Chancellor's Report

to the Board of Trustees

September 15, 1999

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. September to me is always a new year and not because the football season starts every September, but because school starts. I always look at September as the time of the year for fresh starts, setting new goals, working on past goals, and implementing plans. Having said that, I want to say this: I feel very good about this board's agenda, because I think we have the right agenda to move the California State University system into the 21st century. We have good plans in place and I also think we are working on the right issues for California.

Trustee Campbell talked about the first issue that we are really going to concentrate on, and that is enrollment management. Trustee Pierce talked about having an emergency plan and a long- range plan. We need both, but we need also a mid-range plan. As this academic year begins, and all our campus operations are under way, we could be as much as one to one- and- one- half percent overenrolled this year. What that says is that Tidal Wave II is getting here faster than even we anticipated. Also, the economy has been good and people want to go to college, and so those combinations are going to impact us. We want to have a workshop so that we can have this board involved in those detailed conversations with the presidents and with our staff, and we will do that.

I think we have a chance to manage our enrollment because we have some opportunities that we haven't taken advantage of, unlike some other places where I've been that don't have the same chance that I think California has. We have to look at our capacity and think about expanding our capacity at certain institutions, and what that means. It is not as simple as saying, well, let's just put some classrooms there, because capacity has to take care of faculty office space, labs, libraries, and student services. We might have the classrooms but not the student support systems. So we must look at all of those components.

Last week Trustee Campbell and I had some good conversations about year- round operations and what that means or could mean. Now, that is directly related to funding, and related to funding students. We need to convince the governor and the legislature that these students are coming and ask them to fund students, essentially for what I'll just call 120 credit hours, and it shouldn't make any difference whether you are going to school in September or July. However, it will make a difference in one sense. I think we have huge hurdles to overcome given the culture in California about students and faculty not really taking classes in the summer. So, I think we will have to develop some incentive plans to encourage that. But, there is some capacity out there that we can use.

Also, Trustee Pesqueira, I think this might help us to implement your vision about remedial education even faster than 2007. So I want to work on that. We are going to monitor our enrollment numbers so that come October, when we get closer to the 2000/2001 budget proposal we will be able to report to you exactly where we think we are. We are planning-- as you saw on Richard West's slide yesterday-- for a 4 percent increase for next year. That is a big number. That is about $80 million. We may need to come back and ask you for 5 percent. What that means is that we must run that number up to $95, $98 million. Those are big numbers. So we are going to have to depend upon the people of California to keep the Master Plan in place.

The second part of this board's agenda is teacher preparation. We had a wonderful event on Monday evening to honor teachers, the best teachers from our 22 institutions. We plan to continue that throughout the year on our campuses, at special events that we will have to showcase teachers, to raise the level of the profession, and to thank teachers for what they do. Later today, I will be going to Washington along with six or seven of our presidents to a White House conference on teacher education. Some of the presidents are already there. All across this country, teacher education-- teacher preparation-- is a hot topic. I believe that on this issue, this board is further ahead than anybody else and that is why so many of our presidents have been invited to the conference-- because Washington knows what this board and our institutions have been doing.

Around the first of October, I hope you will see on many of the cable stations the teacher recruiting effort that this board is supporting. We will be purchasing about $2 million worth of cable time aimed at attracting more students, both the traditional- age student but also those who want to change careers, those who have an opportunity to retire and do something else. And so we will have a television campaign and a web site up to recruit more. I am pleased to report that I think we are on track for the 25 percent increase in teacher credentialing production that this board set two years ago. We will be able to report that to you this fall also.

We also will be implementing the CalStateTEACH program that is aimed at the 30,000 emergency certified teachers, specifically about 15,000 of those teachers who are elementary school teachers. We have more than 500 applications. Again, in October we will know how many have been admitted to that program and have started. We will plan for a second cohort of those emergency credentialed teachers to start in January.

Our third area is remedial education. We have gotten some very good press and some editorials in the last two or three weeks on the topic of remedial education. I think the public has spoken very loud and has said we want standards, and we want universities and this board to mean it. So the most important thing that we can do is have in place good, sound remedial programs that are intense, that have a lot of mentoring and tutoring. In addition, students need to be informed that after one calendar year, if they can't reach our standards, we will help them find a place that can help them, but it won't be at our place.

We have already begun an outreach program this fall. Executive Vice Chancellor Dave Spence and CSU Los Angeles President Jim Rosser are working together with the state K- 12 schools and have identified 223 high schools that send us the largest number of students who need remedial education.

What we want to do is build a faculty alliance between our faculty and the faculty in those high schools. We want to take our testing information, our results, to those high schools and sit down with their faculty and explain to them what is happening. But also talk about what we can do as a university system to help them with student achievement. Because that is what the real issue is in California: achievement of standards. So we hope that our English, writing, and math faculty will do that.

Fifth, Cornerstones. Cornerstones is back on the agenda. Cornerstones will be coming back to this board for the full implementation of the accountability standards at our November meeting. We had a good session earlier last week with the statewide Senate. Everyone understands that this is going to be on the November agenda to be implemented.

The last thing that is on our agenda, and again very important, is to negotiate a Compact II with the governor and the legislature. Chairman Hauck has been very helpful. Last week he sent a letter to the Legislative Analyst's Office, which had just sent out this missile, without talking to anybody, about Compact I. One of my hunches in this is that Compact I was so successful that the legislative analyst couldn't stand it. So her position was that this was too good for everybody. And the second thing she was worried about is that this is going to tie the legislature's hands. It doesn't tie the legislature's hands. That's the good thing about it. What it says though is that higher education is important in California and important enough to have a compact, and there is a moral commitment to higher education when you don't have the legislation. That is what I like about that.

Chairman Hauck's letter pointed out all of the different efficiencies that have occurred, which may or may not have occurred without that compact, but also stressed the accountability standards that we are renegotiating in Compact II. I think it is a really good deal. The governor's finance office likes Compact II because it builds a fence around that budget, and so I think that will help them in building their own budget. We anticipate the budget that Richard West showed you yesterday being built based upon a Compact II. Finance has told us to go forward that way so we are going to do that. That is an ambitious agenda, there's lots of good things in that agenda for us to work on and accomplish this year, and I look forward to doing that.

A couple of other items. Many of you were present when President Gonzalez had his inauguration a couple of weeks ago, which was a fantastic event in San Marcos, and we congratulate Alex and wish him well for being a real president now that he has had an inauguration. I mentioned earlier the recognition of the outstanding alumni teachers. We are going to continue that. Last night and yesterday afternoon was a great time to thank Barry and Anne Munitz for what they have done for this system, and I can't thank Barry enough for what he continues to do. Almost every week I have a conversation with him about something or I ask him to do something for the CSU, and he always does it. The other item that we are working on-- several trustees, Chairman Hauck, Trustee Foster, and others-- is to build a much better communication plan focused on what the CSU does, what the mission of the CSU is, and spreading the good word about the CSU. You will hearing more about building that internal and external communication plan.

We are also working as part of that communication plan to rewrite a document that Chairman Hauck and others have worked on called Crossroads. It is specifically laying out the policy options for higher education in California. We are almost ready to bring that document out. Many of you know Russ Gould and he has helped us out. We plan by November to have that document redone so that it can become part of our communications plan and we will share that and some other information that we have tried to gather about what the public and the political leadership thinkabout the CSU. Based on that kind of research, then we will have a communications plan that we think we can put into place. It will take some resources and some time, but it will be worth doing.

Mr. Chairman, that is my report.