Chancellor's Report

to the Board of Trustees

March 13, 2002

I would first like to thank President Gerth and his team for hosting us here and making this a wonderful meeting in Sacramento. President Gerth, you did an outstanding job and I know that some of your colleagues are shuddering about hosting us next year and having to meet these standards. So thank you very much.

I want to echo Trustee Gould's remarks and express my gratitude to Stanley Wang. Stanley, thank you for your service, generosity and your support of this board. I am privileged to have had the opportunity to go with Stanley and Franny to Taiwan and walk on the campus of National Taiwan University where Stanley got his undergraduate degree. I then had the opportunity to go to China with Stanley and Larry to visit the institutions that Stanley is going to be helping our students and faculty attend. Stanley, thank you again for sharing your wisdom, experience, and generosity with us.

In addition, I know that everyone joins me here in thanking Larry for his service and leadership as chair of this board. Larry, you have given me great counsel, wisdom, good friendship, and support. I appreciate that very much. Also you have had a very special relationship with the students of the California State University. You have taken the time to visit all of our campuses and on each of your visits, you have met with the students and provided a thoughtful way for them to feel a part of the family of the California State University. I appreciate that and I know that the student leaders know what your commitment is to the CSU. You too will be missed, but you will be with us, as Stanley said, all the time.

This board will formally honor both of you at its May meeting with a resolution, but we want to especially invite you to come to the July board meeting where we can give you the resolutions and break bread together. Thank you to both of you again.

As was discussed earlier, the California State University and the California Faculty Association have reached a tentative agreement. I am very pleased with the agreement and that we were able to find a common ground and I want to thank everybody at California Faculty Association and their staff and our staff who worked hard to reach this good agreement. I know that the CFA will be voting on the agreement through March 21^st. I hope that we can secure a final agreement so that we can resume our focus on working together, working collaboratively, and working to improve the quality, access, growth and resources that we need. We can only do that together here in Sacramento. I believe that if we are not together, especially now in a period of scarce resources, that those resources will just go somewhere else.

I would like to report on a couple of things that have occurred in the last few weeks. First of all the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing has fully accredited the CalStateTEACH program. CalStateTEACH is a program that we asked our faculty to put together to meet the needs of California teachers who hold emergency certificates. This program allows them to receive their credential at the same time that they are working. The CTC gave the CalStateTEACH program a straight "A" in every category that they looked into. They talked about the well-qualified faculty, the faculty mentors, the personalization of the program in the public schools and they also talked about the very high degree of satisfaction that the principals and the teachers in the schools had with the program. I know that this is a very high quality program but it is very good news to hear that from the CTC. We just need to figure out how to market it better and to be able to get it to more teachers.

As Delaine [Eastin] said, the president signed the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act about a month ago. That act says that all teachers in every state shall be certified by 2005. Now, I don't know how they are going to do that, but somebody has got to figure out how to do it because the penalty is no Title 1 funds if the school does not have certified teachers. That is billions of dollars at risk. We will try to help out in any way that we can.

Second, just this last week, Jim Lyons called my office and said, "I have something that I want to hand to you myself," Jim Lyons and the faculty have been working to get Dominguez Hills re-accredited ever since he arrived in 1999. This past week, they got a wonderful letter that said that they had full WASC accreditation.

Jim, thank you. You and the faculty have worked long and hard to accomplish this task and you started from a tough place. You said that you were going to do it and this was your top priority, and you have done that, so thank you.

Today I also need to point out that this is the tenth year for presidential leadership of two of our presidents. President Suzuki of Cal Poly Pomona, who is at the National Science Foundation board, and President Maxson of Cal State Long Beach have both just celebrated their tenth anniversaries. In addition, President Welty at Fresno State is completing his tenth year. John, thank you for your leadership.

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, the White House had a conference on preparing teachers for tomorrow. I asked President Jolene Koester if she would represent the California State University. The President had lunch with the people that were invited and I can say that Jolene represented us well. In addition, San Francisco State University was a focus of part of the program, so the California State University was very visible nationally this past week.

I also would like to congratulate California State University, San Bernardino Professor Robert Blackey who has earned the Eugene Asher Award for distinguished teaching from the 15,000 member American Historical Association.

Last but not least, I would like to ask President Ruben Arminana to come up to the podium because we have something special to present.

Over the past forty years, Sonoma State University has grown from a small college in portable buildings on a former seed farm to a first-rate public liberal arts and science institution supporting the needs of students throughout the state of California. The university's many community supporters have helped build such world-class facilities as the Jean and Charles Schulz Information Center and have helped the university develop its focus on the future through information technology.

President Arminana, on behalf of the California State University, we congratulate you and your university on forty years of service to California. We wish you many more years of service and appreciate what you have done.

Mr. Chairman, that concludes my comments.