Chancellor's Report

to the Board of Trustees

May 14, 2003

Bob Caret, could you please come on up. The chair and I would like to thank you for your service.

I just want to let everyone know what a great president Bob Caret has been for San Jose State. He has done an absolutely great job and we are all going to miss him. He is a wonderful colleague. He contributes to the system. And for a guy who started out at San Jose washing windows, he has done pretty well. He has made a big difference. Bob, thank you.

Remarks by Bob Caret
Thank you very much. It has been a great eight years. I've enjoyed being in California. I hope some day to come back to California, but I've spent 21 years at Towson State University, now called Towson University. They just wanted me to come back. They do need some leadership there. I am looking forward to the challenges and looking forward to the excitement.

I also want to say one thing about some of the comments today. All of us as presidents at schools like San Jose State and the Cal State campuses believe in access for our students. We fought for 30, 40, even 50 years to make sure that happened. One of the things to keep in mind is access without quality isn't worth having. You have to have a certain level of quality at every one of our campuses. If you can't do that then it's not worth maintaining the access. Let's try to balance those two and work on it. I know Cal State will continue to be successful. Thanks a lot.

Remarks by Chancellor Reed

Thanks, Bob.

As Chair Farar said this is a time of a lot of changes in the California State University. At our July meeting, we will honor Bob Suzuki, Manuel Esteban, and Don Gerth. Yesterday I recommended that the board name three interim presidents. I think that those three individuals will do an outstanding job for the next several months while those searches go forth. Also, yesterday we got the official word that Vice Chancellor Louis Caldera had been selected as the new president of The University of New Mexico.

I also want to congratulate Rollin Richmond on his inauguration at Humboldt State. Rollin, thank you for leaving Iowa and coming to the CSU.

Regarding the budget: Raising fees and cutting budgets is not any fun. None of us in this business ever want to do either one of them. I like to go to the Legislature and the governor, get more money, bring it back and figure out how to use it to build this university. But reality has dealt us another hand.

I had the privilege of meeting with the Statewide Academic Senate last Thursday and spending an hour or so with them. I shared with them the three principles that we have talked about among ourselves in the Chancellor's Office and with the presidents when we met in Executive Council. The three things we are going to use as principles to guide our recommendation to this board are: 1) Serving as many students as we can. Access is important. 2) Protecting the current students that we have, and doing everything that we can to get them to their goal. 3) Protecting as many employees, faculty, staff as we can from layoffs.

Those are the three things that will guide the recommendations that we will make to this board.

Chair Farar, that completes my report.