CSU’s Rising Star

The story of how Jolene Koester, daughter of Plato, Minn., (pop. 250) became president of Cal State Northridge (pop. 27,000) is a lesson about the distance a little intellectual curiosity can carry a person.

Koester, 52, will replace CSUN’s last permanent president, Blenda J. Wilson, on Monday after four years as vice president and provost of Cal State Sacramento, where Koester spent her entire administrative career. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin.

The oldest of three daughters and a son born to a car mechanic and a homemaker, Koester wanted to learn about other cultures, so she left the Minnesota countryside and entered the academic community. Neither of Koester’s parents finished high school, though her father passed his equivalency exam while serving in the U.S. military.

Koester’s parents, German-speaking immigrants, had lived in or around Plato all their lives, but she pined for something different. She read books at the library in nearby Glencoe (pop. 3,500) and participated in whatever musicals, clubs and other extracurricular pursuits she could find. But not until she was 17, on only her second trip outside Minnesota, did Koester get a real taste of the world beyond.

“For the first time in my life, I met people who had different values, religions, political beliefs, different points of view,” says Koester. “It was the first time I came in contact with other races. I was excited and interested.”

Her reaction foreshadowed the academic career to come.

Ernest Bormann, University of Minnesota professor emeritus of speech communication, met Koester at one of her debate competitions in a small town west of Minneapolis. The other team outlined its position aggressively, Bormann said.

“Then I looked up and saw this young woman rather demolish the debaters, all with a big smile on her face,” he says.

When Koester attended the University of Minnesota a few months later, she enrolled in his class. Eventually, Bormann would chair Koester’s dissertation committee. He said he always found her to be calm and confident, and he wasn’t surprised when the Cal State University Board of Trustees hired her.

“Very early on it was clear to me that this person had the kind of skills that would make her a useful and good administrator for some college or university,” Bormann said.

She studied speech communication as an undergraduate and volunteered for the university’s Student Project for International Responsibility, a leadership program for foreign students. Through her work with the organization, Koester made friends with students from Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Her interest in other cultures helped her win a Fulbright Exchange Scholarship to Hyderabad, India, to study during her junior year.

“That was a life-transforming experience,” she says. “It taught me who I was as a person, and that I had a measure of personal resourcefulness that I didn’t know I had. It taught me respect for different ways of doing things. It taught me that stereotypes I had of India were false and didn’t capture the reality of that place.

“I would wake up and be halfway across the world and I felt normal, not strange or exotic.”

She returned to the United States to graduate and earn a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a doctorate in speech communication at the University of Minnesota.

Koester says she had hoped to direct an international study program but the more involved she became in her discipline, the more interested she became in intercultural communication. Among the central questions driving her research: “How does culture influence meaning?”

Koester taught speech and intercultural communication at the University of Missouri and in 1985 at Cal State Sacramento. She also published several articles and books on speech communication.

Koester’s leadership abilities were noticed early on by Sacramento State President David Gerth, one of the longest-serving presidents in the Cal State system. The two became acquainted when they worked together on the faculty senate executive committee. Koester became chairman of the Department of Communication Studies in 1986 and assistant vice president for academic affairs in 1989. She continued to move up the ranks until 1993, when she became vice president of academic affairs and provost, the No. 2 spot at the university.

Gerth gave Koester a variety of responsibilities, including many of the day-to-day operations of the university.

Gerth also helped Koester raise her profile throughout the system, encouraging and advocating her leadership on CSU-wide committees, such as the Accountability Task Force, the CSU Leadership Institute and Chancellor Charles Reed’s Cornerstones Task Force on Institutional Integrity, Performance and Accountability. As a result, Koester is one of the university system’s best-known administrators.

Gerth said he expects Koester to go even further than her present position.

“She will emerge as a leader in the entire Cal State University system,” he says. “She is that kind of person.”

At Sacramento State, Koester spearheaded a restructuring of the university’s largest school, the College of Arts and Sciences, which included half the academic resources on campus.

“She reorganized the schools at Sacramento State into five schools and five colleges,” Gerth says. “There was a lot of concern about it at first. She worked very carefully step by step with faculty and students and came out with a resolution that most agreed with.

“She moved people beyond territorialism, and it was a good experience for the university and an important one.”

Even Koester’s critics say she is usually willing to listen to all perspectives and is an extremely good communicator by virtue of her academic discipline. Her approach is often described as consultative and collaborative.

“She’s quite open,” says Bob Buckley, a computer science professor and chairman of Sacramento State’s faculty senate.

Another of Koester’s pet projects is the Council for University Planning, which is a committee of faculty, staff, students, administrators and community representatives who discuss university plans, how money should be allocated in accordance with those plans and how the success of those plans should be evaluated.

The collaborative structure of the council was advocated by Koester. But after she has listened to all points, Koester is known for being decisive and strong-willed.

“She has the ability to see through the superficial issues to what the core issue is,” says Thomas S. Krabacher, former faculty senate president. “And usually when she just makes a decision on her own, it’s usually because the faculty didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to speak.”

That tendency to listen and quickly decide and execute was praised by many at Sacramento State and criticized by a few.

“She’s a strong manager, verging on micromanagement,” says Harry Chambers, a history professor who has taught at Sacramento for 30 years. Chambers took issue with her decision not to hire more faculty members in the history department in advance of an expected rush of retirements.

Koester, who is engaged to a San Diego State professor and has no children, has been shuttling between Sacramento and Northridge since the Board of Trustees selected her six months ago.

With 23,600 students, Cal State Sacramento is heavily focused on the liberal arts. It is ethnically diverse but less so than CSUN, which is one of the nation’s most diverse college campuses. Cal State Northridge has 27,000 students, many of whom are older and poorer than students at Sacramento State.

Koester says she will focus on filling vice presidency positions for university advancement and student affairs. She says she also wants to enhance CSUN’s fund-raising efforts and to strengthen relations between the campus and the people of the San Fernando Valley.