New Orange County College Has Small Classes, Huge Endowment

This weekend, about 120 freshmen are walking onto the first private liberal arts college built in California in more than 25 years.

They’re attending an educational experiment, a place where traditional faculty tenure has been tossed out and a global focus will require them to spend at least five months abroad and to study a Pacific Rim language. They will learn in classrooms that hold no more than 12 students in a school that, backed by an extraordinary endowment, seeks a reputation akin to a Swarthmore or the Claremont Colleges.

Soka University’s Aliso Viejo campus, 103 acres and 18 buildings jutting into the Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park, is open for business.

Its $265-million hilltop site boasts travertine trim on the buildings, a one-acre lake, a copper-plated map of the world underneath a 100-foot dome and a computer port everywhere you turn, 3,800 of them.

Left over is a $300-million endowment, courtesy of the founding Buddhist group and its members, for a school that doesn’t hold its first class for another week, a sum that other schools struggle to match.

It’s more than Loyola Marymount University has saved in 136 years, more than Occidental College has raised in 124. “It’s unbelievable,” said Martha Hammer, president of the Independent Colleges of Southern California.

Soka plans on an eventual student population of 1,200. Students will major in liberal arts with a choice of concentrations in international studies, social and behavioral science and the humanities.

Half the student body is expected to come from foreign countries. And the education will be built on the Buddhist ideals of sanctity of life, peace and human rights.

“I don’t think many will come here to be successful businessmen,” said Soka President Daniel Habuki. “The goal is to contribute to society.”

Added Eric Hauber, vice president for enrollment services, “We want students with a sense of commitment to more than themselves.”

Soka never would have come to Orange County if it had been allowed to expand its campus in the Santa Monica Mountains, devoted to teaching English as a second language. Environmentalists have battled successfully for more than a decade to prevent Soka from growing beyond the 12 acres it occupies and onto the remaining oak-filled 576 acres it owns.

Though the university is continuing the battle in Calabasas, school officials ultimately accepted an offer to buy the hilltop site in Orange County from Mission Viejo Co. for $20 million.

In contrast to the Calabasas controversy, Soka’s plans were embraced in Aliso Viejo. In a community of 42,000 that just incorporated this summer and that has seen its population grow 400% in the last decade, Soka was, for most, just another construction project.

“The timing was remarkable,” said Habuki, 49, who also is president of the Calabasas campus. “If we were built 25 years ago, we probably would not get such a warm reception because we’d disrupt the community. We weren’t the only ones generating dust. Everyone was generating dust.”

As the buildings were going up, Soka tried to integrate itself into the new city and even agreed to give $10,000 annually for five years to the county branch library.

Most of the campus was designed by Norman Pfeiffer, architect for the Los Angeles Central Library remodeling and expansion of the early 1990s, who also is in charge of the restoration of the Griffith Park Observatory.

The buildings are clad in beige stucco with red tile roofs, similar to the nearby housing tracts. Windows are bordered with travertine, the same stone used to finish the Getty Center and the Roman Colosseum.

A one-acre, million-gallon artificial lake with a fountain sculpture of Neptune faces the four colonial pillars in front of Founders Hall. The 3,800 computer ports make it one of the most wired campuses in the world.

Buildings are named for couples. “They all said they couldn’t accomplish their work without their spouses,” said Hauber, the vice president of admissions.

There is Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Hall, named for the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his wife, and Mohandas and Ktsurbai Gandhi Hall, in honor of the nonviolent advocate of Indian independence. The Daisaku and Kaneko Ikeda Library--”Champions for peace, culture and education”--is named for the founder of the college and his wife.

Ikeda is also the leader of the controversial lay Buddhist group Soka Gakkai, Japan’s largest religious organization, which financed the university. A 12,400-square-foot house on campus is reserved for the use of Ikeda and other dignitaries.

Although nearly unknown in this country, Ikeda has been the subject of sharply divided opinion in Japan. He has been called the power-hungry head of a cult that undermines democracy. Others see his group as fighting for the common man against an oppressive establishment.

Soka Gakkai was founded in the 1930s by a high school principal, Tsunesaburo Makguchi, who was jailed after he denounced state Shintoism and opposed Japanese militarism. He died in prison in 1944. The group has grown to include 8 million members in Japan and claims an additional 4 million followers in 177 countries.

The group runs its own schools in Japan, including the original Soka University, founded in 1987.

Published reports put Soka Gakkai’s assets as high as $100 billion.

In the 1960s, Soka Gakkai formed a political party, Komeito, the Clean Government Party, which eventually became part of the government.

The combination of money, a powerful political party and the aggressive conversion attempts of the postwar years have put off many.

“They proselytized successfully,” said David Machacek, a research associate at UC Santa Barbara and coauthor of “Soka Gakkai in America: Accommodation and Conversion.” “But [they] paid with the stigma. They were seen and labeled as a potentially dangerous cult.”

Al Albergate, director of community relations for Soka Gakkai International-U.S.A., said the group rarely hears the charge it is a cult anymore. “To other religious organizations, to various community organizations, to people who teach about Buddhism, we’ve become more familiar or less strange to society in general,” he said.

In the United States, Machacek said, the group has taken a pass on most politics except for encouraging members to be active in their communities and sending a nuclear disarmament proposal to the United Nations each year.

The group puts its U.S. membership at 300,000, including singer Tina Turner. Machacek estimated membership at 35,000 to 40,000.

By starting a college in this country, Soka Gakkai is following an American tradition. Most private colleges in the U.S. have a religious foundation, not just schools like Notre Dame, with its ties to the Catholic Church, and Brandeis, with its association with Jews, but even USC, which was started by Methodists, and Harvard, started by Puritans.

Despite its religious backing, Soka has no chapel and no mandatory religious services. “The founder was painfully clear,” said Alfred Balitzer, the dean of faculty, on leave from Claremont McKenna College after 30 years as a political science professor. “He wanted faculty and students from all faiths.”

Still, the Buddhist influence will abound. The freshman class will be 80% to 85% members of Soka Gakkai, Balitzer said.

President Habuki and Vice President Hauber, who came from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, are Soka Gakkai members, as are several other administrators and professors. Balitzer is Jewish.

The students, who hail from 18 states and 17 countries, include a Zambian who had to travel 16 hours to a phone for his interview with Soka officials. The enrollment also boasts students who turned down Brown, Swarthmore or UC Berkeley.

Kimberly Mitchell, 18, of Long Beach chose Soka over UC Santa Barbara. She is a member of Soka Gakkai but said she would have attended the new college without the connection. She wants to study international relations on her way to becoming a United Nations diplomat.

“It seems like they really are there to teach you,” she said. “I’ve met with many of [the professors], and they seemed so interested in helping us reach our dreams.”

Tuition plus room and board total $24,000. Two-thirds of the students receive financial aid, made possible through the $40 million in the endowment set aside for it.

The 22 professors were recruited from around the globe.

“For us, diversity is real,” Balitzer said. “We want students to experience diversity of cultures intellectually and in terms of associations with students and faculty so it will help them become global citizens. We talk about peace. Education as a vehicle for peace.”

Faculty talk about breaking down barriers between departments, which are called “learning areas.” Many classes will be taught by multiple professors with different specialties. The course on the Pacific Basin will be taught by professors in history, economics and Latin American literature.

Tenure--lifetime employment--will be handled differently at Soka. For starters, there are no assistant professors or associate professors. Just professors.

Soka faculty will be hired for a three-year probationary period, when they will be evaluated first on teaching, then scholarship and, finally, service. If a professor is failing in one of the areas, he or she will be helped with workshops and seminars. At the end of the three years, the professor will either receive a lifetime contract or be let go.

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Eye-Popping Endowment

Soka University, the first private liberal arts college built in California in a quarter century, opens for classes next week with an endowment that rivals those of many older schools. A sampling of endowments:

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School Endowment Harvard $18.8 billion Stanford $8.6 billion USC $2.2 billion Pomona College $1.1 billion Amherst $912 million Claremont McKenna $487 million Howard $308 million Soka $300 million Occidental College $280 million Loyola Marymount $268 million Chapman $72 million University of Redlands $60 million

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Source: Chronicle of Higher Education