Chancellor's Report

to the Board of Trustees

January 28, 2004

Thank you, Chair Farar.

Yesterday, I talked mostly about the budget and so I'm not going to repeat all of that except to say that we do have a major, major challenge ahead of us.

When you think about it, the state has taken out of the California State University 771 million dollars. That's about 29% of where we were. Anytime the state takes that part, and Richard talked about this partnership when he was talking about a fee policy, the state has to be a part of this partnership too. The state should support us and step up and say, "Here's how much money that we're going to guarantee you per student." So we've got some work to do there.

We did talk to the Governor's office in Finance about trying to build a new compact or partnership, but the net results with the 30% fee increase on top of the 10%, and then the 10% that the governor recommended and then the fees for graduate students and non residents is a net-net of about 570 million dollars -- even with our fees and even with everything going right. So that's about a 20% reduction from where we were in 2001/2002. Now, yesterday, I said this, but I think I'll just repeat it quickly. Between now and the March board meeting with the presidents, with consultation with the budget summit, with the statewide budget advisory committee, the student organizations, the Academic Senate, Labor we plan to come back to this board with as comprehensive a plan that we can. That plan will include a recommendation about fees and financial aid as a part of that.

Yesterday, I think we were very clear that we have to start the process now to reduce our enrollment. We will be assigning targets to each of the 23 institutions to reduce the enrollment by about 20,000 students or 5%. We will have a plan for our EOP and Academic enhancement in the public schools. We'll try to figure out how we're going to re-direct 4,000 first time college freshmen. We will have a plan about how we'll go about excess units. We will have a plan to defer our common management system probably until 2007 or thereabouts. And lastly, we're also trying to figure out how we might manage our summer operations to make summer as efficient in getting students courses and trying to save some of the state funding. So that's our plan between now and March.

It is critical that the CSU reinforce our mission everyday. How we are working for California, how we are tied to California's economic liability and how we are committed to providing a high quality, accessible higher education for California students. But we can't take our eye off of quality just for accessibility. It just doesn’t work. We can't do more and more with less and less. Having said that, I'm very optimistic that the entire CSU family is going to be working together. I shared with you that we are putting together a group of labor and other organizations in Sacramento. Patrick Lentz is going to be chairing that for us. We'll be meeting this afternoon to begin talking about that.

I want to share with the board that I had a conversation with John Travis, the head of the California Faculty Association a couple of weeks ago. Proposition 55 is extremely important to all of public education in California. It means over 600 million dollars to the California State University. These are bonds that will provide resources to renovate and build new facilities.

Bill Hauck had called me because of the recent polling about the support for the school bond. The school bond two weeks ago, had the least amount of support statewide that any school bond has had since the early 1990's when one happened to fail. So, Trustee Hauck is our representative on an organization called, "Californians for Higher Education" and they want to try to get out the word to the public, sooner rather than later. So I asked John if the CFA could help us and within just a very few days he called me back and offered to make a $50,000 donation to the Californians for Higher Education to help purchase television and other media. John, we very much appreciate that.

Let me just quickly recognize Scott McNall who has been serving as interim president of CSU Chico since last June. Scott will be returning to his real position as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Chico next Monday. But, Scott, thank you for your help and your service to CSU Chico and the California State University.

Roy McTarnaghan could not be with us today but Roy, like Joe Crowley -- we lied to both Roy and Joe. We told them we wouldn't need them after Christmas, but both of them agreed to stay.

Roy agreed to stay through this month as the interim president at CSU San Marcos. But Roy will be heading back to Florida on Friday and Karen Haynes will be in San Marcos on Monday. And the good news is Joe has committed to stay with us for the next 5 to 10 years.

Lastly, two pretty big events on our campuses, CSULB has been working for several months with Long Beach Memorial Medical Center about the nursing shortage. As I know that several of our other institutions have. But, CSULB and Long Beach Memorial Medical Center entered into a 15 million dollar, 5 year partnership where Long Beach has committed to increase the number of nursing graduates that will be serving in the system of hospitals between here, Newport, Laguna and the service areas that they have.

It’s quite impressive because CSULB's Nursing program is going to increase their size to 1,400 nurses, which is double the size that it is now. They also agreed to produced 350 masters degree nurse practitioners as well as 100 nurses with Associate nursing degrees will move into the BS degree in nursing. That is a pretty big operation and I know in this community, as in many other communities, meets a huge need for the nursing profession. So Bob, thank you and good luck to Long Beach Memorial.

The other large undertaking was at Cal State San Bernardino. There, Al Karnig has taken a pretty big risk with some of his resources, and he has launched what they are calling the Inland California Television Network. There is no news generated in the Inland Valley, so CSUSB has gone live, every night of the week at 10 p.m. CSUSB will provide news to about 4 million cable owners and then they will repeat that, and so 2 million additional people will have access to that news. I think they will potentially reach 6 million people. So Al, I think that will help put CSUSB on the map.

Chair Farar, that concludes my remarks.