Busy 1st Day for University President

You can’t accuse Richard Rush of being indirect.

Only a couple of hours into his first day on the job as president of Cal State Channel Islands on Monday, the veteran 58-year-old educator gathered his executive staff to lay out his vision for the fledgling Camarillo campus.

Whenever possible, he said, he wants the phones to be answered by human beings, not voicemail; that way people know their calls are important.

He wants to make sure every piece of campus correspondence is free of spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, to instill the idea that the institution is dedicated to higher learning.

And most of all, he wants staff members to work hard and have fun--even though the coming year promises to be marked by deadlines and challenges as the campus prepares to open its doors, as scheduled, for the fall semester of 2002.

The first groups of students are now attending classes at the Camarillo campus, but as a satellite operation of Cal State Northridge. If the school meets enrollment goals, it will become an autonomous Cal State University as planned next year.

“We are here for the students, and no other reason,” said Rush, who accepted the $200,004-a-year job in March after nearly a decade as president of Minnesota State University at Mankato.

“We are here to provide access, opportunity, support, encouragement, exhortation--whatever it takes,” he said. “This is not a debatable item. I’m really serious about it.”

He’s not serious about everything, though. He had a good laugh upon learning that the campus, under development at the former Camarillo State Hospital site, still has its own morgue and surgical theater, left over from the days of lobotomies and electroshock treatment.

He even broke into his best Count Dracula voice during a visit to those basement offices, part of a whirlwind tour to learn everything he can about a place in the midst of being transformed from state hospital to state-of-the-art college campus.

Rush brings to the job extensive experience in building and expanding college campuses and an intimate knowledge of the Cal State system, where he served as a faculty member and administrator for nearly 20 years before assuming the top job at Mankato in 1992.

Cal State trustees hired him for the Channel Islands job in large part because of his fund-raising and community outreach skills, both of which will be vital to a campus that must rely on a range of income-generating ventures and public-private partnerships to survive and expand.

Founding Cal State Channel Islands President Handel Evans, who stepped down last week, laid a blueprint for campus development intended to generate the millions of dollars that will be needed to develop the university over the next 25 years.

In Rush, Cal State officials and Channel Islands backers say they believe they have found a leader who can make that vision a reality.

“We’re not taking any chances here,” Cal State Chancellor Charles B. Reed said. “Dick Rush is a perfect replacement. He’s got the energy, the know-how, the fund-raising ability, the academic insight and the knowledge of the CSU system. It’s a perfect handoff.”

Added Ventura rancher and businesswoman Carolyn Leavens, a longtime university booster, “If we had had the good sense to mastermind all of this 20 years ago, we couldn’t have hoped for better than we have gotten.”

Rush, who is renting a place in Oxnard until he buys a home in Camarillo, already has been busy.

He made the final decision in hiring the first 14 faculty members for the campus, and he is getting ready to hire the university’s first provost.

Still, with so much work ahead of him, Rush tried his best Monday just to settle in. In his new office--jammed with blueprints and sketches and aerial photos--he unpacked boxes brimming with Minnesota memorabilia.

There was the image of Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura’s face on a stick. And a couple of phony, oversized $100 bills, plastered with Rush’s head instead of Ben Franklin’s, made by his former colleagues as a joke before he left.

Although he was born in New Jersey, Rush grew up in Los Angeles and attended Loyola High School. He got his master’s degree and doctorate at UCLA.

Now he’s back in Southern California, where his two grown daughters live. He said he was impelled to come back partly as a way to ease his grief after his wife, Janie, died of cancer in 1999. But he said he also couldn’t resist the challenge of getting a new university off the ground. “I truly believe we hold this university in trust for the people of California,” he said. “And it is a rare privilege to be able to build one from scratch.”