Cal State Channel Islands Is a Reality

Just six years ago, what is now America’s newest public university was the glimmer of an idea: The still-nameless school had no campus, no faculty, no academic mission--not even a mascot.

The idea of a four-year school in Ventura County had been glimmering, in fact, for more than 30 years, and was all but snuffed several times for lack of land.

Today, California State University Channel Islands finally opens to 750 students on the lush grounds of a former state mental hospital near Camarillo. Its creation is a lesson in imagination and perseverance involving community groups hungry for higher education and academic pioneers eager to build a school from scratch.

Even after the site was lined up, putting together the school wasn’t easy

“It’s like having a baby. Theoretically, you know what should happen. It’s not until the labor starts that you say, ‘Oh, my God!’ But in the end, what you have is something wonderful,” said Professor Louise Lutze-Mann, chairwoman of the university’s Academic Senate.

Channel Islands, even after a state investment so far of more than $70 million, remains very much a work in progress. Over the next 15 years, it is expected to swell to 20,000 students and add residence halls, sports teams and other trappings of an established school.

Already, though, the university boasts a faculty that includes 30 tenured or tenure-track professors who have come from such far-flung locales as Australia’s University of New South Wales and Harvard University’s medical school. Cal State Channel Islands will begin with eight bachelor’s degree programs and a teacher credentialing program, a boon in a state starved for teachers.

There’s an alma mater, composed by one of the school’s administrators: “From the islands to the mountains, to the mighty shore, Cal State Channel Islands shall stand for ever more.” And there’s even an acronym: CSUCI, which, to the chagrin of many of the school’s gung-ho backers, often is pronounced “sushi.”

The effort to open a public university in Ventura County, long the state’s largest county without one, was fueled by concern over the low number of students pursuing four-year college degrees. The latest figures show only 13.3% of recent high school graduates in the county attending Cal State or University of California schools, well below the statewide average of 17.7%.

Although the school hopes to draw out-of-town students, it is intended mainly to serve county residents, many of them Latino and working adults, who can’t manage to attend college away from home.

“Northridge is quite a distance for us ... and [UC Santa Barbara] is even farther,” said Tina Hurly, a 37-year-old Oxnard mother who recently enrolled at Channel Islands to finish her bachelor’s degree and earn a teaching credential. “We didn’t have ... access, until now.”

Like any new university, Cal State Channel Islands’ first obstacle--and the one that most hindered its progress for three decades--was finding land. Gov. Pat Brown approved the school, in concept, in 1965. But it seemed that every time a potential site was identified, environmental concerns, anti-growth sentiment or other roadblocks thwarted the deal.

Finally, the fledgling school got a break. In the late ‘90s, after Camarillo State Hospital closed, the state handed over the property, free, to the Cal State system.

The 600-plus-acre site--with its elegant Spanish-style architecture, gardens and 30 or so courtyards, surrounded by fertile farmland against the backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains--was a natural for conversion into a pastoral college campus.

Although a new campus offers the comparatively unfettered freedom to develop new courses, curriculum and programs, it also requires an enormous amount of work, some of it tedious, under tight deadlines.

“None of the things that one becomes accustomed to in an established institution are there,” said Richard R. Rush, a soft-spoken Los Angeles native who returned to Southern California to become president of the Channel Islands campus. “Alumni, students, relationships, technology, a catalog.... Here, we had to create everything.”

To sell the idea of a new school, the Cal State system turned in 1996 to J. Handel Evans, a British-born, 30-year veteran of the university system known for his political savvy. Evans, named the school’s planning president, was fresh from a similar assignment converting the former Ft. Ord Army base into Cal State Monterey Bay. The school opened in 1995.

Evans sought backers at Rotary Club meetings, business luncheons and community forums. He lined up lawmakers to press the case in Sacramento.

One of the pivotal legislative victories involved creation of an entrepreneurial alliance between the university and local governments to build 900 houses and apartments on the school’s property. Revenues from the home sales and apartment rentals will help fund university expansion.

Evans was deft at putting the touch on private contributors, who so far have pledged $17 million.

While courting Oxnard rancher Jack Broome for a $5-million library pledge, for example, Evans zeroed in on the philanthropist’s interest in aviation and his enthusiasm for the American Air Museum in Duxford, England. Evans promised to try to hire the museum’s designer, prominent British architect Sir Norman Foster. He succeeded in hiring Foster and in captivating Broome.

“His enthusiasm, and his wife Carol’s, is very contagious,” Broome said. “I just got caught up in what they wanted to do.”

Construction is due to begin next spring on the library, on a spot where the state hospital once operated a morgue and surgery rooms.

For Evans, the outpouring of public support culminated in the fall of 1997. Dozens of university boosters--including farmers, local politicians and business leaders wearing red-and-white buttons that read “Yes! CSUCI YES!”--traveled by bus to Long Beach to urge Cal State trustees to convert the grounds of the shuttered mental hospital into a college campus.

The trustees, some of whom had publicly questioned the level of community support for the campus, stood and gave the backers a standing ovation.

Next, Evans took steps to develop a campus culture. He turned to picking a mascot, a decision that can set the tone for a school (UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs) and at times, land it in hot water (San Diego State’s Aztec symbol, Monty Montezuma). The decision was left to students then at the satellite campus of Cal State Northridge, launched in 1974 in Ventura and moved to the current Channel Islands site three years ago.

Competition was fierce. There were nominations tapping Ventura County’s agricultural and industrial roots, including the oilers, drillers and farmers. And many more drawing from the county’s coastal influences: the sea lion and sea otter, the waves and the surfers.

Eventually, the idea of a dolphin bubbled to the surface, and by March 1999, hundreds of Ventura campus students signed petitions championing the name. Now, there are diving dolphins atop each page of the university’s first schedule of classes, smiling dolphins on pennants lining office walls and glass dolphins for sale at the university’s cafe.

With the plans for the physical campus largely in place, Evans, now 64, stepped aside last year. He was replaced by Rush, 60, who dived into the monumental task of hiring the first round of tenure-track professors.

The school was flooded with 2,300 applications for the 25 advertised faculty openings.

Rush insisted on interviewing in person all of the 65 to 70 final candidates.

During the height of the hiring process, he still was finishing up his work as president of Minnesota State University at Mankato, so he flew in for two three-day weekends and interviewed one candidate after another, in 10-to 12-hour stretches.

The long hours left him with back spasms, but Rush filled 13 of the openings. He was confident that his hires had the talent he sought, and the collegiality and enthusiasm necessary for working well with students and across disciplines.

“People asked if they could come early and get started,” Rush said.

In a second round of hiring this summer, the university offered tenured or tenure-track positions to 19 more candidates, and all but two accepted.

“The vast majority are risk-takers,” said Kevin Volkan, a psychology professor who joined the faculty last year. “They’re kind of like CEOs who go off and start new companies.”

Volkan, 43, a Bay Area native who previously was an administrator and lecturer at Harvard University’s medical school, this year will teach such courses as “Psychology and Traditional Asian Thought” and “Psychology of Art and Artists.”

“This is a new place; we can really try to do something different,” he said.

Rush gave the faculty a Dec. 1 deadline to produce the school’s full catalog of classes and policies.

To keep track of everything that needed to be done, the initial chairman of the Academic Senate, economist Dennis Muraoka, posted dozens of paper notes in the faculty’s conference room on a panel covered with a sticky fabric. It came to be known, with some dread, as “the green wall.”

Professors mulled a degree program in “languages and cultures” but dismissed it as too ill-defined. They adopted a more traditional English degree program.

But they also got adventurous.

One of the boldest moves was to launch a master’s degree program, which will start in 2004, in bioinformatics, which will focus on decoding genetic information, blending biology, computer science and math.

That kind of flexibility is rare at established schools, said Ching-Hua Wang, a biology professor, who came to Channel Islands after 11 years at Cal State San Bernardino.

“You have territories and you have interests to protect. It’s very difficult for [faculties] to work together,” Wang said. “Here, we don’t have that kind formal structure yet.” As the opening day approached, activity on campus heated up again.

Six orientation sessions were held for batches of entering students. University staff organized a formal opening ceremony Aug. 16 that attracted at least 1,000 attendees, including Gov. Gray Davis. Efforts to hire the last of the nearly 40 to 45 part-time teachers continued.

Yet through it all--the hassles and the accomplishments--a sense of excitement prevailed.

“With the help of a wonderful, embracing community, we have created the newest public university in the United States,” said Ginger Reyes, 24, an outreach and recruitment counselor who spoke at the grand opening ceremony.

“Now how cool is that?”