Chancellor's Report

to the Board of Trustees

May 10, 2000

Mr. Chairman, I want to also thank you for your service as the chair of this board in providing me your counsel and your great wisdom. Other board members may not know this, but I probably talk to the chairman almost every day about something. What I like about Bill Hauck is that he’s generally three or four moves ahead of me and he has it already figured out. I really appreciate that, and your wise counsel has proven invaluable many times over to me. I also would like to welcome our new trustee, Murray Galinson. I look forward to working with you and your bringing to this board wisdom from your business experience and your dedication to education, so thank you.

Next, I would like to thank again Trustee Stanley Wang, for you and your family’s generosity in establishing the Wang Awards. We added five more of our family members to the Wang Family Awards yesterday afternoon and last evening, but you distinguish our faculty and staff, Stanley, with your gifts and generosity, so thank you for honoring us as a system.

I would also like to thank the CSSA and the Alumni Council for the outstanding cooperation that the Alumni Council and the California State Student Association has given the CSU this year. Stephanie Rahlf has given outstanding leadership. Stephanie shared with me earlier this week that she will be going to law school, but she already is way ahead of those who are entering law school by all of the work that she has done this past year. So, Stephanie, thank you and thank your colleagues in the CSSA for recognizing myself, Don Gerth, and Stanley Wang at your ceremony yesterday. All I want to say is there’s no greater honor because students are what it’s all about, so thank you very much for that.

I’d like to call upon Gene Dinielli to recognize the outgoing Executive Committee of the Academic Senate.

Gene Dinielli: The Academic Senate executive chair has many happy duties. Those will end for me and the current Executive Committee, which has been attempting, successfully, to work with the administration, the trustees, and the students in furthering and advancing the cause of CSU. The outgoing Executive Committee had me, of course, as chair; with Jackie Kegley as vice chair; Les Pinku, who happens to be in Korea serving the purposes of CSU; Vince Buck from Fullerton; Ray Boddy from San Diego State; and Jim Highsmith as immediate past chair. I will be returning as immediate past chair. Chancellor Reed, you’ll have the honor of formally introducing the new Executive Committee, but if you’ll allow this point as a special privilege, I really want to welcome Jackie Kegley personally. I know you and the board will deal with her with the same warmth, wit, and grace that you have dealt with me and the Executive Committee in the Senate.

Chancellor Reed: Thank you, Gene. Just a few brief updates. I want to thank all of the trustees, presidents and campus leaders for putting on a successful Legislative Day on April 3. The CSU had approximately 350 of the CSU family members in Sacramento to represent the best of the CSU. We continue to do well in the legislative process. Next week, we will officially hear about the May Revise from the governor and the Department of Finance. I am optimistic that we will see additional resources added to a very successful budget recommendation from the governor and the legislature. Then in a very few weeks after that, the legislative committees will be finalizing their recommendations and entering into the negotiation process. But, again, I am very optimistic for the system and I can say every recommendation that this board has made has so far been acted upon positively by the governor and the legislature.

I also want to thank the trustees and presidents who accompanied us to Washington, D.C., last week. That was the third time that we’ve visited Washington and hosted the California Congressional Delegation. It’s very interesting to me that, during the evening event, several of the congressmen and, earlier in the day, senators from California, mentioned how important it was that the California State University continues to do this. Our friends in the UC had just been there the week before. Several members of the delegations made comments about the good timing of the CSU in Washington as they begin their budget process on the 13 appropriations bills.

This Monday morning I met with the Board of Governors of the California Community College System and signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the CSU and the community colleges of this state. I feel very good about that because we focused on many of the issues that we talked about in the Educational Policy Committee this morning, and earlier, about improving the articulation and the credits to degree and the graduation rates of our students. We take about two community college students for every “first time in college” admit, so this system has to be perfect in the way we work with the community colleges. The community colleges also committed to increase their transfer rate to the California State University by five percent a year. That’s going to be some “heavy lifting” on their part, but I’m optimistic that we will improve articulation between the community colleges and the CSU.

On your desk, you’ll see a poster of the California State University transfer guidelines for community colleges. We have mailed out about 10,000 of these posters to all 107 community colleges to let all of the students, faculty, and staff know what the expectations of the CSU are in their getting a baccalaureate degree. That idea really came from Trustee Pesqueira.

Trustee Pierce, you talked this morning about outreach. The SNAPS survey showed that academic advising, especially academic advising down into the high schools, is not working the way it should. We produced about 60,000 posters for K-12 earlier this year and sent them to every middle school and high school in the state. We had to print another 20,000 posters just to take care of part of the requests that we got from the public schools that wanted more and more of those posters to share with their students, faculty, and parents. From that, we also learned that the academic advising wasn’t what it needed to be in the community colleges, and so we went ahead and printed this. I shared this poster with the State Community College Board on Monday and they were very pleased.

Another thing that I want to commend our campuses for is fund raising. We just received a report from the Council for Aid to Education, which reviews the fund raising of all of the colleges and universities of the United States. Nine of the top 20 fund-raising colleges in the category of public master’s institutions are California State University campuses. Nine of the top 20! In fact, the top three are all CSU campuses--CSU Long Beach was ranked #1; rank #2 was Fresno State; and rank #3 was Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. But also in that top 20 were San Jose State, San Francisco State, CSU Chico, CSU Los Angeles, Cal Poly Pomona, and Sonoma State.

Bob Maxson may want to say something about this, but I’m very proud that the California State University and CSU Long Beach will be hosting a California K-16 partnership conference June 21-23 and will have many national experts from around the country coming to Long Beach to talk about how to build more and better partnerships with our public schools, and I hope this is on everybody’s desk. Bob, do you want to speak?

President Maxson: We would just like to invite everyone to the conference, Chancellor. If anyone did not get the brochure, I believe that we’ll leave some with Sandy for distribution. Thank you.

Chancellor Reed: Thank you. I would like to ask President Lyons to join me up front for a presentation. This is the 40^th year celebration of CSU Dominguez Hills. During this entire year, almost on a weekly basis, President Lyons and his colleagues at Dominguez Hills are celebrating the 40-year anniversary of Dominguez Hills. I was at Dominguez Hills about three weeks ago. If you haven’t been to the campus recently, let me invite you and recommend that you drop by. I visited Dominguez Hills in 1997 just before I started this job, and I can report to you that no campus in this system has changed more dramatically in that short of time. It’s nothing short of a miracle what Jim Lyons and his colleagues have done at Dominguez Hills to change that campus that fast. We have to thank Herb Carter. Herb picked my pocket and Richard West’s pocket, but I’ve never felt better about spending resources on a campus than at Dominguez Hills. So, let me thank you, Jim, for your leadership. We didn’t bring up here the soul of the campus at Dominguez Hills, who was there a long time ago; but, Don Gerth, thank you also for your earlier leadership at Dominguez Hills.

President Lyons: Thank you very much for this recognition of our 40^th anniversary. A number of years ago, I was at a meeting at One DuPont Circle in Washington. At that meeting, we went around the table and we were asked to identify ourselves and our institution. I remember after Don Gerth introduced himself, I turned to someone else and I said, “You know, I’m really happy that I can say Jim Lyons, Bowie State, very quickly. If I had to say Jim Lyons, Cal State Dominguez Hills, I don’t know what I would do as a president there!” You see what time will do for you! Thank you.

Chancellor Reed: Mr. Chairman, that concludes my report.