The Board of Trustees of California State University on Wednesday named Joseph I. Castro as the system’s new chancellor. When he takes office, in January, he will be the eighth person to run one of the largest public-college systems in the country, with 23 campuses and nearly half a million students. He will succeed Timothy P. White, who announced his retirement last year.
Castro has served as president of California State University at Fresno since 2013. He will be the first native Californian, and the first Mexican-American, to occupy the system’s top job.
Castro spent 23 years in the University of California system as a faculty member and an administrator, including a stint as vice president for student academic affairs on the San Francisco campus. The grandson of Mexican immigrants, he was born in Hanford, a 40-minute drive from the Fresno campus, in the San Joaquin Valley. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science and public policy, respectively, from UC-Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in higher-education policy and leadership from Stanford University.
In picking Castro, the trustees chose the candidate who was “the most qualified, professionally and temperamentally,” said Lillian Kimbell, the board chair. The upheaval spurred by Covid-19 has plunged higher education into uncertainty, she said, and Castro is “unflappable, he’s calm, he’s an incredible listener. I think those qualities are particularly important now.”
Castro’s background, as a Californian, a Latino, and a first-generation college student, helped make him a good candidate for the chancellor’s job, said Thomas Holyoke, a professor of political science and chair of the Faculty Senate at Fresno. Castro provides a personal example for Cal State students, Holyoke said, and “he just has an understanding of the troubles a lot of students are going through.” (Latinos are 43 percent of the enrollment systemwide and are the majority of students on nine campuses.)
He just has an understanding of the troubles a lot of students are going through.
Castro is also the first new Cal State chancellor to come from the ranks of system leadership in nearly 60 years, and he believes his experience in the system will give him an advantage. “I will be able, on January 4, to start the position and hit the ground running, because I’ve worked so closely with Chancellor White,” Castro said, in an interview with The Chronicle on Wednesday. He was one of the first Cal State presidents hired after White took office, in 2012.
Castro will face the immediate difficulty of steering the system through the upheaval and uncertainty of Covid-19, but beyond that, he said his biggest challenge would be to continue to make progress on the system’s effort to improve its graduation rates. The system hopes, for example, to raise its six-year graduation rate for nontransfer undergraduates to 70 percent by 2025. In 2019 that rate was 62 percent.
“I want to achieve those 2025 goals, and then set some even-more-aspirational goals for the future,” he said, “because California and the U.S. need the CSU to be successful, especially during this consequential time.”
Castro will take office at a time of stark social and political divisions, and his own tenure at Fresno was not free of them. In a viral controversy in 2018, Randa Jarrar, a professor of English, posted incendiary tweets about Barbara Bush, the former first lady, who had just died. Castro, who has called the San Joaquin Valley a “purple” region politically, described Jarrar’s remarks as “obviously contrary to the core values of our university.” She was not disciplined.
Castro said he would navigate the current societal conditions “carefully, by staying focused on our mission and our values, and continue to ensure that our campuses are places where diverse perspectives are shared and discussed and debated.”
He added that the system had all the ingredients for success, including a close-knit leadership cadre, and he believed “we’ll be stronger after Covid than we were before Covid.”
He very nearly wasn’t the next chancellor of Cal State. When White announced his retirement last year, Castro initially told people that he did not consider himself a potential successor due to health issues in his family at the time. “The onset of Covid is really what inspired me to have these conversations with the board,” he said. “I felt like it was time for me to step up. So I’m happy to serve in this way.”
