Open Process to Benefit CSUN

A good listener.

A problem-solver.

A mentor.

Great academic credentials.

Fosters university-community partnerships.

An extraordinary fund-raiser.

The words and phrases used to describe Antoine Garibaldi, Jolene Koester and Jane Pisano, finalists for the top position at Cal State Northridge, add up to one fine university president. (A fourth well-regarded finalist, Gretchen Bataille, withdrew on Friday.)

Choosing the one among the remaining three who will be best for CSUN will be up to the California State University Board of Trustees next week. That the board has made the process so open and participatory can only help with its decision.

In addition to private interviews, each candidate spoke publicly last week at forums open to any interested student, faculty member, administrator or community member. Audiences ranging from 70 to 100 people heard each candidate’s assessment of the job ahead and got to ask how each would handle specific challenges. How informed, articulate and candid each finalist was will be sorted, weighed and used, no doubt, to lobby trustees.

Such community involvement is crucial to the future of the San Fernando Valley’s only four-year university, not just so that the university community knows what it’s getting, but so the new president knows what he or she is committing to undertake.

The challenges ahead are many. CSUN needs a president who, like former President Blenda Wilson, can take charge in a crisis. In Wilson’s case, the crisis was the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which devastated the campus and caused more than $400 million in damages. And yet Wilson had classes up and running in dozens of portable classrooms mere weeks after the quake struck.

The challenge of rebuilding the campus is not over. What also must be rebuilt is the relationship with the neighboring community, something that didn’t fare as well under Wilson. Still unresolved is whether CSUN will build a controversial athletic stadium that’s opposed by local homeowners groups, or even whether a commuter school such as CSUN should continue to field a Division I football team.

And that’s only the beginning. Even more profound are the demographic shifts that are fundamentally changing higher education, especially in California. Among the students served by CSUN are those who are the first in their families to go to college, children of immigrants whose first language may not be English and students who, as one audience member pointed out, grew up dodging bullets in tough neighborhoods and schools. A recent uproar over remedial classes underscores the differences, with some students saying they have no place in a college curriculum and others protesting a new requirement that remedial classes be limited to one year.

These are real challenges, deserving of a leader who is both up to the questions and committed to finding the answers.