September 10, 2007

ANNIVERSARY U

Cal State Fullerton Holds 50th Party; Courting Alums

By Jessica C. Lee

California State University, Fullerton, is throwing a bash for its 50th birthday. Suggested gifts: cash.

This month, the university kicks off its 50th anniversary celebration. The goal: showcase the growing school’s gains of the past 50 years and drum up support from alumni, executives and businesses.

This weekend, Cal State Fullerton has planned concerts, fireworks, a campuswide open house and an alumni homecoming. Events are set to continue throughout the year.

The university, which got its start with just 450 students, now is Orange County’s largest school with 35,000 students.

It’s also the largest among the 23 Cal State campuses and is the second largest university in the state, after the University of California, Los Angeles.

Each year, CSUF generates some $430 million in economic activity.

It’s the largest employer in Fullerton.

The school’s baseball team, the Titans, is a powerhouse.

“Cal State Fullerton has really come a long way,” said Milton Gordon, CSUF’s president for the past 17 years.

Like Disneyland and much of the rest of OC, Cal State Fullerton developed amid a sea of orange groves, according to Lawrence de Graaf, professor emeritus of history and the school’s historian. De Graaf was one of CSUF’s founding faculty members.

In 1957, CSUF became the 12th state university in California. State officials saw a need for the school with the county’s growing economy and population, de Graaf said.

Fullerton won out over some 20 cities hoping to land the university, in part because of its location and support from city officials. About 20 years earlier, the city was passed over by the University of California Regents for a campus, which went to Los Angeles instead.

Originally called Orange County State College, CSUF held its first classes at Fullerton’s Sunny Hills High School in fall of 1959 as plans were made for building a campus.

“In the early days, the campus had orange groves and three old houses and that was it,” de Graaf said. “Physically, the school has changed enormously.”

During CSUF’s first semester, a sparse faculty of five or so professors had old, dingy offices at nearby Fullerton College, de Graaf said. The offices were cramped and rickety, he said. Mice scurried around the rooms.

“Let’s just say the very early days weren’t the most glamorous,” de Graaf said.

Expanding Campus

Today, CSUF has a sprawling, 236-acre campus with 21 buildings. Two more are under construction: a $64 million business school, named after alumnus and donor Steven G. Mihaylo, and a $41 million student recreation center. Both are set to be done next year.

There’s also a satellite campus in Irvine, where upper division and graduate courses are taught. A Garden Grove campus teaches extension courses. The Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana showcases art by the university’s art department.

In the early days, CSUF focused on degrees in education, de Graaf said. It wasn’t until years later that it became a full liberal arts college, he said.

CSUF now has eight colleges: arts, business and economics, communications, education, engineering and computer science, health and human development, humanities and social sciences and natural sciences and mathematics.

This year, it added programs including a master’s in social work, a four-year nursing degree and a doctorate in education, according to Gordon.

The business school, which Princeton Review noted as one of the best in 2006, recently redesigned its honors and master’s programs to include more electives, according to Dean Anil Puri.

The business school, the largest in the state, is creating a joint undergraduate degree in entertainment and business with the university’s school of communications, he said.

CSUF saw rapid growth early on, according to de Graaf. The state had its sights on making the university one of the largest public schools in California, he said.

But, in a dilemma that continues today, Sacramento struggled to come up with money to support the growing student body and faculty, de Graaf said.

Finding money to grow is the school’s biggest challenge today. Earlier this year, university trustees approved a 10% increase in CSUF student fees.

“Funding is still an issue we face today,” Gordon said. “It’s good but it needs to be better.”

That’s led Gordon, Puri and others to reach out to alumni to help fund key projects, including the building for the business school.

The university is a relative newcomer to raising money, well behind private school Chapman University in Orange and the University of California, Irvine.

“We haven’t been in the fundraising business that long, only since the early 1990s downturn when we were told to go out and raise money,” Gordon said in an earlier interview. “So we’re at a great disadvantage. We don’t have a culture of alumni who give money back.”

Other challenges include California’s high cost of living, which makes it hard for CSUF to attract professors, Gordon said.

CSUF seeks to add 100 professors a year through 2010, he said. In the 2005-2006 school year, it hired 93 professors. For the year through June, it hired 83.

Two housing developments, University Gables and University Heights, are expected to help with recruiting. They offer affordable homes to professors and other staff.

But CSUF still needs to find a way to increase salaries so that employees can live in the area comfortably, Gordon said.

For growth, the university also has to look beyond Fullerton, where its campus is largely hemmed in by development.

Gordon hopes that the university will be able to acquire permanent land at its Irvine campus at the former El Toro Marine base.

The school also is in talks with the city of Tustin about possibly getting land at its former Marine base, he said.

“We’re basically looking for land anywhere that’s not too far from our main campus,” Gordon said.

But finding fixes to CSUF’s problems takes money, Gordon said.

That’s where the 50th anniversary comes in.

5,000 Expected

About 5,000 people are expected to partake in the celebration’s opening weekend most of them alumni, Gordon said. He’s hoping the festivities will attract donors.

Gordon declined to say how much CSUF is spending on the anniversary celebration, but said it would be “a lot.”

There are about 180,000 people who’ve graduated from Cal State Fullerton. Eighty percent of them live in Southern California, according to Greg Nelson, president of the university’s alumni association board and a vice president of Washington Mutual Insurance Services Inc. in Irvine.

“Alumni play a crucial role in helping the university grow,” Nelson said. “Not only are they getting something when they graduate, but they have the opportunity to give back. Our goal is to strengthen that relationship.”

Notable alumni benefactors include Mihaylo and Dan Black.

Black, president of Reno-based ProThera Inc., graduated in 1967. Since 1999, Black has been giving money to start the Dan Black Program in Physics and Business.

Most recently, he gave $4.5 million to the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The money is going to refurbish laboratories, buy equipment and finance student scholarships.

Black said he became a benefactor because Cal State Fullerton “changed (his) life.”

“I wouldn’t be where I am now,” Black said. “There are students there now who were like me. They’re trying to make something out of their lives. They deserve to have better facilities and great instructors. That’s why I give back.”

Mihaylo, a 1969 graduate and founder of Arizona’s Inter-Tel Inc., pledged $4.5 million to the College of Business and Economics to build its new school in 2004. At the time, it was one of the largest cash pledges in the university’s history.

The gift sparked some debate on campus as business students brought up Inter-Tel’s $8.7 million in mail fraud and antitrust fines that surfaced under Mihaylo, who wasn’t accused of wrongdoing.

“It’s not just for the name on the building. I want to help the school’s future, to help it build its reputation as a nationally recognized institution,” Mihaylo said.

Many point to Cal State Fullerton’s significance to the local economy as a reason why people need to become involved with it.

“Cal State Fullerton is the largest employer in the city of Fullerton with an undeniably significant impact on the local economy,” said Robert Ferrier, assistant city manager.

The university generates more than $140 million in federal, state and local taxes a year.

University officials say the students and employees have fueled OC’s economy. CSUF has helped revitalize OC’s downtrodden areas, including Fullerton’s bustling downtown, which now has some 50 restaurants, bars and shops that cater to the university crowd.

CSUF has attracted its share of business supporters, though not as many as Chapman or UC Irvine.

A good chunk of them sit on the dean’s advisory board for the college of business and economics. They include Paul Folino, chairman of Costa Mesa-based Emulex Corp., Rick Rayson, managing partner of Deloitte & Touche’s Irvine office, K.P. Bala Balkrishna, president of Costa Mesa-based Commercial Bank of California, and Dean Samsvick, managing partner of KPMG LLP in Costa Mesa.

Folino, who has a university driveway named after him, said a good chunk of his workers are CSUF graduates.

“The fact is, the school produces a good workforce, which is a good resource for businesses here,” Folino said.

The school’s accounting program is a good recruiting pool, said Rayson of Deloitte & Touche.

“We probably get more direct recruits from Cal State Fullerton than we do from any of the other local universities,” he said.

Folino, among the university’s other benefactors, said he’s trying to get the word out about CSUF’s money raising campaign.

“Right now it’s all about increasing the endowment,” he said.