Horace Mitchell, Berkeley's vice chancellor for business and administrative services since 1995, is one of three leading candidates for Bakersfield's top job, CSU officials announced this week.

The other candidates are Ephraim Smith, vice president for academic affairs at Cal State Fullerton, and G. Timothy Haight, dean of Cal State Los Angeles' College of Business and Economics. The successful candidate will succeed Tomas Arciniega, who retires in June after 21 years at CSU Bakersfield.

Mitchell, 59, said he had been approached by a consultant helping in the Bakersfield search, and while he has passed on similar inquiries from other universities, the Bakersfield position appealed to him.

"I felt it was a place that would be an interesting position and that had lots of promise," Mitchell said.

Particularly, Mitchell said he was attracted by the campus's contributions to the fast-growing Kern County area, as well as its focus on public-service learning, the strength of its academic programs and its focus on the community.

Each of the candidates will visit the Bakersfield campus next week to meet with faculty, students and staff. Mitchell's visit is Wednesday.

CSU's governing Board of Trustees will interview each of the finalists May 17 and is expected to make a final decision soon after. The successful candidate will join the Bakersfield campus in July.

Mitchell has a long history in the UC system, first joining the staff at UC Irvine in 1978. Prior to coming to Berkeley, where he is also an affiliated professor in African-American Studies, he was Irvine's vice chancellor for student affairs and served as associate clinical professor of psychiatry and human behavior.

Prior to that, he was chairman of the Black Studies Program, assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and assistant professor of Education and Black Studies at his alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis.

If Mitchell is selected for the Bakersfield job, he will join a campus strikingly different from Berkeley, one of the nation's premier public research institutions with an annual enrollment of about 33,000 students. Bakersfield enrolls about 7,100 full-time students each year.

"Berkeley is 136 years old, and it has a more than 100-year head start on Bakersfield," Mitchell said. "If I can help Bakersfield move toward becoming a Berkeley some decades from now, I would feel that's an important thing to have done."