Steve Weber is at his academic acme: A bearded oracle, his eyes beaming anticipation as his savants take their seats around him. He has done this newspaper the honor of convening, from his faculty and staff of 6,000, a panel to convey his university's new directions.

We are on San Diego State University mesa, where one of every seven San Diego college graduates once yelled the Aztec yell. These alumni are stanchions of San Diego business and professional institutions. As many as half of San Diego schoolteachers have attended SDSU. Half of SDSU graduates remain in San Diego. From City Hall to the stadium, from courtrooms to marinas, Aztecs are in charge.

On campus, we wind among mazes around buildings under construction. Behind barricades, where red trolleys will rumble in 2005, the earth appears to have caved in on a mine shaft. Elevators will rise from a station in that hole, a long-sought palliative for a graduate-level nightmare of parking congestion.

"This university is a sleeping giant," says Tere Mendoza, who moved up from the state University of Arizona. At SDSU, she is vice president for university advancement. "But our alumni have thought of us as the girl next door. We need to update that image."

On a campus thronged with 34,000 students, image is a blur. Even entering the right classroom is a coup. But President Weber is not wise for nothing. Today, he is bringing the image to the reporter.

His lunch group signifies some of the shifts away from the long-familiar at SDSU:

Economist Dipak Gupta specializes in terrorism and conflict among ethnic groups. He is now researching climate change in South Asia, where 1.5 billion people live in severe drought.

"Children follow journalists around now begging for water," he says, "instead of money." With government and foundation funding, he and his SDSU team are into their second year of drought research and exploring how reallocating water could soothe political conflict.

Bonnie Stewart is executive director of the Fred J. Hansen Institute for World Peace. Hansen was a San Diego avocado farmer. Millions flow from his institute into SDSU-staffed aid programs for farmers in Egypt, Morocco and Israel.

"The peace process is one step forward and 10 back," she says. "But we have seen that when they start working together, the results are amazing."

Mike Hergert, a management professor, co-directs CIBER, a center for international business education. It's ranked 12th in the United States. The program began in 1989.

"We put together a business major requiring students to be fluent in a second language. It was so demanding we wondered if anyone would actually try it. We had 1,000 students the first year.

"In similar programs elsewhere, study abroad is optional. We decided to require it for a semester. We set up our own network abroad. When students come back they are totally different people. About 2,000 have graduated into international business in the U.S. and abroad. Their median salary after five years is $75,000."

Susan Wachowiak, who says she had "always been on the restless fringe in education," leaped forward when Robert Price asked if she would start a program for inner-city school students in Balboa Park.

She directs the ingenious School in the Park Program, now in its fourth year, which brings 800 Rosa Parks School pupils from City Heights to classrooms in 10 park museums for 12 of their 36 school weeks. Museum staff and docents share teaching duties with professional teachers.

Its success defies dogma.

Attending students have exceeded their API scores steadily for four years with a better record than any other school in its district. Through it, Rosa Parks, thronged from its start in Sol Price's dazzling redevelopment of City Heights, has freed up classroom space to accommodate more pupils. That's what launched the museum project in Price's mind. He, after all, is the man who decided we would flock into discount warehouses.

At the Hall of Champions, pupils study math through Fantasy Baseball. Tramping through the San Diego Museum of Art, they see their first lessons in geometry. Docents and teachers dovetail with California State standards. Some teachers call the museum program too difficult, Wachowiak says, but "by the end of the year they say things like, 'These kids can do anything.' To me, that is profound. If teachers believe kids can do anything, they eventually will."

What does this say to the public school industry?

"I don't know," Wachowiak says. "They are silent. Few realize that by design, SDSU administers three schools in that district: Rosa Parks, Monroe Clark and Hoover High. We work side by side with teachers. We don't talk down. We offer teacher credentials on site. For the first time in that district, teachers want in – not out. "