CSUN Satellite Plans Its Last Commencement

Eager to get on with graduation, Cal State Northridge senior Maureen Gonzales slipped into her cap and gown last week outside the campus bookstore, giving it a test run before the big day. But she knows when she walks the line Saturday, the day will be about more than diplomas and degrees.

Gonzales, 44, belongs to the last graduating class of CSUN’s off-campus center at Cal State Channel Islands, a satellite facility that planted the seeds for a public university in Ventura County.

Launched more than three decades ago, the center has delivered higher education to a county that for years was the largest in California without a public four-year college. It is credited with maintaining momentum for a university, feeding a steady diet of academic programs and student services to a population long considered underserved.

And when the satellite campus moved in 1999 from Ventura to the grounds of the former Camarillo State Hospital, it paved the way for creation at that site of Cal State Channel Islands, which opened in 2002.

The first graduation at the former hospital site took place in 1998 and involved more than 300 students from the off-campus center.

About 50 students have indicated they will take part in the center’s commencement.

Count Gonzales among them. The sociology major started attending community college in 1982, but it was only in the last four years that she got serious about her studies. The Ventura resident said she chose the Northridge extension because it was close to home, had the degree she wanted and offered a flexible schedule that fit with her job as a freelance illustrator.

“I don’t think a lot of students realize how much CSUN is responsible for getting this campus set up and prepared for them,” said Gonzales, who started at the center in 2002 and will graduate with honors. “People should know that history.”

It started as the Ventura Learning Center in 1974, a joint educational effort between the Cal State and University of California systems. There were only 75 students the first year, but it quickly grew to become the largest satellite campus in the Cal State system. It had about 1,800 students by the time it moved to the hospital complex and a peak of 109 full- and part-time faculty by the time Cal State Channel Islands opened its doors.

Typically, students were older and returning to school after raising children or establishing careers. Often they held full-time jobs, taking advantage of the center’s abundance of late afternoon and evening classes.

But since plans were finalized in 1998 to convert Camarillo State Hospital into a four-year university, officials at the off-campus center have essentially been winding down the operation, reducing course offerings and scrambling to connect remaining students with the classes they need to graduate.

This semester, only about 35 CSUN students remained at the Channel Islands campus. And only three Northridge faculty continued to teach there, with the rest taking jobs at the main campus, joining the Channel Islands faculty or retiring.

“It is the end, but I think the fact that we now have a full-blown university says a lot,” said associate director Dan Wakelee, who has watched the center evolve since taking a job there in 1988. “It’s not a loss. It’s just a change.”

Tell that to sociology professor Helen Meloy. She has taught at the Northridge extension for 15 years, first in Ventura then at Channel Islands. She hopes to teach at Channel Islands next year, but so far has no guarantees. If no job offer comes, the Santa Barbara resident would be forced to take a teaching assignment at the main Northridge campus.

“I’m very sad,” Meloy said of the center’s closure. “It’s been wonderful, because it’s been local people, a lot of mixed ethnicities, some people for whom English is a second language. It has really been a special time for me.”

With the off-campus center in its final days, many there share that sentiment.

There were hugs all around when Meloy held her final classes last week and her students gave her a card, filling it with heartfelt sentiments.

It included best wishes from Danielle Quintana, 29, who serves as the last student body president of the center.

The single mother of two started attending the satellite campus in 2003 after graduating from Oxnard College.

Set to earn her sociology degree, Quintana said it is important that the emergence of the new university not overshadow the contributions of the satellite campus, which laid the foundation for a four-year campus then helped keep that dream alive.

The satellite campus “really did an amazing job of serving the needs of this community,” she said.