Next CSUN Boss Must Rebuild on Many Fronts

When she steps down in June, Cal State Northridge President Blenda J. Wilson will be remembered for spearheading a $400-million campus recovery after the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake.

An even bigger challenge awaits her successor: rebuilding the university’s tattered image, and reaching out to a larger Valley community it has often ignored, according to educators and campus leaders.

“In the past 35 years, if the campus could have built a wall around the entire campus they would have been happy to do that,” said Michael Hammerschmidt, who was associate vice president of development before resigning in December.

That attitude, Hammerschmidt said, has cost the campus in many ways, large and small. Few local residents turn out to support university athletic teams, for example.

The campus has also struggled to raise funds from local businesses and individuals. It’s the third-largest campus in the CSU system, but Cal State Northridge raised only $8.6 million in donations and private gifts last year. That figure is an increase over past years but well below other California State University campuses.

Cal State Long Beach, for example, raised $36 million last year. San Francisco State took in $29.7 million.

CSUN’s endowment of approximately $25.6 million is also small for a state university of its size, educators say. UCLA raised $207 million last year and has an endowment of $1.6 billion.

Several CSU sources said administrative turnover is partly to blame for CSUN’s fund-raising troubles.

When Wilson and Ron Kopita, the vice president of student affairs, leave their posts in June, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Louanne Kennedy will be the only member of the executive staff with more than a year of experience.

“In order to make money you have to make friends,” said a CSU source who declined to be identified. “With this place in such chronic disarray, with the whole place being run by interims, the atmosphere doesn’t lend itself to raising funds.”

Another problem in raising money is a perception--supported by a state audit released this week--that CSUN’s financial house is in disarray.

Auditors concluded that university officials failed to collect more than $1.3 million in fees, parking tickets and other funds owed the university, and criticized Wilson for using state workers and $70,000 in state funds to improve her university-owned home.

“The campus does not maintain adequate internal control over cash receipts, accounts receivable, purchasing and fixed assets,” auditors said.

In addition to putting CSUN’s finances in order, many believe the next president also must be able to lead a student population that is increasingly diverse.

“We really need to have somebody in here to be sensitive to different communities,” said CSUN student government President Joaquin Macias, who ran with an all-minority slate during last year’s student body election.

Wilson, an African American, became one of the most prominent public figures in the San Fernando Valley. But some believe it is time for a Latino to become the university’s next president.

“I think it would be a feather in the cap of this institution to have a Latino or Latina president,” said Jose Hernandez, a professor in the Chicano Studies Department. “We’ve got to tap the underrepresented communities because they can bring in new ideas.”

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The next president must also deal with a chronic problem of ill-prepared students.

Just one-third of the students admitted by CSUN are ready to do college-level course work. The rest must enroll in the university’s overburdened remedial education program--the third largest of any CSU campus.

Education leaders say remedial students are a “chicken-before-the-egg” problem that threatens CSU’s academic standards in future years.

Public schools are not doing a good enough job of preparing children for college, CSUN professors say. But the CSU system isn’t producing enough qualified teachers, according to public school officials.

The answer, according to state leaders and CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, is to flood K-12 schools with better-prepared teachers--more than ever before. The CSU system supplies California with 60 percent of its public school teachers.

CSUN teacher training programs, which graduate 1,400 credentialed teachers each year, will be an important part of that strategy and a key responsibility of the university’s new leader.

“It is not common for higher education administrators to have had experience working in schools as much as we are going to be working with schools,” Wilson said in an interview last week. “The teacher preparation goals of this system and university should be appreciated and embraced.

“The future of this institution is going to be shaped by our work with K-12 reform, including teacher preparation and alliances with the community for a vast range of services,” Wilson said.

After a year of fruitless negotiations between CSU faculty members and the chancellor’s office, campus morale is another festering problem.

With a third of CSUN’s teachers reaching retirement age over the next decade, many wonder if the school will be able to attract qualified replacements fast enough to absorb the growing numbers of students headed for California’s ivory towers.

Since 1990, when CSUN’s enrollment was more than 31,000, the faculty has gotten steadily smaller. CSUN accounting professor Shahid Ansari, a former member of a faculty resource committee, said the school had lost approximately 25 percent of its faculty over the last decade. Many of those faculty positions were lost through attrition or became administrative or part-time slots, Ansari said.

This year CSUN has about 800 full-time teachers and 700 part-timers.

Last year, CSUN administrators attempted to turn the tide with 39 new hires; an additional 73 hires are planned this year.

The new faculty would bring the university up to previous staffing levels but may not be enough if there are significant enrollment increases, said John Mason, CSUN’s associate vice president for faculty affairs.

“Staffing levels need to go up, not down,” Mason said.

Even with new job openings at CSUN, quality faculty could be hard to find.

CSU professors and administrators have been engaged in contentious labor negotiations for more than a year. The CSU faculty union, which says its members are paid 11% less than teachers at comparable institutions, voted down a proposal earlier this year.

The next president must also deal with the fate of the school’s athletic department.

Many universities use athletics to raise money and morale. But in 1997, Wilson decided to cut four men’s sports teams, igniting the public’s fury. But since being reinstated, the teams have failed to draw crowds large enough to support CSUN athletics financially.

Wilson said she regretted eliminating the sports teams without engaging “a broader community,” but she added that CSUN’s athletic program was still struggling.

“[The] community is in an uproar about wanting to have some sports teams, but now with some time having expired, their support of sports is no better than it was before we cut the teams,” Wilson said. “It is hard to understand what the public was willing to do.”

The athletic program, bailed out by a stop-gap measure, is hobbling along without a permanent director and still teeters on the edge of financial disaster.

Crowds at CSUN’s most important games remain thin.

Faculty Senate President Albert Kinderman said he went to a women’s basketball game during the Big Sky Conference Tournament and was disappointed by the scarcity of fans from outside the university.

“We made the semifinals,” he said. “I saw a lot of students, faculty members and staff; I saw the parents of the athletes. But I didn’t see a lot of community people. The masses of the community were not there.”

CSUN’s next leader will also inherit tasks left undone by Wilson, including the construction of at least three new campus buildings to replace structures destroyed during the earthquake, and a new North Campus biotech park.

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Wilson also failed to secure two other major North Campus developments: a new stadium, which neighbors oppose and student leaders say they should not fund; and an entertainment-industry complex for which Wilson has been unable to find a private partner.

Despite CSUN’s many weaknesses and future pitfalls, many observers say the school is well-suited to become a model of higher education for the masses in the 21st century. And as the Valley’s only four-year institution, CSUN’s success or failure is inextricably bound to the fate of the region.

Moreover, the students are going to keep coming. Reed said this week that California universities and colleges must be prepared to accommodate an additional 400,000 by 2010.

“CSU and the community colleges are going to be on the front lines in responding to tremendous enrollment increases,” said Roger Benjamin, an education analyst at Santa Monica-based Rand Corp.

“Managing growth, becoming more productive and at the same time producing higher quality education is a daunting challenge,” Benjamin said. “No doubt about it.”