Internships and Fellowships Transcript - Part 2

BOILARD: All right so, let's pick up.  We've talked a little bit about the Center for California Studies which has been a major institution for connecting the University to the Capital environment, and Betty's already talked about how we had a Center for California Studies, which was created without a lot of investment, shall we say, but we had this stationary and a sign.  And --  

GERTH:  A lot of enthusiasm.  

BOILARD: And a lot of enthusiasm.  And, Don ended up with a very auspicious opportunity that came about to really put a major program into that.  So, Don, why don't you explain that phone call.  

GERTH:  I'd be happy to.  After I was appointed here in November of '83, I had time, for political reasons that defied the timeline of the transition [presidential transition to the campus] in an unusual way.  And so, I had a little time before we actually got here.  And I took advantage of some of that by visiting SUNY at Buffalo and visiting a number of places, coming to know a number of places where there was a state university at the state capital.  So, we came here on July 1, 1984 with a lot of enthusiasm. 

The voters of California in June of 1984 had past an initiative or referendum, I'm not sure which it was -- but anyway, they acted and cut the budget of the state legislature by one third.  And when the voters do that, suddenly it takes hold, there's no negotiating about how -- about the timing and all that kind of thing.  So, during the first or second week of July of 1984, I had a telephone call from a young woman named Judi Hunsinger.  Judi had been Robert Jones' secretary at Chico when Robert was -- worked with me in '65, '66, '67, and subsequently became my secretary when the long-time secretary in my office retired.  Judi had, it turned out, had moved to Sacramento. Well, I knew she had moved to Sacramento while we were still in Chico, and --  because her husband got a better job --  her then husband-- got a better job here.  What I did not know was that she was the secretary to Senator Bob Beverly.  Bob Beverly was the ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee.  He was a Republican of course, at that time.  And he was a senator from Manhattan Beach, who I had come to know quite well because Manhattan Beach was in the service area, so to speak, of  California State University, Dominguez Hills where he came from.  And in those days, presidents had assigned members of the legislature where we were supposed to stay in close touch. 

Bob called saying he'd like to meet with me over a cup of coffee and he had a really interesting thing to talk about.  So, we met, and Judi had arranged for that, and it turned out that he said that the Senate had decided that one of the things that had to be expendable in this one third budget cut was the Senate Fellows Program.  And he disagreed with that strenuously.  Bob was rather education oriented and I had discovered that long before, and wanted to know if Sac State would take the Senate Fellows program.  No money!  Well, that was a boon from heaven.  You know, falling out of the sky, with this new character in town it was looking for access to government.  So, I called our then Chancellor, Ann Reynolds, and said I wanted to do it and I wouldn't ask for any money, I'd go find the money.  And Ann said, “ok” she was -- never interested in this kind of thing anyway, and so on—and, not that I have anything against biologists, but she was a biologist.  She was much more interested in the sciences.  And so, over a couple of weeks, my recollection is, I had to find about $300,000.  And by hook or by crook we found the $300,000 and I'm not even going to tell [laughter] how.  And, we got the Senate Fellows Program going.  We found a faculty member, his name has already been mentioned, John Syer.  I talked to John just a couple of weeks ago.  He's moving this week --they're selling their long-time house in Davis and moving into a retirement community.  But we got John to take the program on with virtually no time to prepare.  We needed a label and I shopped around.  Betty may be the one because I had known Betty in coming here, because I'm a political scientist and came here with a faculty appointment in the Government Department.  And, I think probably you [looking at Betty Moulds] were the one who told me about --  somebody had at least told me that the Center for California [Studies] existed--The Center for California Studies.  It had been approved by the Academic Senate and in those days that was -- it's always important,  but in those days it was super-duper important,  given the state of governance of this campus at the time.  And so, we started the Senate Fellows program with a modest amount of money and a lot of enthusiasm, and on about a two or three weeks' notice.  And the program took off from there, was very successful. 

I would add that in the following spring, Willie Brown called -- I had come to know Willie.  We were in San Francisco State from '58 to ‘63  and Willie had graduated from San Francisco State in '55 and he was very active still, on the campus.  Willie was born a political scientist -- or a politician rather, at least I always had that impression.  So, I came to know him a little bit.  He called and he said, "could we do this—[take] the Assembly Fellows program because the Assembly Fellows were jealous”.  The Senate Fellows got to take courses related to what they were doing and they got the university -- these fellows, of course they're all graduate students -- they got graduate university credit for what they were doing at the Senate Fellows Program.  And the Assembly-- Assembly Fellows didn't get anything by way of credit.  Could we take the Assembly fellows program?  "And by the way Don, I've got -- you don't have to find funding, I've got it.”  That's Willie Brown.  

BOILARD:  Well, just to clarify that the Senate and the Assembly Fellowship programs had already been in place for a number of years

GERTH: Oh yes.  Back in the '60s.  

BOILARD: I think they started with a Ford Foundation grant.  

MOULDS OR SABLEHAUS:  Yes.  Ford Foundation.

BOILARD: So, both houses had these ongoing programs and when Bob Beverly called to offload the Senate Program--which is really just for financial reasons that they couldn't afford to run this program any longer—that the Assembly program was still in existence.  It just wasn't part of Sacramento State.  That's what Willie Brown said, he saw that as a more prestigious program when it's associated with the University. [throughout this passage GERTH is heard saying “yes” to confirm Boilard’s comments] 

SHULOCK: But when they were -- before they moved over to the University, did the program still include an academic seminar?  

BOILARD:  No.  No, that was one of the big differences.  It was really an internship.  And so, it was moving it over here you had the credit -- the graduate credit, the instruction, as well as a much more robust orientation program.  

GERTH:  And to comment just briefly, after the conversation with Willie Brown, maybe six, eight months later, I don't remember the exact time, I had a telephone call one day from George Deukmejian, the then Governor.  I'd come to know him when we were at Chico because we had an annual institute about various aspects of state government and he always --  he was in the Assembly then, this was in the late '60s, and he always did this segment about the criminal justice system.  That was a great interest of his. He was an attorney.  He eventually became Attorney General before he became Governor.  And he called saying, "Is it possible that Sac State could develop something that would be roughly parallel to the White House Fellows Program for graduate students" – and let’s call it the “Executive Fellows.”  And so, we found a faculty member-- Rich Krolak, whose name was mentioned earlier-- who was willing to work on -- in a sense-- inventing a new program, using to some extent the model of the two models already in existence with the legislature.  And thus began the Executive Fellows.  So, in a sense the campus was off and running with an act of providence, otherwise known as the voters in California.  

BOILARD:  Yeah

MOULDS: There's always a political struggle, and there was in this case.  And the one I remember most poignantly was when we were making the transfer of the Assembly program from the state budget to our budget.  And I remember meeting with MaeleyTom who was then working for -- was she working for Willie? 

SABLEHAUS: She worked for the Assembly.  

MOULDS: And the issue was who is going to hire the Fellow's Director?  And I remember sitting for about two hours with -- I think there were four of us in the room going back and forth and back and forth and I knew on the university side that the faculty would not tolerate decisions being made on a faculty appointment by the legislature.  And that was the bottom line and I guess Maeley finally understood that that was the bottom line and we got it our way, but she's one tough negotiator.  

SHULOCK: She had some bargaining power because they needed to offload --  

MOULDS: They needed to offload the budget item and they wanted to carry on the power to control the person running the program and --  

HOENIG-COUCH: They were heavily invested in the Assembly in those days didn't they have like a selection committee 20 or something, Nettie, that it was --  

MOULDS: It was the selection committee also.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes and they were really sort of the governing power.  

BOILARD: And when we talk about selection committee we're talking about selecting the fellows themselves.  

HOENIG-COUCH: The Assembly Fellows, yes.  

BOILARD: So, there's really a couple of levels --  

MOULDS: Two issues on the table.  

BOILARD: Right, a couple of levels of which it's kind of a control issue comes up, and one is the selection of the personnel and the director as well as the selection of the fellows.  And it sounds to me -- just inferring from what Don says, that initially when Bob Beverly called and maybe later when Willie Brown called, they were just hoping they could just move the location of this program and take it off of their financial books but still retain the same kind of control.  And the way the University's thinking about it is "well, if this is going to become a university program, the university has to have, you know, decision making."  

GERTH:  Well, this was less an issue with the Senate, by far, than it was with the Assembly.  

BUNCH: The Assembly program had been in existence much longer. 

GERTH: Yes 

BOILARD: Back to the '50s.  

GERTH: There was another variable to this too.  

SABLEHAUS: But there was a long history in the Senate at that point as well.  It went back quite a ways. I think the distinction was that there was a recognition that when it came to the University they would need to be an academic component.  And the compromise ultimately was that the University would decide who the academic advisor would be.  The University would hire the program administrator and hopefully it would be someone that everybody would be happy with over time.  It wasn't like anybody was going to be forced down the throat of one or the other because this program would only work if there was collaboration between University and Legislature.  

GERTH: There was another variable to this.  That was the University of California.  I think it was about September or October of '54, that I had a call from an old friend of mine who had worked with Clark Kerr on the master plan, in the same role that I had with Glenn Dumke, on the Master Plan-- sort of the guy in the back room, you know, cranking out research and that kind of stuff.  His name was Gene, another political scientist, named Gene [Eugene] Lee.  And he called me and basically his message was, "what's Sac State doing in this program?”  

BOILARD: This was in '84, right?  

GERTH:  In '84, yes.  This is what the University of California does.  And he pushed pretty hard.  He was not -- he was very close to the administration of the university in the '60s, but by '84, he was not.  He was a faculty member in the political science department at Berkeley, and so on.  I think the thing that we had going for is that the faculty and the political science department at UC Davis had zero interest in this and they just didn't care.  It happened, I knew two faculty members there well, one of them very well, because they had been in the Doctoral Program of Chicago a little ahead of me.  And we all got to know each other in the department. I remember the whole University of Chicago in those days was 4,000 students and the department student population was probably 120 or something like that.  So, we all know each other, and they made it very clear.  I called one of them -- they made it very clear they had zero interest.  They were doing other things in that department and so, we got no traction at all within the University.  I was concerned about it for a time because the University of California could be a formidable opponent on occasion, and they had a strong president at that time.  A good president who I happened to know for other reasons way back before he was --  became President of UC.  But it all panned out, and that's the important point.  

BOILARD: So, we talked a little bit about the University's leaders of these programs, a number of whom are on this panel today.  Nettie, you worked with the Executive Fellow's program --  I'm sorry, Senate -- Senate Fellows' program and that was --  you said that you had a real focus on relations with different levels of government from your thinking about the university's connections.  So, how did -- when were you leading the Senate program?  

SABELHAUS:  I took over the Senate program in 1985 as a part time assignment, I had had a baby and I came back and I started to work part time as the Senate floor coordinator on days that they were in session, and the rest  of the time I was the Senate Fellow's program director,  and I was just -- by way of digression, I was the first woman that was allowed to work part time in a professional capacity, in the Senate.  It was a source of great debate.  Could I be home some days, could I be reachable, would I be by the phone?  It was a big deal, and you know, subsequently there were others but that was -- you know, back in 1985.  And I stayed  with the program and then in 1992,  when the Pro Tem, Pro Tem-ship, had changed from Senator Roberti to Senator Lockyer, and Jeff Lustig asked if I would be willing to come to the campus to do the program, in addition to which would I do these other things, would I try to foster a greater relationship  between the University and the Capitol?  So, I wore two hats the whole time that I was at the campus.  And that was a lot of fun, it was a challenge but a lot of fun.  So, I can I guess just to talk about the Fellows program for a minute.  A lot of these issues were not easily resolved.  The Fellows were neither a fish nor fowl.  They weren't employees because they received a stipend.  They couldn't accrue vacation, but they had to get Workers Comp.  They got benefits.  And no one had ever worked out these things and it took a lot of forbearance on the part of the Sac State administration.  I just want to say, through it all of this, Don and Betty and Robert Jones could not have been more supportive.  They were always there to say, "it's OK, we'll work through these problems" because they were unique to this group of people.  But it worked and we continued on and we had wonderful success in recruiting people.  The fellowship grew from 12 people to 15 to ultimately 18 by increments throughout the years and there are people who've gone on to, you know, wonderful places and stayed involved in civic life. That was always our message.  It didn't matter whether you were going to stay in the private life or a public, but stay involved in the life of the community somehow and people really have taken that to heart. 

In my other capacity there were more challenges because, it's been mentioned already, the faculty here was not always interested in interacting with people downtown.  They looked down on them in some cases.  I had a challenge, I was the only person, I should say,  I discovered this later, I was too naive to --  I did not have an advanced degree and people did not like the fact that I was paid as a professional without that.  Other people -- Jeff, other people in the Center, all had advanced degrees, and there was someone whose work I was editing who said, "you know, you don't understand what it's like to write an academic journal. obviously."  And I said, "well, you don’t, you must not understand what it's like to write succinctly".  [laughter]

So, I made my way, but it was -- some people were wonderfully cooperative and enormously generous with their time.  There were other people who wanted to be bought out for every hour that they spent down at the Capitol.  We did a forum called “Water 101,” as we discussed, for the public.  We just got a room in the Capitol and we invited the people in the Capitol-- employees, whoever-- and we had standing room only.  This was our first one and we talked about how water moved from north to south and just a little primer on, you know, the state of water in California and it was something like 1992 or whatever.  And it was a great success. But there were people who were happy to do it, there were other people who weren't going to come-- faculty-- who wanted to be paid, paid for their hours.  So, those issues remained a struggle that-- the role of the practitioner on this campus was interesting.  I, as a lay person, viewed it with interest as we went on to do this conference about the role of State Universities and State Capitals.  The campuses that flourished were campuses that made use of practitioners.  The LBJ School in Austin, School of Public Policy, would take people right out of the federal government and give them tenure.  It didn't matter that they hadn't been in a faculty before.  And people here at Sac State, some of them were horrified by that.  It was like, we could never, we could never think about doing that.

SHULOCK: LBJ school had Barbara Jordan.  

SABELHAUS: Exactly!  Wonderful people. From the State Department--  

[multiple speakers]: That’s  terrible. She doesn't have a PhD.  

SABELHAUS: The Foreign Service and what have you.  So, it was an ongoing issue that everyone struggled with.  And throughout this, you know, Don was great about championing this cause. But it was a tension as people talked about the practical versus the --  you know, the intellectual, the academic, what have you.  So, we went on to do some really interesting things.  We did, for the first time ever, we hosted -- Don hosted-- the training of legislators in the Assembly.  New member training out here, a couple of sessions in a row, where people came out to the campus to get their grounding the first few days of the Legislature --  of the session-- and we had speakers and it was hosted and you [looking at Don] opened it, I think, and it was --  

GERTH: I think we lost that because there was a change of party leadership.  

SABELHAUS:  Yes.  

GERTH: In the Assembly.  

SABELHAUS:  And ultimately people decided that they wanted to do it in-house themselves, which was really, you know, ultimately the right thing to do but we did it when it wasn't being done for anybody.  We wrote two manuals, my assignment was to do a how to book called "Capital Information," and it was a binder that contained information about, in one place, the legislative process, a bunch of glossary of terms, how the different departments and everything from phone numbers to a definition of what they're supposed to do.  And we updated it  through the years and we did the same thing for county-- the counties, in cooperation  with CSAC, the County Supervisors Association of California.  And we had a contract with them and they hosted and we brought in county leaders and talked about county structure, what different departments and counties do.  We hosted -- you may recall when Valerie Brown was the new Chair of the Assembly Local Government.  She brought out to the campus these discussions about what local government should be-- and they were in your conference room next to the President's office and they were off Capitol grounds, so to speak.  Before people had cell phones and couldn't be distracted.  So, we had a chance to do a lot of—a lot of interesting things that had not been done before and we would just say, "Well, let's try this idea and see if it works."  And we transitioned from Jeff Lustig to Tim Hodson, and the Fellow Programs grew.  Everybody pitched in and we tried to --  you know, we had a small staff at the Center at that point, but we tried to help each other.  Cheryl Minnehan was my wonderful trusted associate, kind of filled in as office manager sometimes as people kind of came and went-- and it worked. 

It was -- the UCs were in awe of what we did, I do remember that and kind of amazed that we were able to pull it off.  And occasionally, they would -- they did “Cal in the Capital,” that was their Berkeley program that would bring people up and they were afraid that this would be a competitor for them.  But they really, they enhanced each other and that there was no -- there was a lot of room.  And we-- I think one of the things I'm proud most about the Senate program is we maintained high standards, we didn't countenence any slacking.  People knew that they had to show up for work every day, we placed them with people who were serious, public policy minded people and everybody was grateful for that.  People have gone on to really do wonderful jobs.  We're all proud of some of those Fellows as we see them.   

And the academic component was very beneficial.  They were required to show up on Friday afternoons for a lecture, wasn't -- how was it going to be different than the fellowship that happened before it was at Sac State.  They had to come for an academic seminar every Friday afternoon, rain or shine and you couldn't just blow that off.  Occasionally, if there was a deadline OK, but it was my job to sort of police that on behalf of John Syer or whoever the academic was-- and that was a good combination.  He was the one that provided that component, but I was the one who would help provide a good speaker or someone topical or the Pro Tem of the Senate, whoever that person was, who'd come every year to speak to them and we'd invite the other programs and there was, you know, some sharing of all that.  But it was-- out of all the jobs I've had, I've really loved doing the Fellows program and so, I feel like it was so rewarding.  

BOILARD: I think it's worth noting if it hasn't already come out that the Fellows were full time employees and --  

SABELHAUS: In every way.  

BOILARD: in one of the branches. And they were treated as professional staff. Somebody did mention they're paid as a stipend, technically.  

SABELHAUS: Not a salary.  

BOILARD: Not a salary, but they were professional staff, and the Capital offices would really rely on those staff  to be carrying out the work of the office.  

SABELHAUS: And they were free to the legislator.  

BOILARD: To -- right, because we had the funding directly to the University to pay for their stipends.  

SABELHAUS: I want to say another thing that I forgot, and it's an important component.  Along the line we developed “the casebook.”  And is the casebook past 2003.  I thought it was during the time that instead of people just attending a seminar, they were to do a project in the course of the year and it was Barry King who was the academic advisor.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yeah, I think it did go beyond 2003.  

SABELHAUS: Did it start after 2003?  

BUNCH: I'm not sure when it started but I do understand --  

BOILARD: Is that what you have there, Sylvia?  

NAVARI: No, this not a casebook, this was a -- I don't.  

SABELHAUS: Anyway, we tried to make the academic component more robust and to make it more of a research project and that was a very fruitful part of their experience.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, and that came out of the model.  

SABELHAUS:  Loved those experiences out of places in the east, including Harvard, for people didn't use textbooks, they just used cases as practical examples of the dilemmas of government and how you can learn from --  the grey areas of what needed to be.  

NAVARI: This was [showing book she is holding]--  

SABELHAUS: Decided.  

NAVARI: what would essentially be a master's project and each of the Executive Fellows wrote a chapter on [showing book] this is “Beyond Change, Rethinking California State Government".  And they each wrote a chapter.  So, it was like a master's thesis, if you will, and the Center published it.  But I noticed also, Miki Vohryzek-- you [looking at Claire Bunch]-- you have some that were done by Miki Vohryzek, the student's wrote chapters/cases.  Now, I did both, the academic portion and the placement with the internship because that was what I came out of-- Social Work being in charge of 400 interns throughout the counties.  So, when I was asked  to do the Executive Fellows for this particular year, I said, "Right, well I'll do both the academic and that.”  So, I ran the seminar and I did the placement.  So, I was working  with all the Executive branches.  And I have to say  that particular year Bill Hauk was Chief of Staff, I think,  for the Governor and I worked with him and he was very supportive of -- I mean, there were issues --  

GERTH: He was also on our Board.  

NAVARI: Yes, subsequently.  But he was very supportive.  There were issues, I can't really remember exactly what  they were with the Executive Fellows, but it was --  part of it coming from my background, you know, it was extremely important for me to be in contact with the mentors of the fellows.  John Pimentel was --  

HOENIG-COUCH: “BT&H.”  

NAVARI: Yes.  

HOENIG-COUCH: He was out of “BT&H,” Business Transportation and Housing.  

NAVARI: OK so, he was the kind of -- intermediary between myself and Bill Hauk that I remember on several occasions sitting down with Bill.  So, that's -- this [referring to the book she was holding] was what I considered culminating project for the year.  And the seminar --  I ran the academic portion as a seminar.  So, we didn't have -- the students came together, we talked issues.  We may have had -- I don't remember doing case notes.  

HOENIG-COUCH: No, and it was held on campus.  

NAVARI: Oh, yes, we were on campus and in fact I think we switched it --  it used to be Friday afternoons and we switched it--the students wanted it Thursday evenings.  And so, we did that.  And, you know, they were on stipends but they also --  with the Executive Fellows-- many of them, you know, they were in agencies and many of them worked on the campaigns of various folks during the --  

SABELHAUS: Not on your nickel.  

NAVARI: Not on our nickel, but they -- you know, but they volunteered.  

SABELHAUS: Well, as it would be anybody's right.  

NAVARI: Yes, but when I say worked, I mean, they were expected in some ways to help out with the campaign.  

SABELHAUS: In the Executive branch?  

NAVARI: Yes.  

SABELHAUS: Interesting.  

NAVARI: Yes.  

SHULOCK: Is it in order to say more about the Executive Fellows or we want to stick with the Senate?  

BOILARD: Sure, let's --  

SHULOCK: OK. Well I was a faculty advisor for the Executive fellowship for I think five years, and just became the hugest fan of that program, and you mentioned the level of work that the Senate fellows did, and --  

SABELHAUS: It was for all of them.  

SHULOCK: A little tricky in the Executive Fellowship because there's more of a hierarchy, I think, in these administrative placements.  And people who have been there as civil servants  and who had been there for a while would see these young Fellows come in and shadow the Agency Secretary or whoever the mentor was-- and the program got really high level mentors.  And these people would do very significant, high level work. And it was, you know-- and we would talk about it in class, in seminars-- like, well how do you deal with that sort of jealousy of so many other people saying, "who is this person and why do they get to go on those meetings?"  But I also participated in the selection process and I remember just feeling -- it was just so hard,  I felt like I was playing God with these people's lives.  Because if they got in, it was just such a remarkable, remarkable life-changing experience, and it was just so hard that we had so many good young people and could only take 18.  

BOILARD: Well, yeah, and to that point, I'm not sure what it was at the time, currently we get, you know, several hundred applicants for 18 spots.  The traditional program --  

HOENIG-COUCH:  But I think the Executive program too it had different sets of sort of birth pains, because unlike the Legislative programs, there was no one focal place.  Bill Hauk was significantly supportive, but the Executive Fellows were really, as I recall, really born out of this University, out of Don's office.  And so, over time -- so, I, for a time, also directed the Executive Fellows program.  And, it was really interesting because they were always a bit set apart from the Legislative -- maybe not as --  without as much sort of notoriety.  But at one point, I remember the other fellows saying, "well, all executive fellows are tall" [laughter].  It was the funniest thing, because I thought "OK,  they're holding their ground," you know.  So, I just want to say I think the Executives is an interesting program in the Center's history, because it felt  like it was the one that was really born here, and has, as Nancy said, I mean, it's been an amazing career builder for so many people.  And we were placing in agencies, departments, boards and commissions--widely across the branch.  

NAVARI: You [pointing to Donna Hoenig-Couch] would know this probably better.  It struck me that the Executive Fellows were a different kind of person than the Senate or Assembly Fellows.  

HOENIG-COUCH: I agree with that, yes.  

SHULOCK: Less political and more policy

NAVARI: Perhaps.  And also, adminis—governance-- in the --  I don't know what the range of --  the places from the undergraduate institutions from which this particular -- my particular group came-- were,  I remember we had lots from the East Coast, one came from Harvard, you know, but it was-- they struck me as a different kind of person.  

HOENIG-COUCH: And they possibly -- Claire might know this.  More of the fellows had graduate degrees, I think and coming in the-- coming into the Executive program.  

BUNCH: Yes.  

HOENIG-COUCH: I think that's generally true.  

BOILARD:  Donna, you mentioned how the Executive program, was a little different than the Senate and Assembly because it was created here at Sacramento State.  The Judicial program was as well and you headed that program for some time.

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes so, that's the youngest of the fellowship programs.  

BUNCH: But it's now 20 years so --  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, now, 20 years -- It's an amazing—our babies grow up. So, and like all of these programs, started out with a smaller cadre of students.  The Judicial started out with five, I think; the Executive program was six at its very beginning.  

NAVARI: The traditional, this was 12 but – that was in ’92.

HOENIG-COUCH: So, the judicial program was really Nettie and Tim, and the downtown person with the legislature was particularly interested in creating another opportunity for students in -- not in the legal aspects of the courts but in our role-- as our institution would be-- to look at the administration of courts, which was not a widely known academic or scholarly study.  And it was a very exciting program to work on and I worked with Tim from the very beginning, in 1997.  We had our first class of five Judicial Fellows and they were placed state wide which made it different than --  

SABELHAUS: That was a challenge, because it was so dispersed.  

HOENIG-COUCH: They were placed in courts across the state, so our job was to identify people who could serve as good mentors in a world we were not really --  judicial administration is not a widely known field.  So, we had a lot of the applicant --  and I think this is still true-- come in really interested in law and what we're working on is policies within the courts.  But again, we grew the mentorship aspect of that program, the academic aspect of the program, were-- became just as high caliber as the others, and a really exciting program, because it was state-wide.  The fellows meet once a month at one of the courts where the fellows are placed.  And because of that we get this really rich view of the differences in the state, as well as the particular—the particular flavor of the courts, which has changed a lot over time.  There are a lot of collaborative courts and a lot of sort of social movement within the courts, as well as the legal aspect.  So, it's a rich study.  Applied Judicial Studies is very exciting, I've found.

And, if I can, if it's OK with you, Steve, if I could just sort of segue back for a second because a little component that I think is important in the life of the Center has to do with the early “Envisioning California” studies conferences.  And when I was hired [1990] after my Senate Fellowship, it was primarily to work with Jeff on the “Envisioning California” studies.  

BOILARD: Jeff Lustig [former Director of the Center for California Studies].  

HOENIG-COUCH: Jeff Lustig was then director, and this was when we were just this side of the shingle, the iconic shingle that Betty talked about.  So, we worked out of a tiny office.  Jeff had lofty, scholastic, rich notions of California as a nation-state-- the literature, the politics, the architecture, the art, the diversity of the state --  

SABELHAUS: “California as Place.”  

HOENIG-COUCH: “California as Place,” and he really invested his and committed a lot to those. I think that early energy of the Center had a lot to do with his ability to draw people from all over the state in those early days.  We would have organizing meetings in Southern California, in the Valley and in Northern California.  

GERTH:  Well, Jeff was really the one who invented the idea of the “Envisioning California” Conferences.  And to this day they're alive and well.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes.  

GERTH: Steve well knows the most recent one on homelessness which is a very major public policy issue in the state.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, and I think it's a really important part of the heart of this Center, that it's its best, I think, when we are drawing fromthe literature, and the arts.  And in the early days we had some of the greats,  Kevin Starr, Richard Rodriguez, later on-- and music and plays and the blues and, you know, and even Christopher Hitchens, a little controversial.  

BUNCH:  Those were 3 day conferences, weren’t they? 

HOENIG-COUCH: They were three, sometimes three and a half day conferences, yes.  So, I just wanted to mention the “Envisioning” part that we have kept alive for so long, but I think Don- wasn’t it --  

SABELHAUS: Roy Greenaway--Didn't he [inaudible]?  

HOENIG-COUCH: Roy Greenaway yes, it was wonderful.  He came from DC. And it really drew -- I think in many ways defined, you know, a lot of the real integrity and energy of the Center.  And Don, I think Jeff's early -- he made a case for this in that 1988 letter to the Chancellor, when we were in the little government office.  

SABELHAUS: Social Studies building- 

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, which I think, I don't have a copy of that anymore,  but I think it was an eloquent paper.  

BOILARD: It does strike me, you know, were talking --  I'd like to talk more about the different directors particularly --  I guess it was initially Bernie Shanks, but Jeff Lustig and Tim Hodson.  Throughout this, from listening to this, I think there's palpable tension between California Studies going back to what Betty was talking about, that you have a look at California through an interdisciplinary lens.  It looks at arts, it looks at literature and kind of studying that. The [Envisioning Californria] Conference I think it was really, you know, the apotheosis of that-- that we're going to evaluate and think about California as a place and as a people.  The tension between that and what we've been talking about with the Fellows programs and the Sacramento Semester program which is a more government focused thinking about policy making and governance.  So, the Center for California studies implies more of the former.  Was that kind of Jeff's vision --  in other words, was Jeff not really thinking about the fellowship/ internship side of things as much  as on the California studies side of things?  

MOULDS ; Jeff just took it to a different level.  The California Studies minor was already in place, and that's the way Jeff conceived of the significant amount of the work of the Center.  And in this conference -- I mean, he really brought it to life, and the number of people who were in politics who went to those conferences to learn about other things was enormous.  I mean I was just fascinated, and --  

SHULOCK: But the conference has evolved to be more policy centered. Is that -- what was the --  

HOENIG-COUCH: I think that --  

SHULOCK: what was behind that evolution?  

HOENIG-COUCH:  Tim Hudson's came went --  so, in some ways the Center had taken, you know, the leadership matters.  And Tim, I think, did move the conferences to more of a policy, political, legislative focus.  And over time what also -- I mean, Claire has been incredibly instrumental on the last conferences-- last decade.  They've become, I think, a lot about informing our present world, you know, and the homeless conference, I'm sure, was one of those.  

BUNCH: I think the transition from kind of an eclectic conference, where you cover all these different things to now it's very much “a” topic, “a” focus on one issue. And to come up what that topic is going to be every year, it's always a challenge.

HOENIG-COUCH: But also John Syer was a real proponent of the California Studies for the fellows particularly.  I mean, he would say, "If you can't afford it, crash it", the conference.  

SHULOCK: The kind of leadership matters.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yeah.  

SHULOCK: Finding somebody like Tim, who had a foot solidly in both worlds and then Steve as well, I mean, that was just critical to keeping the vision moving forward.  

SABELHAUS: When did the journalism conference happen?  The journalism awards.  

HOENIG-COUCH: 1995, I think, is that right?  Claire

BUNCH: They already started from when I was starting, so --  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, and that was under the inspiration of Tim, also.  

BOILARD: And like so many things, I think there was --  you know, part of it was how do we advance our mission  as the Center of California Studies and part of a strategic  of how do we build relationships with the press that can be helpful to us.  

SABELHAUS: I think that Jeff understood that his grounding was not as much in the practical or the political and when I was hired my charge was to handle that part and tell him what needed to be done, and Susan Sherri came on shortly thereafter and she was hugely instrumental in creating some of these efforts and the conference about capitals -- state capital universities and state capitals was one of her really efforts also.  So, there was a lot of --  

HOENIG-COUCH: But I also do think that Jeff was contented with the directors running the fellowship programs.  And it was really Tim who wanted to bring the -- all of the fellows programs together as a “Capital Fellows Program.”  And so, we began to be seen as an umbrella with all four branches --  I'm sorry, all three branches represented --  the Center was the fourth.  

BOILARD: Well, fourth fellowship program.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Right, right.  

SABELHAUS: And there was, I will say, some tension around that.  You know, just as Sylvia mentioned that the Executive branch is a different place to work, it should be recruiting a different kind of person and what happened when they all came together is that people would just apply to all three.  And there's value in that because it's more efficient from the standpoint of the applicant, but I think lost in there at times was an appreciation for the difference between the Legislative and the Executive branch of government. 

SHULOCK: Well, in the selection committee process we would be aware of that and we'd identify, you know "this person is really not" --  "they're really not interested in our program, we don't think they're really suited in ours, I think they should be in one of the Legislative programs."  

BOILARD: And they are different applicant pools.  I mean, you are right, we have this umbrella  of the Capital Fellows Programs, but an individual applicant has to decide which of those four programs --  or multiple [inaudible] programs-- they want to apply to and there's a lot of people apply to say Assembly and Senate that won't apply to Executive or Judicial and vice versa.  

SHULOCK: And then there’s the people who forget to change the word in their application and you’re reading it for the Executive and it says Assembly.  It's like "well, they didn't proofread."  [laughter]

NAVARI: Out!  

BUNCH: I should say that we're now 2,000 alumni.  So, we crossed it with this last class-- we crossed the 2,000 threshold.  So, it's a lot of people who were affected.  

NAVARI: Do you know where they all are?  

BUNCH: A lot, we have an alumni data base that we maintain.  

MOULDS: It's a difference in the culture of the Senate and the Assembly, and that's reflected somewhat in the pools as well.  Probably have to have a little more of a stomach for blood sport in the Assembly.  

BOILARD: Well, and I think that the cultural --  I mean, Nettie makes a good point that, you know, there's different cultures and different kinds of people and I think different views of the world that are felt and shown that are coming into these programs-- and I think in part that's reflected in the leadership of each of these programs.  We have a separate director -- I think it's always been, other than just some interim periods, a separate director in charge of each of the programs and that director knows that branch, knows that institution, and knows the culture and the players.  So, even though there is this umbrella of the Capitol Fellows programs, each of the programs is run a little differently, a little uniquely with separate personnel, separate selection committees.  We talked a little bit about the academic components and you're talking about, you know, that particular book that the fellows put together with you [pointing to NAVARI], you [pointing to SABELHAUS] would talk about the casebook.  Different faculty and the different programs treat their seminars differently and have different ways so, they try and bring an academic perspective on to that branch, recognizing the unique culture and the unique mission.  So, I appreciate Nettie's point that you lose something when you put them -- when it's all under one umbrella, but I think there has been an effort over the years to acknowledge the individual flavor of each of the institutions. 

BUNCH: That's part of what we talk about-- the fellowships. Make sure you are-- know what you're applying to.  

BOILARD: Yes.  

BUNCH: I actually put that in there so, yes.  

BOILARD: So, we've talked quite a bit about Jeff Lustig, and Nettie, you were hired by Jeff, correct?  And then I don't -- how many years was Jeff in the position, Don?  

GERTH: About six, I think, I don't remember, exactly.  

BOILARD: So, after that period, there was a -- he was gone.  And, Donna, you were serving as Interim --  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes.  

BOILARD: During that time, right?  And how long was that before Tim came on that you served as Interim?  

HOENIG-COUCH: I think it was six months--.  

BOILARD: OK.  

HOENIG-COUCH: --Yeah.  

BOILARD: So, what was the biggest difference between Jeff and Tim in terms of leadership provision of the center?  

HOENIG-COUCH: Well, as Nancy said, he, Tim Hodson, came in solidly rooted  in the legislature, as well as being an academic.  

BOILARD: He worked in the Senate as staff.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, and he had also taught at Claremont Colleges.  So, his -- I think his involvement in the kinds of things, you know, that Nettie had been originally hired to do was more intensive certainly than Jeff's.  Jeff had strengths, you know, that were more --  

NAVARI: Jeff was an academic.  

HOENIG-COUCH: He was really an academic.  I actually really loved -- when I was talking to Don about participating on this panel.  I loved what you said, Don, about the Government Department and the early, early parts of this that some -- one of the early professors had said,  "we're not about plumbing, we're about theory".  

GERTH: That's a line I'll never forget.  

HOENIG-COUCH: I'll never forget it now either, because I think, you know -- Tim was OK with plumbing.  

NAVARI: I think it's important, as you retire Steve, that-- that the person who runs the Center has a foot in both worlds.  You know, I think -- you know, Jeff took the Center academically to a place that was very good, but the plumbing needed -- I mean, I remember arguing with Jeff about “the plumbing”.  And you know, I'm more of a plumber than an academic in some ways, but --  

BOILARD:  By “plumbing” you mean the more applied --  

NAVARI:  Yea, the applied, yes.  I mean, Social Work is an applied field.  So, you know, the future of the Center I think it's important in the hiring of the Director, that these two worlds be covered.  I mean, I don't know how or what's happening in terms of somebody following you in your footsteps,  but I think that's important.  Because Don as President, an academic  but also a plumber, you know.  So --  

GERTH: My father would not agree with you.  

NAVARI:  Yes [laughter] that's OK.  

SHULOCK:  Is it appropriate to talk a little bit about the faculty research fellows program.  

BOILARD: Sure, yes.  That's -- I understand that.  

SHULOCK: Because that -- I think that really addresses a lot of these themes.  Tim founded that and I remember he came over to my office in the administration building and he said he had this idea:  he wanted to have a program that was more responsive to the legislative decision making process than the UC policy seminar.  So, I forget his name, the guy who ran that UC policy seminar, but -- so, we put together-- a kind of background of this and our reasoning was that the UC policy seminar --  the UC faculty would get together and they would decide what topics they wanted to work on and then they would take that to the legislature and try to get by in.  And our idea --Tim's idea that I helped him implement-- was let's flip it.   Let's go to the Senate, the Assembly and the Governor's office and see what do they need and what time frame do they need it on; and our idea was, because there were some however many thousands of faculty, because this was a system-wide program, across the system, that there was going to be somebody who was already far enough on that research agenda, that they will be able to turn something around much more quickly.  And you know, the program has had a lot of successes  and some challenges so, it wasn't a complete success; but the point was we had talked a little bit about UC first and then they thought that, you know, that was their territory, but they really didn't engage it in that way.  And this was a really good example of the contrast  between the state university [UC] and Sacramento State's approach of trying to be responsive, trying to be applied, trying to write concise things on a calendar that fit with the legislature rather than having faculty do the research on their agenda and their timeline and then try to sell it or market it to the Capitol.  

GERTH: But we wanted to be both academic and practical--  

SHULOCK: Yes.  

GERTH: Plumbing, I think that has been a constant theme -- at least that's my sense of it from a distance.  

SHULOCK: Yes, well let's -- but we would have-- find faculty who wanted to reach that gap as well.  

BOILARD: Yes. Well, and I think it's an important point that -- academia can be seen as arrogant, and to be relevant to the Legislature and the Executive branch with this program rather than saying,  "we have the answers here, take this and follow" --  yes, we know what you need to be doing, here's our prescription--  to come with some humility and respect to the government and say, "what are you working on right now and how can we be helpful?"  It's just a change in tone that I think improved-- going back to the initial, where this whole conversation started-- improves the way that the university connected to downtown, and to the government.  That we're here to help you with partners and bring our resources to bare, rather than "we're here to change you and get you to follow our prescriptions".  

SHULOCK: So, there was a liaison in each of the branches and Tim and I would go and meet with them in the beginning of a cycle and say, "what are your priorities and what are your needs?"  and we would work together to develop a request for proposals that would then be sent out across the system.  

BOILARD: So, there's a little bit of conversation a moment ago about the way both --  well, certainly Tim, comes with this model of having a lot of involvement, you know, one foot in the academic side as well as the more political government side and being able to bridge that gap and is it fair to say that both the Center for California Studies through its range programs,  as well as with Sacramento Semester program is trying  to serve that bridging function of bringing academic resources into a government environment?  Is that a fair way to think about it?  I'm just trying to think about it as -- there are some programs that universities will adopt that are really just more narrowly seen as here is something to make it available to our students, and that's kind of as far as it goes.  But going back to the way Nancy started this whole conversation, it seems like there was an effort to be this more strategic  
about how -- what do we have in terms of resources, what's our comparative advantage -- if I can use that term, as one of the 19 universities.  

NAVARI: I would say yes, but also getting the University into the practical --  to the applied-- getting the entire university into the applied world of government and politics.  Because the many disciplines maintain a theoretical stance, and -- I mean, being from an applied field,  I mean on this campus you've got Health and Human Services --  the College of Health and Human Services,  all of its programs are applied, I think.  Yeah.  All of the programs are applied, but then you have social sciences or --  

SHULOCK: S.S.I.S  

NAVARI:  S.S.I.S, the public policies, the public administrations is in there, most of them are not applied and many of the faculty -- if you come from an R1 institution, you typically are -- unless you're in an applied field, you're typically not --  you don't have a framework that really engages the applied world, you know.  So, I think getting the University and the Center for California Studies is really -- it bridges but it's also, I think, try to push the University into a more applied world.  

SABELHAUS: Well and that ultimately provides a much richer experience for the students.  

NAVARI:  Absolutely.  

SABELHAUS: That's the point, it's -- in some ways it’s what, you know, what the faculty wants and what's good for it but ultimately it's what is best for the student, how do you --  

MOULDS: Bridging has been the most difficult piece to sustain.  

NAVARI: Yes.  

BOILARD: Why is that?  

MOULDS: It takes constant work.  

NAVARI: Yes. 
 
MOULDS: Constant nurturing, new people involved.  

HOENIG-COUCH: And there are inherent tensions in that --  

MOULDS: Absolutely.  

SHULOCK: And one of the reasons for the inherent tensions goes back to --  I didn't really flushed this out in my introductive comments, but the faculty reward structure and the faculty rewards schedule, and faculty still--  One of the big efforts when I was in the early years of Don's administration, there was all these national efforts to try to revamp the faculty reward structure so that we could define what quality, what academic rigor, looks like in applied work.  So, that it's not just measured by your discipline, because most faculties still --  and especially in the academic disciplines, their incentive structure is created  through their discipline, and their audience is their discipline and their journals are peer reviewed  by their disciplinary people.  And so, there's been -- I was just really disappointed over the 15 years that I, you know, followed this whole effort to change the faculty reward structure, because it just didn't keep up with the, you know, the push of these universities --  state universities of place-- that wanted to get their faculty to be just as rigorous but to get people to understand what that meant in an applied endeavor.  

TORCOM: Nancy's absolutely right and it became a problem for the Sacramento Semester when Michael Wadlé retired-- did this over a three-year period-- we were very lucky to have him in the part-time teaching pool.  Because even though there is a field in political science now called "experiential learning," the reward structure doesn't work for people who supervise internships.  And in terms of recruiting someone for the directorship and teach the class, I think there is a young woman, I can't remember her name, I'm sorry, who joined the government department a few years ago, and she was kind of a natural to look to for a possible interest in coming into this.  And she just wasn't, because she was going to need to publish something and this kind of assignment can be very time-consuming with not much to show for it, although there are --  remember when “PS” [Political Science and Politics] was created alongside the American Political Science Review, and it would have articles of items like experiential learning.  But so, what they had to turn to in the Government Department is actually a part-time faculty member who is the director-coordinator and another faculty member who just teaches the class.  And it'll be interesting to see how well—how well this goes.  You all probably know this better than I do, right?  

NAVARI: That's true.  I mean, when I came in to the University as Director of Field Education, it was a tenure track position.  When I left, you know, people-- the tenured faculty-- said we can't do that --  you know, "we can't do that because we don't have --  we won't have time to do research."  And so, it is now a full time, 12 month lecturer position.  And -- but I go back to the year when I was Senate Chair, we had the discussion about the Boyer model; and, I just saw it in my --  

SHULOCK: “Scholarship Reconsidered,” I think it-- the name of it was --  

NAVARI: Yes.  And, because, in part --  I mean the University, even from [Chancellor] Ann Reynolds on down, pushing R-1 research, it's very difficult  for -- new faculty when they're confronted with, you have to publish unless --  otherwise-- you're not going to get tenure or you're not going to get promoted and that's a real problem.  

SHULOCK: And it's not just that you have to publish because there are other opportunities to publish, but it's what you have to publish.  Because -- and that's what the Boyar model was trying to put out.  It was -- you know, there's publications of different kinds, and there is a spectrum of what you can do, and the Boyar model would say "yes, we're not saying  that you should never write anything  and never share your knowledge and never disseminate things  but there should be a spectrum that’s valued,"  and it isn't, it's only -  

NAVARI: Well, and it's discipline by --  you know, department by department.  And again, you know, we hire Research 1 folks because now you have to have a PhD and so on and so forth.  And Research 1 folks, what do they come in with, they come in with that mindset.  

SHULOCK: Well, and if the Center's -- part of the Center's mission is to really engage faculty from a broad range of disciplines, they probably have better luck with some  of the innately applied disciplines, but you're trying  to get economists and sociologists and political scientists then I think that's  where you got a bigger rub with faculty reward structures.  

BOILARD: Yeah, it sounds -- from this conversation, you know, what really strikes me is that the Center for California Studies  and I think sounds like Sacramento Semester program as well, are just not a normal academic unit.  So, they're trying to survive in this environment,  which is very much built on, you know, academic departments.  And you have these other programs which, yes, the incentive structure isn't set properly, the orientation --  kind of the outward facing orientation seems different.  And then I'd like to, you know, bring Sandy in on this.  The financing -- at least for the Center of California Studies is very different.  The budget for the Center is kind of walled off from the rest of the University.  I don't know Sandy, if you could just kind of describe what the Center's budget looks like.  The whole line item idea--, 

BERNARD: Yeah.  

BUNCH:  Square peg in a round hole? [crosstalk]

BERNARD:  Square peg in a round hole. Yeah.  So, the California State University has a line item in the Governor's budget which is 661000 or something like that and then the Center for California Studies is right under it at 002.  So, that is the Center for California Studies and that's our budget.  And we've always been 002, there's now an 003, which is, again -- we're just this square peg because there's two line items under the California State University and that's the Center for California Studies and now “EdInsights,” which used to be [inaudible]. So, the way we request our budget, the way that we get our money, the way that we expend it, and how we spend it is very different from the University.  So, for the 16 years that I've been here, it's been a struggle, for a very long time, and just recently --  

NAVARI:  A struggle with the University or the State or both?  

BERNARD: Yes, yes, because this is what we do, how do we do it, how can we do it within the guidelines of the University and ultimately the State of California.  Recently it just came about, and I don't know if this is here nor there, the fellows --  we are run off a general ledger codes  an account codes is what they're called, and the fellows are paid a salary, but that salary code is the same as support staff.  So, recently when support staff received a general increase, all the fellows got this increase, because of this coding situation.  So -- we were told by the Chancellor's Office, "hey, by the way we're going to take this money back because we gave you too much money because of this coding."  So, I mean, that's just another area.  And so, the Chancellor's Office was saying, "well, they’re students;" and I'm like, "no, they can't be students coded as, you know, getting the stipend, getting the benefits".  So, again, you know, we're at a point as like, are they students, are they staff?  So, it's a challenge -- it's much better than it was 16 years ago, it's a lot easier and people seem to understand us a lot more.  

BOILARD:  But it’s still different.  

BERNARD: It's still different.  

BOILARD: Than the rest of the budget in almost every other unit at the campus, the money is allocated by Sacramento Hall.  It goes back to the -- what was the aphorism that Don gave --  

SHULOCK: Generation does not equal allocation.  

BOILARD: Generation does not equal allocation.  So, the President's office tries to allocate funding in a meaningful way on campus, but the President's office has no control over the funding coming to the Center for California Studies.  That's specified in the state budget.  So, in some ways it's a nice situation to have-- to have this guarantee in funding flow, but as Sandy points out, it causes nothing but headaches for Sandy in trying to run the office on constantly running into these things like this budget coding issue where the University just doesn't set up to handle our particular situation in the budget.  

MOULDS: In so many ways the structure of the California State University's system is-- is more rigid than R-1 institutions are.  

[unknown speaker]: It's true.  

MOULDS: So, we lack the flexibility but where they have flexibility, they have to raise more of their own money, via grants and contracts.  And so, you find institutes and centers and things springing up on the R1 campuses and they have many, many more adjunct professors that they bring in.  The Barbara Jordan's of the world, the businessmen, that may not have an academic program but have a huge amount to offer.  It's easier to do that in an R1, in the University of California than it is to do in the State University system.  

NAVARI: Is the Sacramento Semester now, is it part of the Political Science Department budget or is it --  

BERNARD: It's out of the Center.  

NAVARI:  --funded off of, it comes out of the center?  

BERNARD: Yes.  

TORCOM: You know, it never really had a budget except that first year; and of course, I don't know what happened in the next 4 years and --  

MOULDS: We scraped it together somehow.  FTE was a part of it.  

TORCOM:  Right. Of course it does generate FTE.  

MOULDS: And generous parents were another part, really.  

TORCOM: Wow. Because when I came back to it and John SYER certainly got, you know, assignment credit for units for teaching the class and I got assignment credit for -- I think for the supervisory part and also for the internship part.  But then when I became Chair, I didn't want to quit teaching altogether because I would [makes blibbing sounds) -- wouldn't be able to go back to it.  So, I wanted to keep teaching but that -- so, I continued the directorship just as an overload.  And that remained the case until 1998.  

SABELHAUS: And I think that's how the Center-- we gave you administrative help because you didn't have any money for administrative --  

TORCOM: Right.  

SABELHAUS: So, we just absorbed that, and we did the outreach and we helped with placement --  

TORCOM: But that helped -- that didn't happen until the late '90s in terms of Sandy’s stepping in—and, yes, that arrangement.  You know, it's interesting when Michael arranged to retire and, you know, the Government Department-- Nancy Lapp was the Chair then—but they put together a little group of people to discuss how they might handle this transition.  And they wanted to keep it in the Government Department.  I think, in part, because they didn't want to see the Center absorb it and take it over.  But, you know, I was thinking in terms of my long term interest in it-- the main thing is the program, and I hope it survives.  And, if it needs the Center to do that, and I think maybe that's the best way for it to work that way-- the best thing for the program, as well as the department but --  

SHULOCK: I think a lot of these discussions about the obstacles and the fact that the CSU was-- about the whole budgeting structure-- it was set up as a teaching institution and it hasn't really evolved to support everything that everybody's done here. I think that  just serves to underscore how proud I think everybody should be that all of these initiatives were able to overcome and they were resilient and they keep -- you know, they found ways, not illegal, not hook or by crook ways, you know, but found ways to kind of just pursue the mission against a lot of odds.  [Crosstalk].  

MOULDS: a scrappy bunch

NAVARI: I also think the survival--  the development and good work the Center has done are really a function of Don Gerth coming here and being President all these years-- and you know, laying the foundation that --  I mean, personalities even though we institutionalize  things, personalities make a big difference.  

SHULOCK: You know, one more compliment here before you --  

GERTH: I want to say something.  

SHULOCK: I just remember in early, early years Don said that so much of the administration --  I'm not going to name offices or names-- they were what we would call control agents.  So, that you wanted to do something  and they would say they'd look in their manual and say, "oh no,  I'm sorry, we can't do that."   And one of the other things that he said is, "no, we are facilitators,  we're here to make things possible; and so, stop telling us that you can't do these things."  And I think that's what you're saying-- that his commitment and his drive to kind of cut through or go around all these barriers and just make it happen.  

NAVARI: The Center for California Studies wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Don Gerth 

GERTH: Well, forget that, but – I find this conversation fascinating because when we first got the Fellows programs, we were funded directly by the Legislature.  And I don't remember exactly when-- Betty, you may remember, or Nancy, the Chancellor's Office got upset about that.  And it waged campaign, and we ended up waging a counter campaign and we won for a time.  I don't know where the whole thing is now.  

[unknown speaker]:  It’s a line item in the budget.

GERTH: Pardon me?  

MOULDS: It's a line item still.  

GERTH: OK, well that's wonderful.  If we're able to negotiate with the legislature, and we get some sympathy downtown, and so on.  I'm not very well connected with the real world anymore; but, I know enough to know that there is some resistance to that, and you're much more in touch with this stuff [gesturing to BERNARD, BUNCH, & BOILARD], by far, than I am.  But that was a real battle.   We ended up with [Chancellor] Barry Munitz on our side, which was very --  there was a big change when we changed Chancellors; and I don't have the vaguest idea what or where the current Chancellor is.   But on this question of flexibility. it's a whole different world now.  When we came in 1958, everything was a line item, spelled out in detail.  Your job, my job, your job – everybody.  Faculty were line items, and there was an effort made to control all of this.  So, you got somebody -- we got student-faculty ratio control, and if you're a political scientist, you were budgeted at 27 to one and if you were Nursing you were budgeted at ten to one, that kind of thing.  But it was central control, and the Chancellor's office basically liked that, that is the fiscal and administrative types.  And we got a notable change with Munitz, who brought in the guy named Richard West, who transformed our world financially, and actually we had a big assist from a member of the board.  He's from the Middle East -- his family is from the Middle East, and I can't remember his name now.  He endowed a program that I think still exists for outstanding faculty, and so on,  where, in a sense he --  the Board began to pry things loose.  This is off topic, though.  Really, it did affect the Center, because we would have to fight off interference, so to speak, with some --  you know, every couple of years somebody in the Chancellor's Office would want to start telling us what to do and how to appropriate money and so on. It would depend a lot on who was the Chancellor as to how far that kind of thing would go and so on.   On the whole --  well, on the whole integrity  of the financial stuff on this campus was-- fairly well maintained.  It varied from campus to campus and it depended on campus attitudes about how they wanted structure things vis-à-vis the system.  

SHULOCK: But you know, another --  

GERTH: It's more he ever wanted to know.  

SHULOCK: Another kind of netherworld situation with the Center --  and not only trying to balance between academia and the State Capital, but it's a system-wide entity but it's located on the Sacramento Campus.  So, I think that had raised some challenges like, what exactly--  who’s your audience, who are we serving, and who gets to call the shots.  

BOILARD: Absolutely.  And, I think it also illustrates-- going back to our initial point-- that here is one of now 23 campuses that trying to do something --  trying to make use of its unique settings, unique connections to the State Capital; and how willing is the Chancellor's Office to allow a campus to kind of go its own way, instead of just being one cookie cutter component of a 23 campus system.  So, I think -- you know, there's another whole level to this -- the relationships, we've talked about the relationship between the campus and downtown but there's also the campus versus the Chancellor's O.  

GERTH:  But they-- a theme -- how do I put this nicely--  theme right now -- about all the issues.  You and I have discussed this, Steve-- whether the Center for California studies is -- whether it's academic or whether it's plumbing.  And, the only practical answer to that is it's both.  And so, that's --  

BOILARD: And I think Willie Brown acknowledged that when he was asking for the Fellows program to have this academic component.  You need both.  That’s what --  

SABELHAUS: Is there still a minor?  Can you still minor?  

BOILARD: There is still a minor but I don't think it's active.  You know, I don't think anyone ever was enrolled in it.  But it's on the books, but yes.  

GERTH:  Where's the headquarters of the minor?  

BOILARD: In History department I believe.  

MOULDS: Really?  

TORCOM: Really?  

BOILARD: I --  

TORCOM: Would that mean – a faculty member…

BOILARD: I could be wrong.  

TORCOM: -- was doing the advising --  

BOILARD: It had been Brendan Lindsay in the History Department, who was kind of the California specialist there. He's been most interested in this, but I don't know if he has formal power.  

So, one other thing that we've talked about that I just wanted to circle back on is the conference -- I think we did for a couple of years on State Universities in State Capitals, and we had participation for this-- I think from every --  

GERTH: The first conference --  

BOILARD:  every state --  

GERTH:  every State University in a State Capital in the United States of America had somebody here.  

BOILARD: Donna, were you kind of instrumental in that?  

HOENIG-COUCH: Well, I worked with Don and his office, and I think we were working also with the Chapel Hill to organize and administer that conference.  

BOILARD: But was this through the Center of California Studies?  

GERTH: What year was that?

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, yes we did it through the -- It was '90 --  Don, I think it was '91.  

GERTH: OK, it was before Molly Broad -- yes.  

SHULOCK: And was there -- there was not a preexisting organization --  

HOENIG-COUCH: No.  

SHULOCK: It was more of an effort--  

HOENIG-COUCH: Right.  

SHULOCK: Recognize the --  

MOULDS: In Boston, we did one in East Lansing --  

GERTH: Springfield.  

MOULDS: Springfield, and here.  And there was a critical mass there, people who were specializing in this work, and really got it about applied work --  

HOENIG-COUCH: Right.  

MOULDS: In State Capitals  

GERTH: And we were the leaders, this campus was.  

[unknown speaker]: And is that '99?  

HOENIG-COUCH: No, I think it was ‘91, when we did that -- yes.  

GERTH: I remember, Betty, you went to a comparable kind of conference in Western Europe.  You and --  

MOULDS: Yes.  

GERTH: You and Tim, I think, were invited, were invited when they found out what was happening in this country.  I can't remember where the conference was, I think --  

MOULDS: Brussels.  

GERTH:  -- and so on.  The campus, in a sense, got a reputation nationally. You and I talked about that.  Unfortunately you're retiring [looking at BOILARD].  

BOILARD: Do you want to do another one?  

GERTH: Yeah, I think that would be a natural for this campus right now.  But there's all kinds of transition stuff going on, and so on.  But besides, when you are a retired President, you keep your mouth shut.   But, it was a natural for us, and it was very [inaudible]-- they were very interesting, you [looking at MOULDS] were more involved than I was.  

MOULDS: They were very interesting, and it's kind of morphed for some of the people who were involved in.  I mean, one of our members is now the Dean of the Price School at USC.  He was at East Lansing.   So, people who were in this field have gone on to positions of more university-based power than they had at the time when they were faculty representatives at that conference.  

BOILARD: We have a prop--  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, this was the link.  That's my --  

BOILARD: Hold it up the camera -- there you go. [Honig-Coucn holds up the Conference program]. Thanks.  Turn it around again.  Well, we talked about --  

GERTH: What year?  

HOENIG-COUCH:  ‘99.  

GERTH: Oh.  

BOILARD: Well, when we talk about relationships, and I think this illustrates Sacramento State not just as a state leader and serving the state through the Sacramento Semester Program and connecting to the state government, but here's more of a national leadership role of trying  to bring together other universities in similar settings to brainstorm and share about how they see their roles --  how we all see our roles in State Capitals, and the unique positions we're able to carry out.  And there were -- it was hosted twice at Sacramento State, is that correct?  

GERTH: Yes.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes. And then there was also the LSMI which was not connected with the University so much,  but the legislative staff management --  

MOULDS: Yes.  

HOENIG-COUCH: Institute?  And that went on for how many years?  

BOILARD: It's still going on.  

HOENIG-COUCH: It's still going on.  

BOILARD: Yes, so, the National Council of State Legislatures contracts with Sacramento State center-- through the Center for California Studies as well as USC's Price School, annually to put on a Management Leadership Institute for legislative staff all over the country.  And I think to date we have -- we've done it for 22, 23 years here in Sacramento and we've had about 47, 48 of the states in the nation participate.  Each year there's between 30 and 45 individuals who come for this eight-day long conference --  training institute.  

BUNCH:  And, the legislative… 

BOILARD: We have a “LegiSchool” --  

[unknown speaker]: another program that we haven't even talked about it so --  

[unknown speaker]: There was a --  

SABELHAUS: The budget came.  

HOENIG-COUCH: That's right.  [crosstalk].  

MOULDS: And the Taft Institute-- It predated all of what we've talked about so far-- that was funded by the Taft Foundation, and that was high school teachers who were brought in from-- I think a number of states, and they were here for a week or two weeks, and faculty within the Department of Government taught them about different approaches to handling civic education.  And --  

TORCOM: But that was run by the Government Department.  

MOULDS: Government Department ran that.  

TORCOM: Yes.  

GERTH: Why don't you mention legi-school?  

BOILDARD: Yes, Claire do you want to --  

BUNCH:  I was -- Donna, were you involved at the beginning of LegiSchool or --  

HOENIG-COUCH: Yes, we were -- [Crosstalk].  

SABELHAUS: Jeff Lustig hired Mark Nechodom to do a program called LEGIS and I have -- I told Steve before we began, a binder at home that's this tall.  It was the original-- I don't know if,  I have it but I'm happy to donate it--  which was the beginning of it, that Mark created.  And he had contacts with people like the US Forest Service and the Department of Fish and Game to help people in government understand the Legislative branch of government and their role in communicating with them and educating them.  

HOENIG-COUCH: That was the founding of that--the beginning.  The LegiSchool program is now a high school program.  

SABELHAUS: Yes, very different.  Yes.  

HOENIG-COUCH: That is -- yes, very different but civic education mission.   And it started in --  Claire, I can't even remember.  

BUNCH:  It was going.  Colleen was running it when I came in '98 so, that had to be '96 maybe when it started?  

HOENIG-COUCH: That could've been '95, '96.  Again, with a very small group of high school students and a summer program.  

BUNCH: And that continues to this day.   So, that's over 20 years that program.  

BOILARD: And they do both town hall meetings, where they bring together high school students well --  often in the Sacramento area we shall bring people from other parts of the state, and we run contests,  essay contests, photograph contests.  What's striking to me is that there --  the Center, which again began as a --  as this concept and a kind of unfunded, un-resourced opportunity, has over the years found a number of different kinds of programs, some of which are still around and some which aren't.  But it's just interesting to me how it's a platform and a good name with a lot of good relationships that over the years has been used to direct energy in different ways, whether it's the LSMI, whether it's the --  what's the name -- is it LINKS?  

BUNCH: LINKS.  

BOILARD: The LINKS conference, LegiSchool, Taff Institute --  it's been a number of different opportunities that have arisen and that's probably one of the strengths that's so distinct  from the rest of academia, where you have highly rigid, highly well-bound Faculty Senate --  you know, all these different kind of guardrails compared to the center.  And at least my experience when I was Executive Director, and I assume this was felt  by the other directors, is you want to do it?  Give it a shot, you know, it's -- let's see how it goes.  And that's pretty unique but I think that's kind of part of the success -- you know, one of the keys to the success of the center's had over the years is having the freedom to experiment and try.  Don, did you want to kind of round things out here?  I think you have some remarks you want --  about the building and elsewhere, but actually before we get to that, was there anything else on the Center of California Studies or Sacramento Semester program that we've talked about that somebody wants to share?  If not I think Don wanted to take us out, so to speak.  

GERTH: I want to tell you all how very impressed I am by this program.  A lot of people need to watch this [laughter] and I've learned from it because the Center has -- this whole --  the evolution of this whole notion of what the role of the State University in the State Capital can be  as a wonderful, wonderful story and it can be attributed  to all of you and other people like you who worked so very hard with this.  I want to -- I'd like to make a more general comment  at the end of this, the first taping, in the series of three, and I want to talk about technology, which everybody in my family can tell you, can testify,  I know very little about, so on.  But I think one of the things I've learned out of this experience putting this whole thing together and working with all of you, certainly working with Steve, is that the advantages of technology are more extraordinary than I ever realized in my amateurish kind of way.  And I want to thank a man named Spencer Freund—who many of you know-- because it was his vision that built this.  And he often had to fight an uphill battle within the University.  

SHULOCK: Because it wasn't in an Orange Book [laughter].  

GERTH: Yes or its successor document.  And the -- this is just extraordinary.  He worked to raise the money that made this possible.  We had to fight a real battle with our good friends in Long Beach and he fought that battle and prevailed.  I wrote a book after I retired that --  that I—where I did it with pen and paper, because --  and my wife gave me a hard time.  I'm not sure we need this recorded but I would give her, my handwriting was terrible.   When I was in the Air Force,  I was a finance officer at one point, and the check signing machine broke down, and our monthly payroll at the air force base was 14,000.   And my boss and I each --  I guess we each signed 7,000 checks, and my penmanship has never recovered.  Bev had to read  that penmanship and translate all these sheets of paper into what turned out to be 694 pages. And so, a lot of people were very tolerant.  Here we are filming and taping these conversations, and you know what's going to happen?  Our good friends here from the Creative Services --  I think it's called, will take the tape and put it in some kind of a machine and instead of hiring, for some incredible price per hour, a transcriber, the machine -- the computer-- will convert this into a script.  

And it will become available and end up with our good friend James Fox in the University's Archives.  I want to thank-- at the end of this first session-- I'd like to thank all of you in the technology, the Creative Services area, I really think you've been enormously helpful, as James has been and Sally Hitchcock, who I think it's not here in the room right now, making this whole thing work, and I thank all of you.  This has been a fascinating conversation.  I hope it's translated soon, because one of the things that's happening now in the life of the University, which I watch from a distance  but with an interest just like all of you have an interest, is the advent of what's happening downtown, and of course, the change going on in the leadership of the Center.  I know that's at some stage of being underway, and so on.  The Center for California Studies is an important instrument, not only of this campus.  One of the things I really liked about Barry Munitz as Chancellor, in contrast perhaps with people --  particularly one individual before him-- was that he understood what this Center could be for the California State University system as a whole.  And he helped us head off efforts that were being made at the Chancellor's Office to have us cease being a line item in the budget, which gave the campus too much control, and they wanted to control us and control this aspect of the University from the Chancellor's Office.   Barry helped us to help to head that off in his good days as our Chancellor.  I think that's it.  Thank you very, very much.  [Crosstalk].  

[01:39:11]
BEV GERTH: You did such a wonderful job.  I think it's going to be helpful for a lot of people.  You don't understand, if I'm sitting here and listening  to all of this, I think it's just incredible.  

GERTH:  And James, I hope you've been able to use this, a lot of people will probably watch the film.