Board OKs Naming Library for Broome
The Cal State University governing board gave final approval Wednesday to naming a university library after John S. Broome, the Oxnard rancher who is donating $5 million to the fledgling Cal State Channel Islands campus.
The board’s action comes a day after the trustees’ committee on institutional advancement voted to name the university’s library and media center after the 81-year-old philanthropist.
Broome’s money will jump-start the planning process for the 283,000-square-foot facility and later help transform a closed medical research unit at the old Camarillo State Hospital into the library complex.
“I’m delighted,” Channel Islands President Handel Evans said after the board’s vote. “We are just beginning, but this is an incredible stake to begin from.”
The donation--one of the largest in county history--provides a boost to the university’s private fund-raising efforts. Those efforts, headed by the Cal State Channel Islands Foundation, are central to the university’s mission of finding nonpublic money to expand the campus.
“We don’t intend to stop here,” Evans said. “We intend to go out and have people continue to support this university.”
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