New President of Cal State Long Beach Named

F. King Alexander, the 42-year-old leader of Murray State University in Kentucky, was chosen Thursday to become the sixth president of Cal State Long Beach.

Alexander, who has headed Murray State since succeeding his father, Kern Alexander, in the job four years ago, will replace Robert C. Maxson, 69. Maxson announced in February that he planned to step down this year after 11 years at the helm of the university.

The incoming president, who will assume his new duties in January, has enjoyed a rapid rise through academia. He became president at Murray State after four years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a professor and managed a graduate program in higher education.

Alexander will leave Murray State, which has 10,000 students, for a far larger campus. Cal State Long Beach, with an enrollment of 34,500, has the third-largest student body of any public university in California, behind only UCLA and Cal State Fullerton, according to the latest figures.

In a telephone interview, Alexander said he hoped to boost the number of undergraduates who stay at Long Beach and earn bachelor’s degrees, bucking the widespread pattern of high dropout rates in much of the Cal State system. He said he also hoped to expand fundraising efforts, noting that the campus has never had a formal capital campaign in its 56-year history.

“With the great success of the institution, the timing is right to explore new areas in private fundraising,” Alexander said. “For someone coming in from the outside, [it appears that] there’s a great degree of wealth in Long Beach, near Long Beach and associated with Cal State Long Beach to find new avenues of funding.”

Maxson said the chief challenges for Alexander would be handling the demand for the university to expand and serve more students, as well as to deal with the various constituencies at a large campus, including donors, alumni, the intercollegiate athletics program, and city and community groups. Still, Maxson wasn’t concerned about Alexander’s youth: “He’s run a campus, he’s been a president, and he’s done it well.

“It’s nice that they’ve hired a young president to start here,” added Maxson, a widely admired campus leader who will work for the Cal State system for another two years as mentor to new campus presidents. “He has the potential to be here a long time.”

A widower who lost his wife to breast cancer five years ago, Alexander is a single parent raising daughters ages 6 and 9.

Cal State officials said Alexander’s salary has not been set and declined to provide an anticipated figure. But base salaries for presidents in the 23-campus system, under an increase approved Thursday, range from $220,116 to $286,896 annually, and they receive housing and auto allowances as well.

Alexander was one of four finalists considered by the Cal State University Board of Trustees. Another leading contender was Gary W. Reichard, 61, the one in-house candidate, who has been Long Beach’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs since 2002.

For eight years before that, he was the associate vice president for academic affairs and a professor of history at the campus.

The other finalists, both of whom visited the campus last week, were Wilson G. Bradshaw, president of Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, and Richard H. Wells, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

In a prepared statement, Robert Foster, the Cal State trustee who was chairman of the search committee, said Alexander “has the right combination of an excellent academic background and superb administrative experience to take the helm of Cal State Long Beach. He is a strong supporter of student success, is energetic and a visionary who can enhance the campus reputation that outgoing President Bob Maxson built.”