SAN MARCOS ---- The year in higher education ---- for all three of North County's public institutions ---- turned out to be very, well, presidential.

In the span of the last 12 months, the region's two community colleges and one university all saw their presidents leave, or make plans to.

At Cal State San Marcos, President Alexander Gonzalez took the helm at Cal State Sacramento in July. His successor, Karen Haynes, was named in November. This fall, Palomar College President Sherrill Amador announced that she will be retiring in June, and last summer, MiraCosta President Tim Dong also announced he would retire at the end of the academic year.

As the search commenced for a new leader at CSUSM, people on campus used those very words when they were asked just what they were looking for. Someone "very presidential," they would say.

The task has fallen to Haynes, who led a campus in Texas that's somewhat similar to Cal State San Marcos. Her campus, the University of Houston at Victoria, serves as a suburban bastion of the huge, public, metropolitan main Houston installation 45 miles away.

Victoria also resembles the upper-level CSUSM of the early '90s in that it enrolls juniors and seniors almost exclusively. And, like Victoria, San Marcos started out as an outpost of San Diego State 14 years ago, with headquarters in a furniture warehouse.

As Haynes moves onto the hill next month, two of the main "feeder" schools, Palomar and MiraCosta colleges, are conducting presidential searches of their own. Both of those campuses were stunned when their leaders announced they intended to retire when the 2003-04 academic year ends early next summer.

MiraCosta's Dong has been on board nearly 10 years, coming from the student services office at Cal State Los Angeles. He has been credited with maintaining, nurturing and growing an atmosphere of collegiality for which MiraCosta has gained a reputation.

Palomar's Amador arrived in San Marcos in 2001 from the presidency of Cuyamaca College near El Cajon, where she reported not to a board, like she does now, but to the chancellor of the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District. She walked into what's been variously described as a hornet's nest and a powder keg. The tension and unrest have stalked the Amador presidency.

That fractiousness stems chiefly from the fact that the faculty and the administration have failed to come to terms over the first-ever contract in Palomar history for the more than 1,100 full- and part-time teachers there. And the talks, on again and off again and complete with officially declared impasse, have been going on now for some 2 1/2 years.

Through it all, even her opponents will credit Amador for bringing structure and coherence to the processes of planning and governance and ensuring that decision-making be driven by rock solid data. Such information gathering, with careful projections made into the future, was crucial to developing the new Palomar master plan. Described by board member Nancy Chadwick as a "work of art," the plan outlines the college's needs for at least the next decade ---- including the need for building two new campuses, one near the Poway-Ramona line and the other along Interstate 15 north of Escondido.

Palomar, like every campus, has further been stalked by the state budget situation. Though students, faculty and administrators surprised Sacramento with a concerted lobbying effort that restored some of the slashes proposed by then-Gov. Gray Davis, the present is austere and at the moment the future does not look flush.

"We've been so under-funded for so long that we're running out of creative ways to make up for it," Amador said recently in an interview at her office.

In the meantime, she said, she aims to settle the contract issues by the time she leaves July 1. She also continues to be optimistic that it can be done, and says her optimism is more than just wishful thinking. The district and the teachers, represented by the Palomar Faculty Federation, are divided mainly on issues of compensation, workload and class size.

Palomar's presidential search apparatus is just starting up, while MiraCosta is ready to post national advertisements.

Among what's being sought in a person to lead the Spartans' Oceanside and San Elijo campuses, according to a draft of the ad's language: a maker of "quality" decisions who delegates while shouldering responsibility and blends "analysis, wisdom, experience and judgment" to serve students of diverse backgrounds in the best possible way. This is not to mention "agility within complex organizational cultures" and "diplomacy and directness" in settling differences among people and groups on the campus.

Questions without clear answers hanging in the North County air: Who would want the job at fractious Palomar and who wouldn't want the job at MiraCosta, one of the state's richest public two-year schools with average teacher salaries in the mid-$90,000 range?

And, looking down the road, if what happened at Cal State San Marcos can be used as any indication, the new chief executives at both community colleges will be a distinct contrast to what has come before.

At CSUSM, Gonzalez tended toward dark conservative suits, a courtly manner and a restrained and formal demeanor. Suffice it to say for those purposes of contrast, Haynes made her first public campus visit early in November, at the time one of three people vying for the San Marcos post, dressed in a fuchsia suit with a blouse that had an even deeper shade of red. She told a crowd at an open forum she did it so she'd be remembered.

Haynes, whose degrees are in social work, officially is to join Cal State San Marcos as its third full-time president in January. She'll be the first one selected by a process that invited the active participation of a campus panel of students, staff, administrators and faculty. Although the trustees of the 23-campus CSU had the last word, not much was heard in the way of dissent on campus about their choice of Haynes.