The politics are byzantine. The union issues, brutal. The students’ educational needs, enormous. And the financial outlook, given California’s ever-growing budget deficit, is dismal at best.
But for the two people brazen enough, and perhaps a tad crazy enough, to become the next chancellors of the California State University system and of the California Community Colleges—systems that together educate three of every 20 Americans enrolled in higher education—the opportunity to have an impact is enormous.
“If they succeed here it will point the way for the rest of the nation,” says Julia I. Lopez, president of the College Access Foundation of California, an organization that awards scholarships to 4,000 disadvantaged students a year. “There are people who want that challenge.”
The to-do lists for the new chancellors, posts that came open with two key retirements, are formidable.
“Whoever takes either of those jobs has to embrace California and its realities,” particularly a future where the population is getting younger and poorer, Ms. Lopez says. Half of the state’s high-school graduates come from low-income families, she notes. And while the cost of attending Cal State and the community colleges is still lower than the national average, the notion that California can continue raising tuition and fees to support its public-college systems, she says, “is not a sustainable model.”
Advocates are also pushing each of the systems to make internal reforms.
For the community colleges, those reforms include improving the system of remedial education for underprepared students and finding ways to offer more core academic courses at night, on weekends, and during summers to better suit students’ needs—even if it comes at the expense of the colleges’ near-sacred tradition of providing low-cost, nonacademic programs like golf classes for senior citizens. Several recommendations coming Thursday from California Competes, a council of business and civic leaders that has been reviewing higher-education needs for the the state’s economy, call for streamlining how the colleges are governed.
Cal State, meanwhile is wrestling with questions over how best to use distance education to extend its reach, as well as an urgent need to find additional streams of revenue.
Looming over all of that, of course, are the budget questions. State support for the community colleges is $668-million less today than it was in the 2009 fiscal year, a reduction of about 24 percent. The annual state appropriation to Cal State is now nearly $900-million less than it was in 2009, a drop of 30 percent. And this year alone, the University of California took a cut in state support of $750-million, a reduction of 25 percent; it now gets about $1-billion less from the state than it did in the 2008 fiscal year. In all three systems, the cuts have resulted in enrollment limits affecting thousands of students.
Without a doubt, California is approaching a crossroads.
Jack Scott leaves the community colleges on September 16, and Charles B. Reed will retire from Cal State when his successor is found. Many speculate that the University of California’s president, Mark G. Yudof, who is 67, will retire within two or three years too.
Come November, voters will be asked to approve a ballot measure on tax increases to help close a $16-billion state budget deficit. Even if that measure passes—forestalling hundreds of millions more in immediate cuts in public college budgets (a proposed $250-million each at Cal State and the University of California, and $300-million at the community colleges)—a bigger question remains: Does California still have the will and the wherewithal to provide its citizens with the kind of affordable higher education envisioned by the state more than 50 years ago, when it adopted the California Master Plan for Higher Education?
“It’s a critically important moment in the life of California higher education,” says Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education and herself a former top Cal State administrator, in the 1990s. The ballot measure, she says, “is a make-or-break kind of decision for the citizens of California about their future.” She predicts that if it passes, “experienced and ambitious folks” will come forward to help lead California public colleges.” If it fails, the impact will be felt well beyond California, Ms. Broad says. “It will diminish the stature of U.S. higher education.”
No Shortage of Advice
Against the backdrop of that vote and the broader soul-searching about the place of public colleges in the fabric of California society, state higher-education leaders face no shortage advice for the kinds of people who should replace Mr. Reed and Mr. Scott.
The chair of the California State University Board of Trustees is now choosing trustees for a search committee, and has named Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates, a search firm, with hopes of naming a successor to Mr. Reed “by fall,” a spokeswoman said.
The president of Cal State’s main faculty union, which has long been critical of the “secrecy” surrounding the 1997 hiring of Mr. Reed, wrote to the Board of Trustees on Wednesday formally requesting that it “establish an inclusive and diverse hiring committee” that would include representatives from the Academic Senate and from the faculty and staff unions.
While few have speculated on potential candidates from outside the state, insiders expect that at least three sitting Cal State presidents, F. King Alexander of the Long Beach campus; Mildred García, who recently took the helm at Fullerton; and Alexander Gonzalez of Sacramento would be among the contenders to replace Mr. Reed.
The search committee for the community-college system’s chancellor, comprising seven members of the Board of Governors of the system, one college instructor, and one college chancellor, met Friday with its search consultant from the firm of Issacson, Miller. Community-college watchers say they expect to see Brice W. Harris, chancellor of the Los Rios Community College District, among the contenders to replace Mr. Scott.
“In California right now, there’s a critical need for someone who can communicate the need for public higher education,” says William G. Tierney, director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California.
Mr. Reed’s forte was dealing with state politicians, Mr. Tierney notes: “He was hired to work Sacramento, and he worked Sacramento.”
But Mr. Tierney, who calls the Cal State leadership politically “tone deaf” for approving higher pay for college presidents this year while 44,000 professors and staff members faced furloughs and several years of salary freezes, says the current public mood requires a new tack. The next Cal State chancellor needs to be “someone who engages with relentless communication to the citizenry and to the faculty,” Mr. Tierney says.
Mr. Reed has had a testy relationship with the California Faculty Association. Lillian Taiz, president of the group and a professor of history at Cal State-Los Angeles, says the union isn’t necessarily the enemy of the administration.
“We can fight together for more resources and then have a consultative process on how to use them,” she says. The faculty association disliked what she calls Mr. Reed’s CEO mentality and a “very insular” style of consulting with his own inner circle. But, she says, no new chancellor who comes in as a unifier, committed to public service, “has anything to worry about with the faculty union.”
Over the past four years, Cal State has shrunk its ranks of faculty and other staff by more than 3,000, or about 6.6 percent of its work force. To the faculty association, however, it still seems that the campuses have “more deans than you can shake a stick at,” Ms. Taiz says, and professors remain worried that the system will rely too heavily on distance learning as a solution to providing educational access when that form of delivery may not be what students want. “People are leaving the State of California to go to brick-and-mortar campuses in Arizona and other parts of the country,” she says.
On paper, the community-college chancellor’s post appears to have a lot less authority than Cal State’s. The system enrolls about 2.6 million students, more than any other in the country, but much of the decision making affecting the 112 colleges resides with the 72 community-college districts that run them, and with their locally elected trustees.
Someone coming from a community-college system “where the chancellor has a lot of actual power would probably have some unpleasant surprises” in California, says Nancy Shulock, a longtime professor and administrator in the Cal State system who now runs the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at Sacramento State.
Many of the changes reformers are calling for, like the politically unpopular idea of curtailing nonacademic classes, can’t be mandated from the chancellor’s office, and many policies that affect unionized faculty and staff members need to be negotiated at each of the 72 local districts. To lead in that environment, you need to really understand incentives and sanctions, says Barry A. Munitz, Cal State’s chancellor from 1991 to 1998 and now an adviser to the philanthropist Eli Broad. “It requires a magician,” Mr. Munitz says.
And in reality, he says, that’s not all that different for the chancellor of Cal State, contending with a sprawling system of 23 campuses, nearly 427,000 students, and 2.6 million alumni. “You can’t send out a memo saying we will do the following thing tomorrow, unless you want to be certain that it won’t happen,” says Mr. Munitz.
So along with a passion for the Cal State mission, managerial talent, and finely tooled political skills, the next Cal State chancellor will need enormous amounts of patience and “an an extraordinarily ironic sense of humor,” Mr. Munitz says. “If you don’t have perspective on yourself” he says, you’re doomed.
