Cal State Fullerton Students Reporting for Duty at El Toro

The blackboards--they’re whiteboards these days--didn’t arrive until Monday morning and still hadn’t been installed.

The classrooms smelled of new paint, and until the cafeteria is completed, students and faculty will have to buy food from a Carl’s Jr. trailer in the parking lot.

Little of that mattered, though, as Cal State Fullerton opened a branch campus Monday on 11 acres of what used to be the El Toro Marine base.

Instead of Marines wandering through the Wing Command Headquarters, college students will take classes at the brown, two-story Spanish-style compound the university spent $1.3 million converting into 22 classrooms and 48 offices.

Satellite campuses are nothing new for Cal State Fullerton, which offers classes in Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Irvine. For nearly 13 years, the university had its largest satellite campus at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, which about 1,200 students attended. But when the Marines announced plans to exit the base in 1993, university officials saw an opportunity to serve South County students--who make up about 20% of the university’s enrollment--with a larger facility. The lease was signed last spring.

The El Toro campus will offer 200 classes for 2,400 juniors and seniors. It has the room to handle an additional 600 students, said George Giacumakis, director of the campus. “We had truly outgrown Saddleback,” he said.

Eight hundred students are expected to take classes just at El Toro, with the rest also taking them in Fullerton, many using the shuttle between campuses.

Among students who take classes on both campuses is Kent Webber, 23, a speech communications major completing his final semester. The drive to El Toro from his home in Irvine is just eight minutes. He is taking classes there in Chicano history and criminal justice on Mondays and Wednesdays and three classes at Fullerton on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Besides the short commute, he said he likes the idea of taking classes on a smaller campus; the Fullerton campus accommodates most of the university’s 30,000 students.

Cal State Fullerton, which administrators say is the fastest-growing CSU campus, has had six consecutive semesters of record-breaking enrollment.

“I would think a lot of people who live in this area would rush to take classes here,” said Webber, sitting on a stairway talking to a friend as he waited for his class to start.

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Easier Parking Than at the Main Campus

Justin Murrietta, 24, decided to take classes in El Toro even though he lives in Yorba Linda, 10 minutes from the main campus. Like other students, he had heard stories about monumental parking problems at Fullerton, where drivers have been known to follow students to their vehicles to take their parking spots.

Cal State Fullerton has a three-year lease that pays the Navy about $527,000 annually for the land. The university expects to work out a long-term arrangement, said Paula Selleck, a university spokeswoman.

The university’s goal is to obtain all 276 acres dedicated to education under Irvine’s plan for a Great Park to replace the former base, Giacumakis said. The Navy plans to turn over 80% of El Toro’s 4,738 acres--a site once proposed as an airport--to Irvine.

Several Cal State campuses began as satellite campuses. San Marcos was attached to San Diego State, Cal State Monterey Bay was affiliated with San Jose State and Cal State Channel Islands was part of Cal State Northridge.

But that doesn’t mean the El Toro campus is on its way to becoming an independent campus. Colleen Bentley Adler, a spokeswoman for the CSU system, said that proximity to other campuses and enormous expense of construction are the primary concerns about building a campus.

She said off-campus centers, such as El Toro, are a way to compensate for overcrowded campuses. “We think it’s a good solution for not having to build a full, new campus,” she said.