question: What’s the next hurdle for Cal State Channel Islands?

Answer: The governor will be making final decisions this week about his recommendations to the Legislature for the session that will start in January. I know [state] Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo) has been working very hard to bring this to the governor’s attention.

Here in Ventura County at Cal State Channel Islands and throughout the whole CSU system, two things come together very nicely: the importance of access and opportunity for Californians to get a baccalaureate degree.

The biggest problem that I am dealing with is figuring out how the CSU system will have the capacity to continue the enrollment growth that has been occurring. This year we realized almost a 4% enrollment increase over last year; we are anticipating a 4 1/2% enrollment growth next year, which is about 13,000 students. If you calculate that out, that’s like creating a new university every year for the next 10 years. CSU Channel Islands is really important to that access and opportunity question because of the capacity that this campus will bring to the CSU system.

So we are quite anxious to see in the governor’s budget recommendation a $10-million amount to start to do the academic planning, to start to employ the academic leadership, the deans and the faculty members to do the right kind of academic planning in order to open up this campus in 2002.

We’re prepared to do that if the state is prepared to put the operating resources up. This campus is unique among the 23 CSU campuses, and maybe unique in the country, in that a development authority was legislatively created for it able to build housing and other facilities on the campus and then to use that revenue stream to build out, renovate, improve the current facility.

Q: What sort of signals are you getting from Gov. Gray Davis’ office compared to the ones that came from Gov. Pete Wilson’s office?

A: Actually, we haven’t gotten any signals. No news is generally good news in this business. One very important thing that has been occurring is that a lot of citizens of Ventura County have been writing to the governor’s office--and I know that they’ve been getting the mail. That is really good.

I think it’s on track. The CSU Board of Trustees has been very clear and put the $10 million in the budget as a line item all by itself so it stands out as a top priority.

If you look at this region, it’s a struggle for students to go to the community college and transfer or complete the 12th grade and decide where they want to go to college. We need to make access a priority for this region, and I think this campus will do that. I think we’ll see a major change in the going-to-college rate of high school students here, and they’ll also have a better understanding of what it takes to go to college.

I know this past year CSUCI President Handel Evans has worked with the superintendents and several of the high schools in building a partnership. One of the priorities of the CSU is to help improve the public schools. If we have a university campus operating here, we can help do that.

We want to tell all the students in California what it takes to go to a California State University. We have printed 50,000 posters in English and 25,000 in Spanish that say, “Beginning in sixth grade, here’s what you need to do to be successful if you want to go to college.” It’s a step-by-step, year-by-year checklist--all the way through 12th grade--showing the grade point averages, the SAT and ACT scores, here’s a way to navigate your way through all the courses you need to take.

The other thing we are doing here in Ventura County, last year Handel and some of his colleagues met with some of the high schools about diagnostic testing in English and mathematics, and to start at the ninth- and 10th- grade level, let’s give a one-hour exam to these students and say, “If you want to go to college, here are our expectations. If you don’t pass this test, then here’s what you need to do in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades to be eligible for CSU.”

The high school leadership here was excited about that. I think we’ll see more and more of those kinds of partnerships. There are good partnerships here between the community colleges and this campus.

Q: What sorts of development are in the works for the first phase?

A: The development authority had a meeting recently, and things are working well between it and the campus and the developer. We’re proceeding down that road so we can have the revenue available. The renovations and improvements on campus are proceeding on schedule.

The plans are the same as they’ve always been: 950 housing units, 300,000 square feet of research and development space, a new elementary school. We’ll begin by getting a few hundred housing units ready for the beginning of school in 2002, and our school well underway depending on funding.

This campus will serve place-bound students [those who can’t move across state to attend college because of family or job commitments] but it will also be a wonderful facility for people to drive up here from Los Angeles or wherever and drop their kids off. The two or three times I’ve been there, I can just see that happening because it is a beautiful campus to begin with, it’s safe, it’s isolated, it’s unique in its architecture, so it has all of the right ingredients to draw students from all over the state.

Something very special happened to me on the day that we transferred the property to CSU ownership. We had a couple of hundred people out there to unveil the interstate sign and sign the transfer deed. Handel had a lunch, and afterward as everyone was leaving I was standing up on the stage, meeting some local folks who had been trying to bring a campus here for a number of years. Way in the back there was an agricultural worker in khakis and a ball cap. After everybody had left he came up to me and asked me to sign the program to his son, who he said was a seventh-grader. He wanted his son to be able to go to school there.

Now, I know that if we have a campus there, that’s going to provide that kind of opportunity to all the people who are working here in Ventura County. That’s why it’s important that we bring this campus in on time, within budget and with the kind of general program that’s needed: teacher education, business, nursing have all got to be very important to this area.

Q: Back to the partnership with the high schools: How do you determine whether they’re doing any good? What’s the mechanism to measure that?

A: We’re going to look at the numbers to see if those high schools send us fewer students who need remedial education. We can track that year by year by year.

The good news about remedial education is that the gross numbers have leveled off, so something good is happening out there in the public schools.

And we had the best success in remedial education this year that this system has ever had: 79% of the students who began a year ago completed by the end of this summer their remedial work. Up until this summer, that number had been less than 49%. The CSU system made a decision that we were going to put resources, energy, focus all on remedial education. The campuses, presidents and students really delivered.

We will always have to offer some remedial education--I’m talking about our students who are not coming directly from the 12th grade, but the students who are returning to a university, students who have worked part of their early career who need some help. I also believe that the community colleges can do a much better job at remedial education than the CSU.

Q: Do you foresee a time when you would stop doing remedial education for any of your incoming freshmen?

A: That’s probably a pretty good plan. I’d like to do that, where all the 12th-graders who need remedial help would go to the community colleges but for the twentysomething student it would be available.

Another thing I’m excited about, here, is being able to start off without a lot of history, of norms, of “this is the way we used to do it.” One of the things I am convinced of is, if we are going to serve all these students we are going to have to move our system to year-round operations. At CSU Channel Islands there is no history, and so as the faculty gets employed there can be very clear understanding about what the expectations are. One of those expectations is that this campus operates year-round.

We’ll do this in the most flexible way, with courses taught in three weeks, five weeks, seven weeks, not just the traditional 15-week blocks.

Q: If you get the $10 million operating budget, what do you see happening in the year 2000 for Cal State Channel Islands?

A: I see that we’re off and running. It’s a real university. It’ll mean a whole lot to those eighth-, ninth- and 10th-graders now in school. It’ll mean a lot to Ventura County’s economy. CSU really is the economic engine in California. We produce 62% of the teachers, 65% of the engineers, 70% of the nurses--it’s the backbone for the state’s economy.

This university is probably the single most important thing that will happen for this community in the next 50 years. You’re talking about something that’s going to be here forever. You’re talking about an institution that adds value to everybody and everything that comes in contact with it.