Chancellor's Report

to the Board of Trustees

September 26, 2001

Thank you Mr. Chairman. Again, I will give an abbreviated report.

First, thank all you for rearranging your schedules to allow for this telephone meeting. Because of the tragic circumstances of Sept. 11 and the postponement of our Sept. 11-12 meeting, we needed time for sensitive items to be taken up by the Board before our next meeting.

I have been visiting several campuses since September 11 and I was in Washington the last two days. I want to just say this: The world changed forever on Sept. 11. And I think that our universities have a major, major role to play in the future. I believe that universities are going to be needed more than ever for what we do, from language training, to telecommunications, science, and even training teachers, which is what we do best on our campuses. We're going to begin a process with our presidents to start to look at those plans that need to be reviewed in light of Sept. 11, so that we can bring them back to the Board.

Another thing that I want to report to the Board is that we have worked with all of the presidents on issues relating to our international students and their safety. Our campuses have programs at 37 sites and in 17 different nations. We have been in communications with the directors of all of our programs abroad. We have set up a link to our web page and we have asked all of our internationally placed students abroad to watch our web page every day. We are going to have to learn as a system and a university about how to operate in this new and changed world.

Later this morning Richard West is going to be talking about entering into a new fiscal restraint time. I believe that is going to be with us for some time.

But let me just briefly say this is a kind of good news/bad news report and Richard will talk a little bit more about this when he brings up our budget for this year and next year.

On a very preliminary basis, based upon this week and last week with our quarter campuses starting it appears that we are approximately 2.3% over-enrolled beyond what we had anticipated last year. That is about 7000 more students than we had anticipated who are not funded in this most current budget. This has resulted in part because of the downturn in the economy, and with dot-coms and other companies laying off workers, more students have come back to school.

Tidal Wave II is not coming…it has washed up over the beach. And so, 11 of our institutions are over enrolled by as much as 7.54%. We only have two institutions that have not met their enrollment target this year. So we will be working with the presidents to figure out how to handle this enrollment this year, and how to plan for continuation next year.

Briefly, in other news, this Board in July adopted an alcohol policy and asked all the campuses to implement that policy that fall. All campuses are doing that. In addition to that, the Governor's office contacted us and last week, John Welty and I met with the group that the Governor's office had pulled together from the law enforcement agencies, the alcohol and drug agencies, and the business and transportation department of California. They want to join the CSU as a partner in the alcohol policy implementation, and we will continue to work with them.

Also, very briefly, in July the Board asked me to continue to work at Channel Islands with the architect and the staff on issues relating to the design of the library. On our agenda today, we are asking for approval of the science building. And, I can assure you that the science building now reflects a continuation of the California Mission-style architectural theme. There will be a meeting tomorrow, Sept. 27, between our staff, Pat Drohan, and the architects and CSUSI President Dick Rush. They will continue to work on the library to make it as close to California Mission style as possible.

Mr. Chairman, that concludes my report.