SAN MARCOS ---- The president's office at Cal State San Marcos will be vacant this week.

Interim President Roy McTarnaghan, saying he could probably handle any leftover loose ends by phone, fax, e-mail and teleconference from his home state of Florida, left the campus on the hill shortly after 6 p.m. on Thursday and headed for a long-awaited reunion with his grandchildren in Boca Raton.

He had already stuck around a month longer than he'd planned.

Incoming President Karen S. Haynes is expected Feb. 1, which is next Sunday. On Friday, she was in Victoria, Texas, at her University of Houston satellite campus, affirming that she indeed feels she is holding two presidencies at once right now: in Texas, where she has been since 1997, and in San Marcos, a position she said she has dreamed about for some time.

Her specialties

Haynes, whose academic specialty is social work, becomes the third full-time president in the 15-year history of North County's only public university. The choice, made from a field of about 100 applicants and made official by a vote of the CSU board of trustees in November, is seen as meshing with plans at Cal State San Marcos for a fourth college devoted to health and human services that would offer advanced degrees in nursing and social work.

She was a recent presidential finalist at both the Chico and Sacramento campuses, dropping out of the Chico competition the same week in October that she became one of three finalists for the San Marcos job and losing out at Sacramento in March to Alexander Gonzalez, her predecessor at CSUSM.

Described by people she's met and worked with both here and in Victoria as collegial, upbeat, skilled at listening and endowed with a good sense of humor, Haynes, 57, heads for San Marcos as CSUSM opens it first permanent library and moves into its second semester as a residential campus.

In a telephone interview from her office at Victoria, some 45 miles from downtown Houston, Haynes said she looks at her immediate future with "a lot of excitement." She said she's focusing on how to go about meeting all the people she wants to meet and who want to meet her and gathering the information to get a good sense of how things are going at CSUSM.

Assessing situation

"I've been giving a lot of thought to how one really enters a new university, a new system, a new state," Haynes said. "In what order do I begin to not only meet that large internal and external environment, but how do you begin to take the information you're getting, sift through it and synthesize it so you can create a plan. I want to know about the things that should stay the same, that this is what works, that this is what could be changed."

She says she wants her presidency to be open and accessible, yet planned. She said she wants to hear from people and connect, and that she wants no one to think that she's about to barrel in and make wholesale changes.

Haynes is expected to continue McTarnaghan's efforts to use technology ---- namely, the Internet ---- as a way to counter the problem of university access. McTarnaghan urged the Web be looked at as the way the university could reach out with academic offerings to people who would otherwise not be able to attend.

Haynes also arrives on the heels of the interim president's call to get more freshmen to return to campus for their next year. CSUSM is among the worst performers in the system's 23 campuses in holding onto freshmen from one year to the next: In general, one of three does not return for a sophomore year.

Inevitably, the budget

Officials say many students leave out of frustration that they are ill-prepared for college-level work. A pilot program that sent 20 students through a rigorous six-week "boot camp" in math before they started their freshman year has shown some promising results. Test scores went up dramatically, said David Barsky, CSUSM associate vice president for academic affairs.

Haynes arrives, too, amid the backdrop of a budget crunch that could see Cal State San Marcos turn away its share of some 20,000 otherwise qualified students across the state because the campuses are running out of room and resources.

At the same time, the budget proposed this month by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would add an average of $204 to the tuition bill, bringing the cost of a year at Cal State San Marcos to $2,618. This would be on top of two fee hikes last fiscal year. Haynes told her search panel interviewers that she'd strive to keep the campus focused on its ongoing momentum, because to focus unduly on the budget situation brings only demoralization.

As he left campus Thursday, McTarnaghan said he would urge students to stay the course and also to make sure Sacramento gets constantly reminded of the importance of higher education. "And realize, too," he said, "that in California, this is still a bargain compared with other states."

Haynes and her husband of 17 years, Jim Mickelson, a professor, social worker and children's advocate, have found an apartment to rent about a mile from the campus. Once settled in ---- the movers are set to leave Victoria on Tuesday and the couple is booked on a flight to San Diego on Saturday ---- they plan to look for a house to buy.

Meanwhile, Haynes says she'll seek to hear from people with all points of view.

"I don't think you can please everybody," Haynes said Friday, "but at least in my 6 1/2 years as president here ... people could always say they were heard. I asked for and received input. My decisions were not what necessarily pleased people, but they always knew why I made them and they always felt involved."