Local CSU ‘Architect’ Prepares to Leave Office

As the final days wind down for Handel Evans and his mission to create Ventura County’s first public university, he is grateful to have his architectural training to fall back on.

Not because he plans to pursue the profession full time, though he may do some consulting work after stepping down June 15 as founding president of Cal State Channel Islands.

More to the point, architecture is all about putting up buildings and then walking away. That is where he finds himself today, preparing to hit the road a year before the campus he brought to life officially opens for business.

“This is what we do, we build buildings and then never live in them,” said Evans, 62, who took the helm of the fledgling university in 1996 when it was little more than a long-held dream choked by long-standing problems.

“You hope and you pray that what you did will be the foundation for something quite wonderful,” he said. “Still, it hurts.”

It hurts even though his departure, at this moment, was part of the plan when he was brought in to jump-start a project stalled by setbacks and plagued by opposition.

As the driving force behind the rocky birth of the county’s Cal State campus, he cajoled Rotary Club members, wheedled money from politicians and generally twisted arms in a five-year campaign to whip up public and financial support for the new campus under development at the former Camarillo State Hospital.

He was part cheerleader, part showman, part master builder--working to pull together opposing viewpoints and getting people to believe he could make good on CSU’s 30-year-old promise to bring higher learning to Ventura County.

Evans Credited With Making School a Reality

By most accounts, he poured his heart and soul into the project. And he had the force of will and personality to persuade others to do the same.

“If it wasn’t for Handel, there would be no campus in Ventura County,” said CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed, noting it was Evans’ mission to get the campus off the ground, and with that task completed it’s now time to install a permanent president who can hire faculty members and craft a long-range academic plan.

“He had the vision of what the state hospital could become and he had the drive to build the community support to get there,” Reed added. “He’s an architect; I think he sees things maybe the rest of us can’t.”

Added Ventura rancher and longtime university booster Carolyn Leavens: “He was crucial, absolutely crucial. You can’t help but be charmed out of your socks by the guy. And he has the ability to make you want to be better than your best.”

That ability, Evans says, stems from a fundamental belief that higher education should be accessible to everyone.

Born in 1938 to a working-class family in a suburb of Manchester, England, Evans said he, his brother and sister all attended public colleges.

He earned his undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Manchester, his master’s from the University of Oregon in Eugene. He did postgraduate work at Cambridge University’s Center for Land Use and Built Form Studies.

He started with the CSU system 35 years ago, working his way from an instructor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to president of San Jose State. While at San Jose, Evans also was put in charge of overseeing the conversion of a mothballed Army base into Cal State Monterey Bay, which opened in 1995.

That experience gave him a unique perspective on the task at hand in Ventura County. And it’s the reason that then-CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz picked Evans for the job.

“There were very few presidents in the country, never mind California, who had gone through already what we had to do at Channel Islands,” said Munitz, who left the CSU system in 1998 to become president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

“I needed somebody who could galvanize the community, deal with the politics and the system administration, understand the economics--but also understand academic policy,” he said. “You could count on one hand the people that met that criteria.”

Although a local state university had been on the drawing board for more than three decades, when then-Gov. Pat Brown authorized a study of potential Ventura County sites for a campus, it was not an easy sell.

In 1969, the state bought 425 acres in Somis for a campus, but sold that land seven years later.

Nearly two decades after that, Cal State officials targeted several hundred acres in Ventura, just west of the Ventura Freeway, but opposition from nearby residents of the Ventura Keys neighborhood thwarted that project and university officials abandoned the site.

Cal State planners then looked north to Taylor Ranch, a sweeping hillside parcel that overlooks the ocean near the junction of the Ventura Freeway and California 33. Once again, local opposition prompted officials to back away.

By the time Evans had arrived, there were plenty of people who believed the campus would never be built. And there were some CSU trustees who believed local residents didn’t want it to happen.

Message Delivered to Groups, City Councils

Evans’ job was to convince both groups otherwise. To do so, he set out to round up as many like-minded supporters as he could find.

He spoke to service clubs and city councils--and any other organization that would have him--about the importance of embracing the college campus.

That message resonated with Carmen Smith, who in April 1996 became Evans’ first hire.

She had been the assistant to the Ventura County superintendent of schools for more than two decades, but had always said she might like a job at the new campus, should it ever be built.

She didn’t intend to get in on the ground floor, however. She just got swept up by the vision.

“They couldn’t have sent a better person to do this job,” she said. “He [Evans] just dove right in. There was no blueprint, he just made it up as he went along. I don’t know that this county truly understands how unbelievably fortunate they were to have him.”

Evans said he never doubted the campus would be built. Still, he said he was comforted by a series of milestones along the way that let him know he was headed in the right direction.

When CSU trustees voted in the summer of 1996 to name the new campus Cal State Channel Islands, even though not a brick had been laid or any concrete poured, Evans said that sent a strong message the university system meant business.

And when then-Gov. Pete Wilson announced that same year the closure of Camarillo State Hospital, opening the way for the facility to be converted into a college campus, Evans said it pushed the timeline well ahead of anyone’s expectations.

There were key votes by CSU trustees, once in 1997 and again in 1998, in which they agreed to take possession of the state hospital and move forward with the conversion. Both times, dozens of university boosters boarded buses and traveled to the system’s headquarters in Long Beach to support the board’s action.

There was hard-fought passage in 1998 of legislation to create a special authority dedicated to managing all financial aspects of the proposed campus and generating the cash necessary to make the vision a reality.

But Evans said he was most moved by the hundreds of people who dug deep into their pockets to support the effort. People such as Oxnard rancher and philanthropist John S. Broome and Oxnard real estate mogul Bud Smith, who each donated $5 million.

Broome’s money is being used to establish a state-of-the-art library on the campus, while Smith’s will come as an endowment to provide student scholarships, reward faculty members for superior teaching and establish an endowed chair to study local land-use issues.

Taken together with hundreds of other donations--totaling about $12 million--that have poured in, the Channel Islands campus is among the top fund-raisers in the 23-campus CSU system, despite the fact it hasn’t yet formally opened its doors.

“What we have done here is absolutely phenomenal,” said Evans, sitting in a black leather chair in an office that is nowhere near being packed for departure. Family photos fan out on a nearby table, congratulatory proclamations and letters stack up on a nearby desk.

“Unless you are in the middle of it, I don’t think you really understand it,” he said. “We don’t have a curriculum, we don’t even have students yet. It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me to think that so many people would stand up to the plate and say, ‘I believe in the dream.’ ”

Not everyone believes, of course. Although there has been little open criticism of Evans or the new campus, some in the community worry about the academic direction the university will take.

Santa Paula resident Richard Ferrier, an instructor at Thomas Aquinas College, launched an early campaign to block the emerging Cal State campus.

He contended it would be little more than a “new age polytechnic,” dedicated to job training and advancing a liberal agenda rather than the loftier pursuits of higher learning.

Conflicting Visions Offered, Some Say

Ferrier said he has seen little since then that would cause him to change his mind.

“It seems to me Handel Evans has done a wonderful job of persuading the community to buy a pig in a poke,” said Ferrier, who contends CSU officials have offered conflicting visions of what the new campus will offer and who it will serve.

“At the end of the day, it’s kind of hard to know what we did get, except maybe some kind of standard-grade, off-the-shelf CSU campus,” he said.

Around Ventura County, that opinion appears to be in the minority.

Broome, the Oxnard rancher and philanthropist, said there is no question in his mind that the emerging Cal State campus will deliver untold educational opportunities to students who had previously run into an academic dead-end.

“Students will now have a university right around the corner, and it will encourage so many to seek a higher education,” Broome said. “Handel made it all happen, and he’s convinced almost everyone what a wonderful project it will be.”

Added state Sen. Jack O’Connell, who has carried legislation and budget bills to make the new campus a reality: “He was the perfect fit for this county and this university. And I have every confidence that because of the strong foundation he laid, the next step will be easier than the last.”

Evans wants to remind everyone he isn’t going too far. His last official day as Channel Islands president is June 30, but he is leaving two weeks early to go fishing with his son in Canada.

After that, he will be assigned to the chancellor’s office in Long Beach for a year, his last in the CSU system. He has no idea what he will be doing or how he will fit architectural work back into his career.

All he knows for sure is that he and his wife, Carol, are not leaving Camarillo, having growing attached to the community and the people who helped him turn the dream of a college campus into a reality.

And he knows he will be back in the fall of 2002, when the Channel Islands campus is set to open.

“It’s bittersweet,” said Evans, who little by little has been packing up the office.

Just last month he packed away his cap and gown after commencement ceremonies for the local campus of Cal State Northridge, a satellite facility that will evolve into the Channel Islands campus.

“Literally, I’ve had people come up to me on the street to shake my hand and thank me for what I’m doing--you can’t buy that,” he said. “But no matter what I think, there would come a time when I would be leaving.

“And no matter what I think, there will be new presidents who will come and move this institution forward. The important thing to remember is that what we’ve created here is bigger than any of us.”

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