General Governance Transcript
GERTH: Good morning. First, I want to thank all of you for being here at an early hour today. And. . .thank you in advance for what's certainly going to be a wonderful discussion. I want to especially thank the very wonderful staff in this creative center, part of the technology operation in the system -- in the university as a whole. These sessions have taught me more than I ever knew about technology. One of the first things I discovered as I was addressing the question of hiring a secretary, a transcriber, or somebody to transcribe these conversations and get them on paper, is that we don't need somebody to transcribe, a computer does this for us. For somebody of my generation, that's news -- and we’ve learned a lot about technology.
I want to thank also Amy Kautzman, the Dean of the Library and James Fox, who is the Director of Special Collections and the Archives of the University. And, certainly, Sally Hitchcock, who not only got us coffee and rolls this morning, but has been wonderful through this whole series in helping us. She's Assistant to the Dean of the Library and does all the public affairs kinds of things with the Library.
This series is very important to Bev and me because it's a way of revisiting and getting in the record, so to speak, some of the formative years of the University. I -- I’ve borrowed a phrase from David Wagner. I first heard this from him a number of months ago, that we were in a period of kind of the maturing of the University. And David is going to talk about that, I believe, this morning. But, this whole series is rather important; and the work that will be in the library, in the archives, already we've got one graduate student interested in talking about this and doing a thesis having to do with the history of California State University, Sacramento. We feel fortunate to be-- we, as in Bev and I, we've been together only 63 years.
We feel fortunate to be, have been, members of the California State University family since 1958 when we came here to San Francisco State. And we feel particularly fortunate to have been a part of California State University, Sacramento. This is not only an important campus in the system as a whole because it is in the state capital and it is the campus, which, in many ways, represents all 20-- what are now 23 campuses-- with state government. And this campus has had a very interesting and a productive history. We've been a part of the California State University for all these years and we're very grateful for that. And again, we want to thank all of you for being here. And Steve, it's all yours. We're going to have a very interesting morning. I indicated to Steve, and, I think, in a note to all of you. I'm not going to be a participant directly in the discussion, although I'm available to answer your questions. And there probably will be times when I can't restrain myself from holding up my hand, but we'll see. Steve, it's all yours.
BOILARD: OK. Well, thanks, Don. Why don’t we - -
GERTH:: And I want to say thank you to you, Steve Boilard, for helping us with this series. Steve is ending a number of very, very good and productive years as Director of the Center for California Studies. We talked about that Center at the very first of our meetings a number of weeks ago. Steve.
BOILARD: Thank you very much. Let's begin just by doing a quick round of introductions, self-introductions of your role during Don's tenure as president, starting with Ann Louise.
RADIMSKY: I'm Ann Louise Radimsky, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science. And, in those years, I was very active in a number of committees and ended up on CUP for, again, a number of years. I looked at my resume and I have forgotten that I was in so many committees [laughs] during this time, so.
BOILARD: Thank you.
BARRENA: Juanita Barrena, Professor Emerita, Biological Sciences. I was Department Chair during Don's early years, when he first came, and was the Senate Chair from '87 to '91, and very actively engaged in governance throughout Don's tenure, much to his dismay [laughter].
BOILARD: Not what I hear. David?
WAGNER: David Wagner, Emeritus Professor of Communication Studies. A checkered career here. Started off as debate coach, was a Department Chair roughly equivalent to Juanita's time when she was in Biological Sciences. Was an Associate Dean in what was then the School of Arts and Sciences, which I would note parenthetically was a School that was bigger than half of the campuses in the CSU at the time. Then, a Dean of Faculty and Staff Affairs, and I ended my career here as Vice President for Human Resources.
DORMAN: Bill Dorman, Emeritus Professor of Government and Journalism. I came here on the faculty in 1967. And, during Don's period of time, I was on the Faculty Policies Committee [and] Chair. I was, for the Senate, Vice Chair or Co-chair of the GE review at that time, and also a member of the WASC accreditation team.
FITZGERALD: Michael Fitzgerald, I was-- I came here in 1986. Bill hired me, actually, for the Journalism Department, which I don't think he regrets. I don't—I’d have to ask him about that more. I was a professor—So, I came in as an Associate Professor, and as happens at Sac State, if you raise your hand, you end up as a Department Chair fairly quickly, which I did. I was the Department Chair. But I was also the faculty advisor of the campus newspaper, which Don might have something to say about those years. But the whole goal-- my goal was to try to make it as professional a newspaper as possible because I was a professional journalist, and I'm still a journalist in Upstate New York. I did serve as Senate Chair in -- about two years after Juanita was-- Juanita's era ended with; and then I went back in years later for a second time, showing that I'm a slow learner.
BOLIARD OK.
FARRAND: I'm Scott Farrand from the Department of Mathematics and I started here in 1981. During the time Don was here, I was-- served as Department Chair from my department and spent some time on the Senate and a lot of Senate committees. I was Chair of Fiscal Affairs for quite a while. And, I was Vice Chair of the Senate when Juanita first took the helm and then once again later. And, the other thing, main area of involvement, was in budget matters. I was on the University Resources and Planning Council, the predecessor to CUP.
DOMICH: I'm Karyn Domich, and I started here as a student in 1965. Was a student assistant for a couple of months in the order department of the Library when the wonderful librarian Robert Trimingham took me aside and said, "Could you work half time?" And that was a real bonus back in 1965 because if you worked part time, you would also get benefits. And so, anyway, that was-- that sort of started my time here. And Professor Barrena is, was one of my professors. She likes to hear me to say that she was the number one of my, like, top five. And, I ended up my career here as the Executive Assistant to President Gerth.
SHULOCK: I'm Nancy Shulock. I was hired right in the beginning of Don's administration,1984, in a position that was being, thereafter, reorganized, but it was Associate Vice President for Resource Planning and Allocation. And was-- were a staff person on our efforts to strategic planning and budgeting. And then I got reorganized into Academic Affairs and so I was Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs for a number of years. And in 19-- in 2001, I left the administration and went over to direct the newly founded Institute for Higher Education, Leadership, and Policy.
KOESTER: I'm Jolene Koester. I came to Sacramento a year before Don began his work as President here. I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies. David Wagner was my Department Chair. And, I served in that department for six years, the last three as Department Chair. During the time that I was in that department, I was, as several people have indicated, immediately put on the Academic Senate. And in fact, I was elected to the Senate Executive Committee for my first year on the Senate and my second year at Cal State Sacramento. It was one of those dizzying experiences. Why am I here? I raised my hand. Somebody called and asked me and said, "Sure, I'll serve," thinking nobody would ever vote for somebody that they didn't know. So I was on the Senate Executive Committee Don's first year as President here. So, that really informed as much of what I understand about the early years. I was then Interim Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs, Vice President for Academic Affairs and then Provost. I had a lot of titles. Left here in 2000 to become President of Cal State, Northridge, where Don and I then were colleagues as Presidents on CSU campuses and retired from there in December of 2011.
RAMEY: My name is Felicienne Ramey. And, when Don first came in '84, I was actually in the College of Business as a faculty member there and I served as-- in the College of Business for 28 years. Don asked me to start--to be his Counsel. I was Assistant to the President, reported to Don, and I was to handle legal matters within the University and interact with the Attorney General's Office, if there was a case filed, grievances filed. During my time there, I wrote, I think, four policies. One was the sexual harassment policy, believe it or not, the smoking policy, a patent policy; and there was one more, which escapes me-- I mean, grievances -- I handled lots of grievances. And before-- And after that time, I then went back to the School of Business as Department Chair, as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, and then I ended up retiring as Dean. And so, my title was Professor and Dean Emeritus from California State University. And I have to say this in front of all of you publicly is that, it was a wonderful time I spent here. OK. And I've been at two other universities in the UC system and I still say that my time here was precious, OK.
BOILARD: And I'm Steve Boilard. I came here the same year Don did, 1984, same year Nancy did, as a graduate student in the Government Department. And, after I went to a brand X University from the other system and got my PhD, I ended up eventually finding my way back here again as Executive Director of the Center for California Studies, which I just retired from. So I guess I started the same time you did, and retired before you did. So, it's quite a trick. Well, as you can tell, we've got a lot of different angles on governance here at the campus during Don's very long tenure. And we've asked Jolene Koester if you would kind of set the table for us and introduce this topic of University-wide Governance.
KOESTER: I'd be glad to do that. I offer a perspective, perhaps different than many of the rest of you because I was pretty naive and uneducated about California--California public education, higher education, when I came here. So the relevant factors for me in my beginning of working with Don Gerth at Cal State Sacramento were pretty uninformed, perhaps. But I think, retrospectively, pretty right on in terms of the major factors that structure, then, his contributions in terms of governance for the institution. First, the university was driven by the infamous Orange Book, the funding model from the State of California that had algorithms that produced both dollars but expectation about how those dollars were going to be spent. And those dollars and expectations, then, had also shaped the organizational structure of the University. The College or the School structure, the divisional or program center -- and Nancy will explain a little bit more about that term—the administrative structure of the organization. It also, the Orange Book, really drove a sense-- or people in the University-- a sense of what you needed to consult about, because so much of it was formulaic that there were expectations as well in terms of consultation. So, the Orange Book was dominant. Secondly, I would say a factor that was important in terms of both University governance and then also then in terms of the shared governance-- faculty constituent governance --was a fairly pronounced atmosphere of antagonism between the faculty, at least formally the faculty, the Faculty—the Academic Senate and administrators. And there's no need to go into all the history; but there had been a lot of turnover of presidents, and there was not a lot of trust and there wasn't a-- there were not grooved pathways for creating partnerships between the administration and faculty. And that is one of the things that Don, working with others, attempted to create, sometimes very successfully, sometimes not so successfully, but nevertheless that was another part of it. The third factor is that when Don got here to Sacramento, it was the second or third year after the faculty union contract had been ratified. California Faculty Association had been certified as the bargaining agent. And while that wasn't immediately dominant in terms of its impact on the University during the time that I was here, it became a much more powerful force over time. The fourth factor that I would simply say is that the University operated pretty much in isolation from the region it served. I didn't fully understand that to begin with, but as Don got into his work as President here, and he had a very different point of view about what the University ought to do, that became apparent because he was trying to create structures and norms and values for the University around what it is the University did in concert with its community. And it-- it wasn't only that we were in the State Capital. I know that was a big part of it, but it was really an obligation to the economic and cultural - the social capital, basically, of this region that the University would be synergistically involved. So those are some of the major themes, I think, that we will explore both in this first session and then in the session where we turn to the shared governance, or I would say constituent governance, of the University. I'm going to ask Nancy to kind of lead off with some of the more specifics in terms of the impact on the organizational structure and governance.
SHULOCK: So, I had three themes that I was going to-- that I want to talk about and I was going to say that I learned from Jolene, because I worked under and with Jolene, that you should only-- that you should always think in terms of three and then she went and added a fourth. So, I guess I'm falling behind your model. I've organized my thinking in terms of these three themes: what Don inherited when he came in, in terms of the culture; what kinds of changes to the culture he was trying to implement; and then, a few of the mechanisms that he introduced to do that. So, it's just a few minutes. But the first one, it'll be some overlap with what Jolene said. He inherited -- The first theme I'm calling kind of unified governance because when he came in - and again, because of the Orange Book and the structure of the system - -there were three fiefdom. There was Academic Affairs, Business Affairs, and Student Affairs. And, the culture was just used to-- and, I’d think probably more in terms of budget
because that was a big part of my role. But the budget would come in and just be divided into the three fiefdoms and there wasn't any or very little interaction. And, there wasn't an expectation that one unit would really share its goals and priorities and plans with the other. And, so, Don came in and tried to get us to think that we're one campus, we need to work collectively, we need to think about priorities and agendas and resource allocation as one institution. And some of the mechanisms that he introduced to do that was the Administrative Council, the notion of program centers --which was every unit-- we had to define what constituted a unit, but it wasn't just academic unit. You know, the Library was a program center and Student Affairs was a program center and University Affairs-- which came in later, which Karen is going to talk about. So there was the Administrative Council, program centers, and then-- Ann Louise, you mentioned CUP, which stands for the Council for University Planning, which had a more inelegant name earlier, which was “urpcee” [URPC] - and I think, Scott, you mentioned University Resources and Planning Council. But again, a mechanism to bring everybody together and talk about shared priorities.
The second theme I'm calling-- well, flexibility, but-- flexibility with accountability because when Don came in, as Jolene mentioned, he inherited a culture that was really dependent on formulas. So if you had formulas, everybody just went, and expectations were they just did their thing and you didn't have to ask questions or you didn't really have to think in terms of accountability because it was sort of fixed rigidly with the rules in the Orange Book. The culture also did not care to afford much leeway and much authority to management and administrators also because of the healthy amount of distrust that existed. So-- And that went hand in hand with the rules because if you don't trust management administrators, you just make them follow these rules.
And, Don, I think, really in tune with the contemporary and emerging thinking about good practices of public management, wanted to loosen up the rules and constraints, and, you know, let the managers manage within a new expectation of openness and accountability. And so, he made the budget process more public and open. Ha! Again, reflecting the culture, there was-- there was a lot to overcome because there was always this concern--culture leftover where there's—‘they're not telling us everything;” Mernoy [Harrison], who was the Vice President for Administration and Budget Affairs, “he must have a drawer somewhere with dollars in it that they're not telling us.” But anyway, the attempt of the Gerth approach was to make it-- was to be-- more accountable, open, and [to] encourage managers to find ways of doing things that, again, have been collective. We have these collective priorities and then let's go let the managers do their thing without being bound by all these rules and regulations, and then there'll be accountability. Some of the governance mechanisms there, again, goes back to CUP and its budget subcommittee; and the published budget document, which I believe was new—I don't think they had a published University budget before; loosening up some of the budgetary controls in terms of positions-- for example, position control, accounting, faculty positions; and the expectation that units would reallocate, if there were priorities--instead of having-- getting -- new money for everything you wanted to do, just the expectations that there would be reallocation in accordance with the priorities that had been established.
The third theme is a more programmatic and priority-driven approach supported
by data-driven decision making, which --again-- was kind of a newly emerging set of expectations and terminology in public management. The culture that Don inherited-- and we talked about this in some of the earlier sessions that we had here that I participated in—was, I would say, allergic to priority setting. It was just this expectation that --we just-- had-- everything is the same. If you have $100 and a hundred programs, everybody gets a dollar. Don't rock the boat. Don't stick your head up. Don't-- You know, don't try to declare that you are more important than anybody else. And, as Jolene said and we talked a lot about in the earlier sessions, a sense of place. So here we are, we're not-- you know, we're not just any campus in anywhere California or anywhere USA, we're in Sacramento –the State Capitol. So, he introduced not only the culture, but the activities of strategic planning and priority setting. And then, in equal partnership with that is the data-driven approach, because if you're going to declare that some things are especially important, you need to be able to justify that to this new open participatory governance system. So, the mechanisms there included a new array of institutional assessment instruments. We had-- I don't remember if it was called institutional studies at the time or institutional research. But, they started doing a lot of surveys and developing new data tools. We had the strategic plan themes and then there were assessment procedures that went along with the strategic plan, we brought all of that forward. The budget process was restructured so that each program center had to try to justify its request in terms of the University’s collectively determined strategic priorities. There was a pretty difficult plan that Jolene can, I'm sure, talk about more, “Academic Plan” where every department was asked to identify itself. I think there were two dimensions, one was centrality to the mission of the University and the other was growth. And then, and this got a little technical, but we tried to reorient academic planning at the department level away from just FTE, which was very non-programmatic to: what is the health of your majors; what kinds of new majors or concentrations are you going to be developing; what is the job market for that look like in our region? And then, we would kind of work backwards to determine the FTE impact on resources. And then, finally, and this was something that I was involved in a lot, was data-driven models –or sort of—[to] more rationally allocate resources, again to accommodate the collectively determined priorities.
We had a model for allocating faculty positions, a model for allocating department chairs and for the support staff positions.
So those were the three themes as I saw them: the kind of the unification of governance, the whole university; the giving [of] more flexibility to managers within an expectation of accountability; and then trying to be more programmatic around a set of priorities.
BOILARD: So we've got a surfeit of themes, now, which is wonderful. I saw a lot of note-taking. But let me ask, you opened up, Nancy, kind of talking this idea of campus culture and what Don encountered. And Bill, do you have some thoughts on how the campus culture had---
DORMAN: I was just thinking that it would be far more useful if we had either a cultural anthropologist or a novelist to handle this sort of thing-- you know, this particular section.
GERTH: You've got a novelist on your left.
DORMAN: There have been several references to the culture that Don inherited. The elephant in the room has been introduced. It didn't start that way. And there are some reasons why it developed. And that's what I'd like to touch on today. I was present at the creation, so to speak. I had been a student here in 1964 and graduated, and came back on faculty in 1967. I was no stranger to the campus. I was no stranger to turmoil on campuses. I'd been in graduate school during the free speech movement at Berkeley. But I came in as a 26-year-old, very naïve fellow. I had one-year experience teaching at Monterey Peninsula College, and that was it. And, in those days, I was hired, the way many were, with a phone call from the department chair. No interviews, no worry, concern about affirmative action, anything. But, they remembered me from my undergraduate years, and said, "How would you like to teach here?" Sure. So, I arrived, as I say, with very little experience in that sense. I arrived at a time that I considered to be the beginning of the most tumultuous years this University has ever experienced and probably most Universities in this country-- a time which was characterized by race, civil rights, terrible disruptions, a war that was bitterly fought, a counterculture that developed. Having to watch students, for example, come in one day dressed in saffron robes, the next day with a crew cut. It was disorienting. The governance before that, under Guy West, was a benevolent dictatorship. I mean, he had an Academic--or what he'd call Administrative Council, and that really ran the College-- at that time, College. He had a Faculty College--Council-- and it was a Council, it had about as—as a typical student-- bloody council at a fairly large high school. And, personnel decisions were left to the -primarily to Guy West and to his Council. But, it was benign. There was not this distrust. There was a birdwatchers group, where faculty got together and changed-- exchanged --gripes and gossip and whatever. But. there wasn't an open confrontation.
And. then the 1960s arrive and he retires '66. The Master Plan kicks in. In 1963, the Senate at the State level was founded, often times with help from-- such as Jack Livingston and Bob Thompson here at Sacramento State. Then 1967, the year I come, arrived, the Senate --Faculty Senate-- is established at Sacramento State. And again, it was not initially an adversarial body. However, the thing to understand about that period is that external events drove what happened on this campus for a number of years --not internal concerns but external concerns. And I'm talking about everything from the civil rights movement to, and concern about, racism, to the women's movement to the environmental movement, to right on down the line, establishing the Ethnic Studies program at San Francisco State. There was [turmoil]--it is true, that the Trump years are beginning to resemble this dark time. But, it was extraordinary. It was just, and for [inaudible].
The other thing that you have to keep in mind is the hiring wave. I was at the last cohort of the huge-- we were hiring about a hundred people a year to try and accommodate the enormous growth, sudden growth. That, when I was a student here-- my wife and I were students here-- there were 6,000 students, and then it begins to explode. So you have to hire and Guy West did hire. He did, he did—So, you had a bunch of young faculty coming in. And that cohort of faculty, though, was cut off pretty much in the early '70s when Ronald Reagan came in. And the freeze was put in. And you didn't have a turnover of faculty for almost 20 years. You didn't have new blood, and that, that turned out to be a factor. So, the first couple of years, the Senate and the new President, Robert Johns, and I'm going to refer to him as Johns the first--they got along fine. And later in retrospect, we realized why. So long as the faculty didn't have anything that Johns wanted, everything was cool. They got whatever they wanted, so long as Robert Johns didn't want [it] as well. And then finally, the Senate, in its first major transformative move, discovered that almost a third of the faculty traveling funds, travel funds, were going to Robert Johns so he could travel to Chicago, where he was supposedly recruiting faculty. I don't think that's where you came [looking at Don Gerth], Don. But it was [inaudible]. But it turns out later, he had faculty-- he had consulting contracts with the Darling Corporation. And then he got rid of the food service operation here at Sacramento State and brought in something called Servomation. And then he built without trustee approval, the Roundhouse, which, you know, by coincidence, had Servomation machinery inside of it. Long story short, at some point, Robert Johns--then the stuff really began to happen --the assassination of Martin Luther King. I remember walking across this campus with a colleague from English and smoke was coming out of the administration building. Now, Johns had said, I'm not lowering the flag for this guy. Actually, he put it much more crudely. But I'm not lowering-- going to lower the-- and there was a great consternation about that. Finally we got him to lower the flag. But at that point, he hadn't lowered the flag, smoke was coming out of the building. This guy from English runs into the building to warn folks. Finally, discovers that nobody had set the building on fire, it was just smoke from the heater or--conditioning, whatever it was. That's how tense things were. It was tense enough that I couldn't get to the faculty parking lot across from the old bookstore,
one night. I had to call my wife and say, "I'm going to be late." There are kids there throwing rocks. They were young African American students from high schools, who were upset at the shooting that had occurred. And, they were throwing rocks at anybody. So, we just waited. This is the situation. I mean, it was extraordinarily tense. And so who do we have as Governor? Recently elected Ronald Reagan, who's cutting support to the higher education-- all higher education, attacking it publicly, cutting salaries--cutting the money available for sabbaticals. He was not popular. The Senate begins-- when they find out about the travel funds and Johns, they confront him with it. And that's when-- the beginning of the end. The Senate began to feel its oats, it did. It began to realize it had a kind of power and it ought to have a kind of power, as a countervailing force.
Johns once said, quoted in George Craft’s wonderful book about [the history of CSUS]-- that his general assumption was that he would serve as the President on a campus somewhere for about three years and then leave a couple weeks ahead of the sheriff. Well, that's about what happened. The DA investigated and found out, after he had left, that he-- well, he hadn't really done anything that was exactly illegal, immorality, oh!. Number one then, those faculty had a autocratic president who was self-serving and they had a governor who was hostile, et cetera, and they began to respond accordingly. And this is where the roots of the distrust began. And, understand that the first wave of leadership on this campus, Jack Livingston, Marc Tool, David Lucas, on and on, Rollo Darby, Betty Austin, Peg McKoane, others of that sort were not anything other than totally committed to democratization of education, to a grand experiment that Sacramento State represented. Incidentally, none of those, that first wave of leadership, were ever active to my knowledge in the union. Jack, who was my mentor, distrust-- he was a union-- he was all in favor of the unions but not for college professors. He didn't feel that the first priority for the expenditure of funds ought to be taking care of the faculty. He felt it ought to be taking care of the students. So, to my knowledge, he never even joined the union. My point in this is, these folks did not turn out to deserve the reputation that they got. Because they were opposing people like Reagan, Robert Johns.
Bernie Hyink came along. Well, first of all, when Johns left, that was the second blow. The President that this faculty wanted was Otto Butz, who had been Provost, an intellectual, who was Provost to Johns. Johns-- the first meeting I ever saw this happen-- Johns treated his Provost with the crudest approach I had ever seen in my life. I mean it was a marine gunny sergeant talking to --you know--a recent recruit, treating his Provost that way. Well, Otto was very popular with the faculty. They wanted him to be the replacement. Instead, Dumke, who was increasingly becoming conservative, from our view point, and the Trustees said “no”, sent us Bernie Hyink instead, who was a very wonderful gentleman, that's not the issue. But, not Otto Butz. Otto went on to, incidentally, become President of Golden Gate University and very successful, retired there. That was the second blow. Bernie Hyink, wonderful; but ineffectual given the challenges facing us. Remember we're trying to start all of these programs at that time. And, then, assassinations are occurring, the invasion of Cambodia, is the campus going to be closed, is it going to be open, on and on, [and] Reagan's continued attacks.
Bernie Hyink is succeeded by the predecessor to Donald Gerth, James Bond. I don't have time to go into James Bond, other than to say that the first time I ever saw him walking across campus with a phalanx, a V, of lackeys-- I don’t know how else to describe them, in his wake, I thought, “Oh, boy, we're in -- this is not going to turn out well.” And, it didn't. He began taking back all of the kinds of shared governance features that had developed under, with, with the Faculty Senate and Bernie Hyink and Otto Butz -- began grabbing back all of those kinds of things, particularly on personnel. And it sort of-- the culminating thing was when he turned down the English Department's election of Ted Hornback as president – and--, I mean, as Department Chair.
[unknown speaker]: Right.
DORMAN: And this happened in June, and I remember where we had the meeting for this. How they managed to get that many Sac State faculty together at that time of year-- just when they were going to begin their vacation -- in outrage, I don't know, but they did. It took until that following spring for Bond to back down and allow the department to go through with their personnel decisions. So by the time that President Gerth took office, what was clearly in the minds of the faculty was distrust. You're right. But you know, when you look back at many of those years, they were on the right side of history, on all of the social issues, the social justice issues. They were on the right side of many issues about this campus, which is not to say that they were angels. And that's what Don had to confront when he became President.
Now, in my view, I was-- my mentors are guys that-- my heroes were Jack Livingston, Marc Tool, this class of individuals. The one thing they insisted on was rational and reasoned discourse, that name calling wasn't going to get us anywhere, that pushing people off a cliff wasn't going to get us anywhere, that this unending confrontation between administration faculty was not going to work. It wasn't going to serve anybody's interest -- least of all, students. So, when Don-- Don, the first 10 years of Don's governance, I think, went fairly well, given the extraordinary number of sea changes you guys were trying to achieve. Which, I think, personally were necessary. But, there were number of faculty who, because of this trust thing, because of feeling that Mernoy had, you know, a stash somewhere, that they weren't being [honest]. And incidentally, their earliest experience with finances here was with Pretzer, Stan Pretzer, who was a joy, a gem and a delight. This guy was--
SHULOCK: He did have a drawer.
DORMAN: He did have a drawer. And he was not being forthcoming in terms of this. And so, this is what Don inherited. And you know, it was a stormy time during the middle years, very stormy time. But-- Well, I'm going to end it there.
BOILARD: That's a really helpful setup, and I think you were right about the need for a novelist. I think you filled in very well on that. Don.
GERTH: A brief comment -- None of you in this room are aware of this—[except] Bev—And, that is, we needed a new president at Chico State in1966. A long-time President, who was greatly admired by some and not so admired by others --I was one of the admirers-- retired. And, three of us on the faculty, one was a guy named Ben Franklin, not the real one, and we were all political scientists, we recruited Jack Livingston, got him and his wife, Ethel, to come to Chico and tried to convince him that he ought to be a candidate for President because we had learned of him and all the, what we regarded as, good things he stood for on this campus. And Jack and Ethel said they would think about it, and the conclusion after a week or so was --no, we don't think so; we're not ready to move to-- move away from Sac State; we want to stay here. And I don't know that any of you have ever known that story, but we came to know Jack-- one of the things that disappointed me when we came here in 1984 was that Jack had died a few years before that.
DORMAN: 1981.
GERTH: And it would have been fun to work with him because he was just a superb academician and a superb leader. And I'll be quiet.
BOILARD: Well, so, Bill's going to set the years coming up to Don's administration. And, it seems to connect with what David's talked-- heard-- I've heard from him a little bit about earlier, which is the maturing of the university. And, did you want to expand on kind of how the University, as a concept or as a campus, has matured either during this period or during Don's tenure?
WAGNER: Well, I'd say it's a process and it's not done yet. When you compare ourselves to the Harvard's and the Yale's, we're still at the toddler stage of our existence in terms of years. But I think for public higher education, the time after World War II was a rapid acceleration-- nationally. So, we're more than toddlers. From the-- from all the factors that have already been discussed, I don't know why Don took the job as President, because it was no secret, it was no secret in the system or in higher education. I was in law school at Berkeley during part of this tumultuous time. It wasn't just Sac State responding to those type of external pressures and forces. And the hiring process did improve because at least three faculty interviewed me before making a recommendation on my hiring. And I actually had a chance to come to campus on the hottest day of the year. I think part of the maturing of the campus had to do with how--how the campus recognizes opportunity. And what Jolene and Nancy were talking about was [that] it was very easy not to do so because if your budget was allocated by formula and you had no discretion, there was no decision. And if there's no decision, there's no need for shared governance on those decisions because the book says, if you're a new faculty member, you get 110 square foot office, you get a desk, a chair, a file drawer, and a book case. Seriously, that's what you got as a new faculty member. So, the maturing process begins with there are now choices to make. How do you make them? How do you develop the structures? At the same time, I think, Don deals with issues of faculty and faculty governance, beginning of active unionization on a campus. How do you develop a responsive and responsible management class on a campus? For, up until then, it was all formula driven. Your answer with anything was -- that's the Orange Book. And one of the most startling concepts as somebody who began his administrative career the same semester Don came to campus, that was coincidence, was Don's statement that generation does not equal allocation. So your generation under the Orange Book doesn't mean that's what you can expect in an allocation. And that was shocking for those of us in the schools and departments because what replaces it, question mark. What's your confidence in what replaces it, question mark.
I think a second step towards maturation was an ultimate decision that the campus was going to grow. There had been discussion about this, remaining a small campus, a small campus environment. I'm not sure how public all those discussions were; but at some point, the need to respond to the region and students won out. And so this idea of kind of an elite campus serving 10,000 and 11,000 students went out the window, and there was a realization that we needed to do more than that to serve the region and the students. And when that becomes the mindset, you're looking for different things because it's not just preservation of the status quo. You're now talking about-- the term we use was “programs of excellence,” you know, where can we develop programs of excellence which did involve faculty and school collaboration, which we can then use to attract faculty and students to come to the campus. So part of the maturing is based on some of these factors that occurred and were eventually decided some quietly; and some, not so quietly. And then you need to have structures that deal with these decisions for-- and some of them are small. Don came in on the cusp of going to Division One in Athletics. And I got to tell you, personally speaking, we were no more prepared for that than I was prepared for parenthood, which is we weren't very prepared. It was a bold statement, but boy, did we walk off the plank, and we had no idea where the bottom was leading us once we were out there flapping our wings.
DORMAN: Still flapping.
WAGNER: And we're still-- thank you-- we're stilling flapping. We are. It's—but-- we're getting better. Second step of the maturation process is how do you interact with the community that you've now decided you're going to serve and is a changing community. Sacramento was a changing community and remains that. Ideas, not all of which were just growing here but were coming from the CSU as a system. Over this time, you develop advancement offices. You develop community relation units or embedded them in schools. We became involved in partnership with USGS, which I thought was a wonderful idea of partnering with the Feds to develop a structure and building on campus that's still here—novel idea, because buildings were allocated by formulas. And so, if you wanted to do something, you had to really think outside the box. That's a maturing campus to realize they need to do it and then they go out and actually get it done. The development of Capital Public Radio. Again, just thinking outside, you got to work on how you can partner to do it. I know there have been prior discussions on our involvement downtown with the Capital, with public policy, all of which were novel ideas. And, in the broader context of serving our students, serving our region, serving the state, really can only be done by a campus that saw itself as a strength in the region; and then we're willing to invest time and resources to make sure these things happen.
Nancy's already talked about the need for planning and budgeting expertise, evidence-based decision making, all of which, if we're not careful, gets branded as corporatizing the university. And yet, some version of that has to be developed because you're now left to make decisions. You don't need to corporatize anything as you long you were told the resources you had and where you had spend it. You needed to develop different skills once the Orange Book went away. And that was-- that's the maturation process of a Senate structure, of a union structure, of a management structure, of academic administrators, and how you wrestle with that as structures and personalities when there was this deep distrust. It was so bad that my very early years here when I was on the faculty, I would hear people in the community-- and imagine being a major university, the big player in Sacramento in terms of public higher education and have people tell you, you must be doing things right because I don't read about you in the paper anymore. Just let that sink in. You're doing something right because we don't hear anything from campus, because the press was so bad with the type of things that Bill had talked about.
There were some small changes. There was a professionalization of the Foundation in campus services, which was a sore point with some prior administrations before Don got here and I think got set on a road of development and maturity. Let's see what else. I think that's -- and as I said, maturation is a process. It didn't begin or end with Don, but the forces were aligned when Don became President that forced us to do something. All these externalities, we had to do something. And, a President who’s committed to governance, who believes first that he's a faculty member, which is odd-- that's odd coming from a President that first there, a faculty member, set the stage for where I think we could actually have discussions and start to plan things out. The campus isn't done planning things out, it's not done even developing all of our wish lists, and it's not perfect. But, the maturation of the campus was realizing these are now things we've got to deal with. How do we deal with it? And I think the hallmark was we deal with it in collaboration-- not as an autocracy and not as an autocracy either of the faculty as a group or administration as a group-- but ,you've got to collaborate if you're going to reach those type of goals and it always was to serve the students. You can't serve the students if we're in disarray and you can't serve the students if we don't know what we're doing. And, we can't give some reasonable expectation of programs and support for programs that students are relying on when they come here. So that's it, I think it's a process. The campus isn't done with it. But, as I said, do they have the equivalent of hazardous duty pay for Presidents because you should've put in for it when you came here.
GERTH: I think you're all being too kind, and we’re done if there is too much in this conversation.
WAGNER: No, it's not-- And actually, I tried to avoid that because you came at that moment in time, OK? Those were the factors that were here. You came at that moment and then it's-- what do you do? What does the President do when that's the confluence of the things that are out there? And I think without the type of leadership Don had, this would be a much different place.
KOESTER: That's a exactly what I was going to say, David, because I do think that the characteristics were there. They were generated by some of these other forces that Bill described in the-- that were happening politically. But I think a different President--
WAGNER: Yes.
KOESTER: -- who had a different set of values and perhaps who didn't see himself, in this case, as a faculty member focused on students would have created a different trajectory in-- some of the maturation would have occurred. And I work with enough different universities around the country to be sure that I am correct; because I've seen other institutions where Presidents came in and made other leadership choices. He made leadership choices that we're describing-- that created --an institution with some resilience and some structures and some accountability, and some genuine commitment to students and the region.
BOILARD: It's really-- I think this has been-- a perfect kind of setup because we both got what was the lead up to 1984, what was the history that, you know, certainly affected the campus and what was-- where David just setup, what's-- what is the cusp of change that Don encounters when he comes here. And then the question is, well, what does he do with it?
KOESTER: Right.
BOILARD: So we've kind of set it up, we talk about what we do with it in our second portion, where we really want to focus a lot very specifically on shared governance between faculty and administration. But for the moment, I just want to look at one particular change that Don instituted and Fel, you're really involved in this-- this is the first attorney brought to serve the campus. And how does that-- how do you see that role and how did that affect the campus and governance and the climate and decision making on the campus?
RAMEY: I see it as-- Well first of all, I was shocked, but I see it as a way of, there were things going on campus and Don just said, "Go see her" -- Go see me. And with respect to grievances, I tried to settle things before they got to the level of the State Attorney General's Office. And, I think that helped by the fact that I was-- I worked as a Deputy Attorney General for many years. So I knew the people over there, they felt comfortable talking with me. And, I'm sure they probably would have felt comfortable talking to other people too. But I also did-- one other thing is that I went around and I met with all the Deans and tried to explain what my role was -- that I reported directly to the President and he assigns me things to do. I said to them, first of all, that our conversation was-- You know, you can't disclose what we talk about. It's confidential. All right. And I said the only-- I said, however, it's not confidential as far as the President goes because I report to him, OK. And I went to let them know that whatever they said, it might end up in Don's head, OK. Because that's what I felt that I should do, and I think that we made an agreement to that fact, OK. And when I met the Deans, they just couldn't see why there was a need for an attorney. And I said, well-- I said, I think you have a problem coming up here that regards that. And I said-- And I don't think it ever reached you because it came to me first, OK. And, the other thing that I think was important is that we had, behind us, the State Attorney General's Office. Now, some other campuses are big universities like UC. They basically have their own attorneys that handle it. And, as many of you may know, they settled on a lot of things out of court, you know; whereas we did not do that very much. And I think that was very, very important, OK. I don't know if other campuses were doing this or not. I just-- he asked me to do it and I said yes. I was very thrilled about it, OK. The other things that we-- There needed to be policies on the campus. The other policy that I wrote was a copyright policy. And I can't remember why I wrote that policy or why you asked me to write that policy, something with copyright. And I don't know what was going on, on campus, but anyhow, we wrote a copyright policy and I've-- senior moment, I can't remember, OK. And the other-- the sexual harassment, was very important because there was-- things going on on campus, faculty doing these things. And, quite frankly, when I wrote that one, I actually talked to the Deans about this one, you know, sexual harassment, you know, and the importance of it not happening on our campus where it stopped-- it just stopped happening. And the patent policy, that was another policy. I don't remember why I wrote that, or I don't know what happened on this campus. I mean, I can see it at a research institution, but I can't remember why I had to write this patent policy. But someone said, we need a patent policy, and so I wrote the patent policy. All right.
But the things that happened--like in many instances, whenever the Dean or the Department Chair would come and see me, in a lot of instances I knew them because I had gone around campus talking to a lot of people. And so, the fact that I grew up with them, so to speak, here, helped me in that first position as the Attorney. And then sometimes they would get-- you know, they would scream and yell and I would just let them scream and yell. And then we’d go out for coffee or I'd call them a little bit later, and sooner or later I got them to agree with what I thought should be the decision in this matter. And, I felt that that was an important part when setting up that unit and the people coming after me should try to get around to see other people, to talk to other people, to get a feeling for what they're going through. Because sometimes I would think one way and then after talking with the Dean or the Department Chair, I mean, you know, just like you're talking here, I heard all these other stories, and I thought, "Oh wow, OK". So I settle down in that and then we try to reach a certain agreement. And in many instances, we didn't have agreements because of the attorney's role in that matter, OK.
But, I have to share with you one particular thing is that at one point, there were some black students demonstrating on campus and they were upset because some of the white students used the N word. And, we had a policy on the campus at that time that that was a hate crime. And, I think Don felt very uncomfortable about applying this hate crime to the black students because he probably thought, well, they're going to say that I discriminate against them. So I listened to him and I said, it's a hate crime. It doesn't matter whether they're white, black, green, or brown. You have to enforce the hate crime. So he says, "Oh, OK". But before that time, I went to the students, I talked to the students and I said, look, I said, you're out there saying those same words. I said, you can't expect other people to rally and then be penalized when you yourself are not penalized. And that was-- I think you had issues with that, I'm not sure. But I felt that that was the right decision because if you go in any court of law, they don't look at it and say, "Oh, well, that person said that, so we're not going to go against them because we may be called discriminatory." So, that was the most-- You know, I actually ended up talking a lot to the students, the student groups, and I was a member of the black faculty and staff and that helped a lot being on campus because I wanted them to have a black faculty and staff. I didn't want it to be just the faculty. I wanted to consider staff at the same time because that was our campus climate, too. We didn't think of faculty as being above the other people. We thought of faculty be-- you know, they are partners and staff are our partners, OK. And so, whenever we had the black faculty and staff, I actually talk to them about certain things and about how the campus handled certain things, and whether they were aware of these things that were occurring there, OK. Because I wanted to know what the climate was, I wanted to know, is this going to come to me? I'd rather it not come to me and I'd rather it not go through-- you know -- the President have to tell me, "Well, you need to do something about this." If I could fend off those things, that's a good thing to do.
But I also continued-- as I was in that position-- I continued to have regular meetings, not meetings, so to speak, but just conversations, you know, meeting with coffee, having-- excuse me, having coffee with them and department chairs. OK. And so-- And when I did these policies, I don't-- I actually would have like a trial balloon and then I said, "Well, you know, what if I wrote this with-- you know, how do you feel about that?" you know. And then they would say, "I don't know", you know, something like that. So I thought, well, maybe I'll have to research this a little bit more and then come back to them because I am going to say that," OK. But I just have to figure out a way to say it so that person accepts this thing, OK. And so that was-- I think the most important role I played was that I tried to keep matters from coming up to Don. If I heard something on campus, he might not have even known about it, but then I would just work with the people or that group and try to settle it. And when the next person came in, I tried to tell them exactly what I was doing and I also told that person that if they run into issues and they wanted to call, you know, ask me about it, I'd be happy to talk to them about it. But I had hoped that that person then would go around and do the same things that I did about things, because you get a lot done just having a quiet talk with a person, and they see you as a human being and you see them as a human being, because sometimes that's pretty hard, OK, because you're upset with the person. You're really ticked off with the individual because they allow this to happen but then you know you still have to solve the issue, OK.
BOILARD: Before your position was created then and there were- a legal issue on campus, would it be the AG's office then that would handle it?
RAMEY: You know, I really don't know. I don't know what-- I think it went to Faculty and Staff Affairs.
DOMICH: The System
BOILARD: From the Chancellor's Office?
RAMEY: Yeah.
BOILARD: Because it does-- Because the way you described it, Fel, it's-- if you had an outside entity that would come in once a problem had materialized, it's very different than having somebody--
RAMEY: That's right.
BOILARD: -- who's on the campus trying to do early intervention and--
RAMEY: Right.
BOILARD -- resolve things before they [inaudible].
WAGNER: But, while the system had a group of attorneys if anything wound up at trial, we had a— the system had a contract with the AG's office. So any trial work was not handled in-house in the Chancellor's Office. And so there was a bifurcation there of active trial work, trial prep, et cetera is done out of the AG's office and other legal advice and advice leading up to something that might go to trial was-- would be-- performed by Fel on this campus and/or the Attorney's Office in the Chancellor's Office.
BOILARD: Yeah, Don?
GERTH: You know, there's a history to this. The campuses never had attorneys until 1978 when one of the campuses established the position. It was the Dominguez Hills campus. The Chancellor's Office opposed it. That is, the Chancellor's legal staff opposed it—“you're taking away from our work.” But the then Chancellor, Glenn Dumke, supported it. He generally supported the campus-- campuses -- in a sense almost against his own staff because he wanted to see more decentralization. But the Attorney General's Office also opposed it. We had a real battle going on and Dumke hung in there and insisted that we needed attorneys on campuses. So gradually… and won that battle. So gradually, beginning that year, '78, campuses, as they wished to do so—they weren’t told, you have to do this, that wasn't the style-- established campus attorneys. And we were able to do that in 1984, '85. I remember Austin Gerber, who some of you who've been around forever would remember, he was known as “Awesome Grabber.”
RAMEY: Yeah.
GERTH: He was the Interim President for the year before we came to Sac State. And I remember, when I talked to Austin, he was very helpful at the transition, about the issue. Austin himself was an attorney. He taught business law, as Fel did, in addition to having been longtime Dean of the College of Business. And he suggested Fel and we were off and running. And, we got to the point where all the campuses had attorneys. We're not supposed to talk about what happened after 2003, but that position has been reversed--
RAMEY: Right.
GERTH: Just within the last year or so and the campuses no longer have attorneys, it's all centralized in Long Beach, which I personally believe was not a good decision; but that's-- the world happens that way sometimes.
BOILARD: All right.
GERTH: I'm not supposed to be talking.
BOILARD: Well, actually it's helpful to have the background. It sounds like, you know, Dominguez Hills, where you'd had some involvement as well-- kind of blazing the trail here. But at Sacramento State, I think Fel makes a real compelling case that the kind of service you provide is very different when you have an in-house campus attorney rather than relying upon either Long Beach or the Attorney General's Office.
One other theme we haven't really talked about as much -- we've talked a little bit about resource allocation and the Orange Book and whether generation should equal allocation or not, but this related theme of advancement. And Karen you've been pretty involved in that part of things. Can you tell us about how advancement was approached and fundraising was approached under Don's tenure.
DOMICH: Well, I can tell you the Orange Book did not work with fundraising. But I—first, I have to say-- it's a cute story about Austin Gerber-- just sort of jogged my memory. We laughed with him a lot. He was in what was then the Sierra Room which was next to the President's office. And he was fiddling with something, some AV equipment, and he yelled all the way down to where Jolene's office was, but it wasn't Jolene in there, "How do you turn this on?" And the response was "You push “on’." We laughed about that a long time. So, we've heard a lot about all the changes and the restructuring that Dr. Gerth faced when-- and wanted to do-- when he came here. And when he came in 1984, there was no such thing as University Affairs. And, in fact, it was, Chuck McFadden who was the Director of Public Affairs, he did all of the newspaper, TV, whatever; Geri Welch who worked with publications; and Dorothy Bush who handled all of the alumni relations, all the memberships and everything she did it all in there. That was three people. So when Dr. Gerth came, he brought in Robert Jones and who was the Vice President for University Affairs. And he hired me and so that was that. And it—there was a long process of kind of building up the pub-- what we call-- the University Affairs, Public Affairs, the Governmental Relations, and put in a lot of other-- the publications part became much more active. And it wasn't until-- well, first of all, Chancellor Reynolds was there at the time. And then, in 1990, '91, Barry Munitz became the new Chancellor and it was, you know, fundraising had been sort of talked about but it never could happen. And, anyway in the '90s, Barry Munitz and Molly Broad restructured the Chancellor's Office; and in that restructuring, they made room for the campuses to carry out fundraising activities. And let's see, this-- it-- there were-- there was just a lot of, you know, things that went on and there was-- 1994, it was the Chancellor's Office declared that the Universities had to raise 10% of their general fund allocation. And so, we knew this was coming down the pike. There was a lot of talking about it. And so, they had to build the whole development staff, the development directors that were in the colleges, each of the schools rather. And Steve Black was brought in, in 1985 as the Director of Alumni Relations. They later added the-- and Director of Annual Fund. Some of you may remember the very early annual fund phone banks where faculty and students participated in training and scripts and whatever; and we-- they would put these phones in the Sierra Room. and, at night, call and ask for donations. Well talk about a clash of cultures-- culture. We really heard about that, because-- Why are you asking me for money when I pay my taxes. And that was the culture, that public universities were not to fundraise. In fact, I was talking to a friend of mine who applied for a job in 1988 at the UC President's Office. And she said she remembers in her interview, she was told that it was illegal for the CSU to fundraise.
Well, when Barry Munitz came and Molly Broad and that was restructured, they brought in Douglas Patiño who was the first Vice Chancellor for Development. And he -- Last night, I'll back up here, I said to my husband, you know, I need some dates and stuff. Can you go find that book Dr. Gerth wrote? His library has outgrown-- the books have outgrown the shelves, and so I was not going to go in there and look for it. So he comes out and he had already turned to a page and stuff. So anyway, I just want to tell you, there's a wealth of information. So anyway, it was there in that book that I learned it-- that Douglas Patiño learned the sort of a gentlemen's agreement and understanding that the CSU would not engage in any kind of fundraising that would compete with the UC. But that eventually went away; and like I said, in 1994, it was decided that we would be full board fundraising and that's-- I just felt like this was important to say because I think people now at this University believe that fundraising was here forever; and, you know, it hasn’t always been here and it was a huge effort. A lot of people needed to be hired and trained, and really fundraising was not a subject that was offered in universities; and, you know, it wasn't even a skill that was required by Presidents or whatever and-- so anyway, with the 10% rule, there were a lot of difficulties with that because each campus was different-- you know, their size, their students, their location, whether the President was committed to the concept, and the success of alumni. And so, you know, there were a lot of issues that had to be dealt with and it was a huge, huge undertaking.
SHULOCK: It really-- It touches on a couple of themes really well in terms of the, you know, the culture and the expectations at the time and the maturation issue because I remember it was really controversial at the planning council. And Robert would come in, you know, with his budget request because in the first many years, it wasn't bringing in any money.
DOMICH: Right.
SHULOCK: It was just taking away money from--
DOMICH: Right.
SHULOCK: Nobody was used to that and nobody saw the-- you know, the benefits of it. And then he would bring in, well, look at the size of the fundraising operation at UC Davis, you know?
DOMICH: Yes.
SHULOCK: They have like 45 people and we have three, and so it was-- yeah, it was an uphill battle.
DOMICH: I mean and along with that was the publications. All of the University’s publications were done off campus. Geri would take all the design and everything was off campus because our reprographics didn't have the capability. They did the tests and what the faculty needed and stuff. And pretty soon we had to hire designers and because it was much more cost-effective. I remember thinking that so much money was spent on the Capital University Journal that went out to the alumni. I mean huge amount of money. And I finally divided the number of alumni and whatever it turned out and it was like 2 cents a copy. And for 2 cents you get a lot of interaction with your alumni. So, you know, I was-- I kind of closed my mouth about that. But I want to also say that when University Affairs was established, I can't tell you how many times I was told that most on campus didn't even think that department was necessary. It was considered sort of fluff. Don't need it. Why are we having that department? And so--
BOILARD: I mean, it does bring in the kind of philosophical question that needs be touched on, which is-- with a public university that's presumably publicly funded. You know, does this become necessary? That-- and I don't think this was during your term as much, Don, but we quickly got to a place, the 1990s, where state budget cuts were replaced with student tuition increases, which we called fees in those days. And so, you know, just this fundamental question about -- what is the obligation of the public to a public university -- increasingly comes to the fore. And as the University made decisions about fundraising or about tuition increases, it becomes more and more reliant upon that. It starts to change the relationship of the University to the State and the taxpayers, et cetera.
DOMICH: One thing I forgot to mention was that with fundraising and the Orange Book, and all, this created--I mean there were severe limitations on the State funds on how you could use money and spend money. And so, with gifts coming in and different kinds of income coming in, a Trust Foundation board had to be set up that would help, you know, manage and invest the funds and also an auxiliary organization of the foundation being set up. And in Dr. Gerth's book I discovered that Northridge was one of the first ones forced in the 1980s to set up an auxiliary organization specifically for the purpose of accepting funds and it gave much more flexibility of what to do with those funds. And then we were second to follow that.
KOESTER: One of the themes here is that Don, when he came here, responded to the circumstances-- the need for maturation, external forces, et cetera-- with some wise moves, some prescient moves. Because that fundraising and the university affairs at university advancement activities, legal counsel, were ahead of what was taking place on other campuses. Something like “urpcee” [UPC] or the Council for University Planning-- similarly, I think was a tactic, a set of steps, a structure that happened here before a lot of the other CSU campuses. One of the other areas that I think is important to point out is that Don had a Dean of Faculty and Staff Affairs. David, I think-- were you the first person in that role formally?
WAGNER: Betty was.
KOESTER: Betty was. OK, that's right. Betty was, and then you were-- Betty Moulds. But even today, there are not many CSU campuses that have a Vice President for Human Resources. But more campuses in the last few years have added that really critical, and I think its central function at a senior level given the importance of the human dimension. I mean 80% of budgets in the CSU—about—are in salaries. Yet, in a lot of campuses, those administrative functions were distributed across various divisions. And I think it's worth noting for this historical record that Don recognized the centrality, and there was a central position devoted to that area. And, I mean there are fights around this on other campuses. But here, we sort of got passed it in a way that was accepted. I don't think there are fights about it here now. I don't know for sure but--
BOILARD: Ann Louise, you had some--
RADIMSKY: I just wanted to make a comment about the fundraising because it might give the impression that we were after dollars. And coming from the School of Engineering for which this kind of fundraising was very important, a lot of the fundraising we did was equipment. And at that time, we had locally both Intel and HP, which were very generous. So, we benefited from that. The equipment money which was available via the normal process of budgeting was generally not sufficient for the needs of a College like ours. So, the fundraising done by the College was very valuable. And I think we represented quite a significant portion of the fundraising done-- and that I don't think we raised actual money, but we raised a lot of equipment. I also wanted to make a comment-- somewhat personal comment. I think Don also had a concern or an ability to deal with the faculty which I had not met in his predecessor. I think when I arrived in '79, it was some kind of Johns who was in charge, who ended up at Gallaudet-- that's--
BARRENA: Johns the second.
RADIMSKY: Johns the second, OK. And I don't want to say that I am particularly remarkable, but at that time I was the only female faculty in the entire College. So, I stood out as a sore thumb. And I met Johns several times. He never acknowledged me. When Don came, it didn't take many meetings-- probably the second meeting he met me, he knew who I was. And I think that's a touch, which has remained constant in his tenure and was an important aspect of his governance.
BOILARD: Juanita?
BARRENA: You know, I think it's important to note that there was a little bit of a transitional period between James Bond, the prison guard-- yeah, he did come from the prisons, James Bond -- and he treated the faculty in that manner. And then there was-- there was a little bit of lightening up and more positive relationships between the faculty and the administration when Johns was there; and that mostly was because Sandy Barkdull was there. And, in terms of the relationship between Sandy Barkdull and the then Senate Chair Jerry Tobey, I think at that time, there was-- it went from really a faculty Senate and we got back to an Academic Senate. Then we lost that later on during Michael's tenure, it became a Faculty Senate again. But there was a little bit of a transition there. And I'm talking about kind of a creation of a clean slate. There was
a kind of a clean slate here for Don to work with because those-- some of those mechanisms didn't exist before at all. And he came in, as Jolene indicated, as a “faculty president.” And that made a big difference for the Senate and for faculty relationships with his administration. And had it not been also the fact that the faculty had exercised its oats and was strong -- and the Senate was strong. If it had not been, then this campus would have been dominated by the Union, as it was on many of the other campuses-- so that you cannot tell the difference on some of those campuses between the Executive Committee of the Senate and the executive committee of the Union. They are one and the same. And that didn't happen on this campus. And it didn't happen because the faculty was strong. In fact many of the faculty on this campus rejected a sole bargaining agent. We were one of the few campuses that did that because in a sense, the faculty here didn't need the Union because they could run the president out of town. And they had a lot of control over themselves. So prior to Don, except for the little transitional period, there really was no working together, especially on academic policies or academic programs because the administrations didn't give a hoot about it. They were not involved in any of the academic programs-- at all. So then comes Don, and he, you know, he likes general education, so then you can work with him. And he has some kind of academic interest. And that's why, you know, the campus wanted Otto Butz because he exercised academic leadership. So if you come in and you have some, you know, some kind of academic intent, which is what faculty are about, then you can work with them.
BOILARD: On a symbol of that, I think it was Don continued to teach, even as President.
So we're moving into the topic of much more directly faculty and shared governance, which is a very rich part of the conversation. I'm going to suggest we take a short break for five minutes and we'll take up that theme for the balance of our time.
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