San Francisco citizens, outraged by the "quackery and empiricism" of the city's public school teachers, demand that the city ensure the quality of education for their children. To remedy the situation, city officials establish a normal (teacher training) class in the autumn of 1855. John Swett, disappointed gold seeker who himself held a normal school education from Massachusetts, is chosen to instruct the class -- to impart the best teaching techniques to the future teachers of a new city.
The population of school-age children in the state jumps from 38,000 in 1847, to 68,000 in 1861. The city's normal class is unable to keep up with the burgeoning need for qualified teachers. A committee of concerned teachers drafts a strong case for establishing a state normal school in San Francisco. The state legislature approves the request, providing $3,000 to establish the California State Normal School -- the first state-supported institution of higher learning in California.
Enrollment at the California State Normal School in San Francisco increases from 6 students, on its first day, to 384.
Ellis Holmes, principal of the Girls' High and Normal School in San Francisco, realizes that the existing Normal School isn't keeping up with the demand for qualified teachers. The city approves his addition of an advanced teacher-training program to the high school curriculum, providing a year of instruction for girls who want to pursue a teaching career. This teacher-training class is SF State's direct precursor.
The California State Normal School's early days are volatile: In five years, it has five different leaders and moves to four different locations. One of its earliest principals asserts that "gold fever and the restlessness of California society hindered the institution's progress" in San Francisco. As a result of pressure from the State Superintendent of Education, the City of San Jose, and powerful railroad magnates and silver kings, the Normal School is relocated to "the cow pastures of San Jose."
Even after the California Normal School is moved to San Jose, Girls' High continues to offer teacher-training classes in the evenings. It is now the only publicly-supported institution in San Francisco where a young woman can pursue training for a teaching career.
John Swett takes over leadership of Girls' High and Normal School and fights tirelessly for the establishment of teachers' rights in California, including academic tenure. From its inception through its final transformation into San Francisco State Normal School in 1899, more than 1,500 young women receive their teacher training at Girls' High. Of the 514 teachers in San Francisco in 1899, 425 have graduated from Girls' High and Normal School.
Due to political pressures, the one-year teacher-training class separates from the Girls' High to form the San Francisco City Normal School. Although it is the only normal school in the state to require a high-school degree for admission, and the only school of its type to require practice teaching in real classrooms, local tax support drops away from the program in 1899.
San Francisco is riding high on a wave of prosperity. The city's population jumps from 300,000 in 1890 to nearly 400,000 in 1900. In 1894, the City holds its first world's fair, the California Midwinter International Exposition, in Golden Gate Park, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors and showing the world that San Francisco is a great metropolis of substantial achievement and great promise.
A contingent of San Francisco State Normal School teachers, students, and local supporters press the Legislature in Sacramento to convert the school into a state-funded normal school. With great effort, the bill passes by a narrow margin; the institution that will become San Francisco State is established with an appropriation of $10,000 and opens in a rented building.
Frederic Lister Burk is appointed the first president of the San Francisco State Normal School. A scholar of child development and psychology, he'd worked for six years as a journalist in the Bay Area before teaching in public and private schools to finance his post-graduate work at Stanford. He chooses the motto Experientia docet -- "Experience teaches" (Seneca) -- for the new school, and incorporates practical teaching experience into the curriculum.
San Francisco State Normal School's first "Circular of Information" (catalog) states that 'candidates for admission must be at least sixteen years of age, of good moral character, and in perfect health" and that "tuition is free in all departments . . . Board and room may be obtained in families from $4 or $5 per week upward."
San Francisco State first catches the eyes of the world with its radical teaching method of "individual instruction." This teaching style recognizes that the new city is populated by immigrants from across the globe, and that its children have different social backgrounds, varying abilities, and learn best at their own pace. The schoolteachers graduating from SF State become known throughout the state as well-prepared and dedicated, and their methods are copied as far away as England and Australia.
SF State Normal School graduates its first class -- 36 women.
The SF State Normal School's building, a plain stone structure on Powell Street near Clay, is destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, but few students miss it. Of the old building, Dean of Women Mary Ward will later write: "It would be difficult to locate another normal school building that was as old, inconvenient, or depressing."
Ten days after SF State's building and all its records are destroyed during the great fire and earthquake, President Burk finds a new site for the school on upper Market Street, and classes resume in June. It is the first public school in the city to re-open after the fire. For the next two decades at the Buchanan Street campus, Burk leads the school to national prominence as an innovator in education.
Burk and his faculty are fifty years ahead of their time in conducting research and reporting to the teaching profession about such curriculum concepts as what will later be known as "modern math" and "ungraded classrooms."
The State Board of Education reports to the Governor: "California has reason to be proud of her normal schools and of her generosity in providing, equipping, and supporting them . . . A larger percentage of the teachers of California than any other state have had advantage of normal training."
SF State's dramatic and moving graduation ceremony, the "Ritual of the Teachers' Guild Service," begins to draw such large crowds that it moves to the Greek Theater in Berkeley. Wearing classical, austere robes as they carry the light of education into their community, the graduating women look much like the figure in SF State's future official Seal.
SF State Normal School has acquired enough momentum and liberal arts courses to begin offering a bachelor's degree option. The school's name is changed to San Francisco State Teacher's College.
SF State Teachers' College receives authorization to grant the bachelor of arts degree.
Archibald B. Anderson becomes SF State's second president. Anderson was a student in Santa Rosa High School when Frederic Burk was the principal. Years later, Anderson was Superintendent of Schools in San Rafael when Burk invited him to join the SF State faculty, where he served as a dean for twenty years until he became president.
Following the death of SFSU's President Anderson, Dean of Women Mary A. Ward serves as acting president until a new candidate is appointed that fall. Ward, herself a graduate of SF State and an expert in the training of mathematics teachers, serves the College in several capacities for a total of 44 years.
Alexander C. Roberts begins his 18-year presidency.
SF State's colors, green and gold, are adopted by University of San Francisco (some SF Staters accuse USF of "stealing" their colors). SF State Teachers College changes its colors to purple and gold.
The Depression sharply curtails the need for new teachers. If SF State is to continue providing its students with career options, it must offer more than the teaching credential: it must become a college. The curriculum expands, and more men begin enrolling.
Men's sports, particularly football, become more popular at SF State. After SF State's student newspaper, the "Bay Leaf," calls for the school to adopt a mascot, a reader proposes the alligator -- because "it is strong and we hope our teams have strength. It is well-built and is steadfast, steadily moving toward its goal." The reader also proposes spelling the Golden Gaters with an "e" to typify our San Franciscan location to strangers. Students vote to adopt it. That August, however, the Bay Leaf begins inconsistently misspelling the name as "'Gator," and after the paper eventually changes its own name to the "Golden Gater," the name and spelling sticks.
The demand for an SF State education continues to increase, and the school outgrows the cramped 4/5 acre campus it has occupied since the 1906 earthquake. At the same time, with the Hetch Hetchy water project complete and water flowing into San Francisco from the Sierra, the projected reservoirs at Lake Merced are no longer needed. President Roberts approaches the state legislature and persuades it to purchase 54 acres on the lake from the City of San Francisco for the new college campus, replacing the aging building off upper Market Street
Now that SF State Teachers College has attained liberal arts college status, its name changes to San Francisco State College.
The ratio of women to men now enrolled at SF State is 2 to 1.
Although the land for the new campus is formally acquired and ground first broken in 1939 -- an event coinciding with the 170th anniversary of the discovery of the Golden Gate -- World War II intervenes, and funds for new buildings are slow in coming. It wasn't until 1949 when construction began on the first permanent structures -- a stadium and physical education building, the two facilities most lacking in the previous, tiny campus. The $12 million campus will be officially dedicated in October 1954.
J. Paul Leonard leaves his education professorship at Stanford to become president of SF State, seeing the appointment as a challenge to take "a college with a creditable history -- remake its instructional program to serve an ever-widening group of Bay Area young people, tie it closely to the life and interests of the Bay Area, build an entirely new campus."
To bring intellectual cohesion to the burgeoning College, President Leonard and SF State's faculty create the college's General Education program. This innovative model, which attracts nationwide attention in the late 1950s, requires all students to take a core curriculum, regardless of their chosen field. General Education becomes the common bond unifying all majors at San Francisco State.
When SF State's attempts to acquire additional land for the new Lake Merced campus are thwarted, President Leonard and student body President Izzy Pivnik, backed by student protesters, meet with Mayor Lapham at City Hall. The mayor asks Pivnik: "Who are you, and why did you bring [the students] down here?" Pivnik replies: "My name doesn't matter . . . what does matter is that I and many other of those students out there waded through the mud of France to protect democracy in this country, and we are here to tell you that the action of your Board of Supervisors does not represent the kind of democracy we fought for." After a protracted battle that reaches as far as the state legislature, the College is able to purchase the additional land.
President Leonard successfully negotiates with the University of California and wins the right for all state colleges to offer graduate degrees. San Francisco State offers its first master's degree in education.
During the McCarthy era, a law is passed requiring all state employees to sign a "Loyalty Oath" swearing allegiance to the United States. Seven SF State faculty members refuse to sign, and lose their jobs.
The influx of returning WW II veterans swells the college population from 1,117 in 1945-46 to 4,390 in 1950-51.
SF State English professor Ruth Witt Diamant, with encouragement from her friend, the poet Dylan Thomas, establishes a place where both known and emerging writers can read for the "extremely lively and stimulating group of students" found at SF State. The Poetry Center quickly flourishes with readings from such diverse and international writers as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Chen Shi-Hsiang, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams.
California grows at the rate of about 400,000 people a year; approximately 180,000 children enter the elementary schools each year from 1958 to 1961.
Glenn S. Dumke becomes SF State's fifth -- and, at age 41, SFSU's youngest -- president.
With California's population increasing by some 1,500 people per day, a master plan is needed for the orderly coordination of higher learning in the state. President Dumke is appointed a member of the Survey Team established to prepare a Master Plan for Higher Education in California. This team formulates the Donahoe Higher Education Act (eventually approved on April 27, 1960), grouping SF State with other California colleges into a single system with its own Board of Trustees centered in Long Beach -- the beginning of the California State University. Dumke goes on to serve the new CSU system as Chancellor for 20 years.
When the House Un-American Activities Committee meets in San Francisco, students from SF State, U.C. Berkeley, and other campuses demonstrate and disrupt the Committee's hearings in City Hall. The students are fire-hosed down the steps and dragged, unresisting, to jail.
Frank L. Fenton, Dean of Instruction and Professor of English, serves as acting president after the resignation of Dumke.
Paul A. Dodd, a specialist in economics, industrial relations, and educational administration, becomes SF State's sixth president.
SF State's Film Department is nationally recognized as one of the best in America, and students at universities across the country wait in line for a chance to buy tickets to see the "Film Finals" of SF State students' culminating work.
Stanley F. Paulson, Associate Professor of Speech, serves as acting president from fall 1965 to spring 1966.
Before the drug is declared illegal in 1966, the Psychology Department's Psychedelic Research Institute is inaugurated to test the creative power of LSD. Subjects are asked to bring with them professional projects on which they've been working; while taking LSD under the auspices of the Institute, one man solves a major design problem of Stanford's linear accelerator, and another subject manages to complete a set of plans for a shopping center that he'd been commissioned to design.
SF State's Experimental College -- the largest, most successful in the nation -- is begun by a group of students who are dissatisfied with "irrelevant" curriculum. With help from some faculty, students work out designs for several courses to supplement or replace General Education requirements. Some of the experimental courses are extremely successful: John Handy's evening jazz class draws over 80 people in fall 1968, and Steve Gaskin's "Monday Night Class" grows to over 1,000 students, eventually migrating to a large, rural commune in Tennessee. By 1967, more than 2,000 students take courses offered through the Experimental College.
John H. Summerskill becomes SF State's seventh president.
SF State once again captures the nation's attention as two turbulent years of sometimes violent protest remake the College into one of the most visible emblems of the sixties.
By picket lines, "sit-ins," Administration Building break-ins, and other means, students protest racial discrimination, the Vietnam War, the draft, and "irrelevant" curriculum, pressing for campus reform. Early in the midst of these changes, Summerskill resigns, and Robert Smith, a professor of education, becomes SF State's eighth president in June 1968.
Events come to a head in 1968 with the beginning of the longest campus strike in the nation's history. In November, the CSU orders President Smith to suspend controversial teaching assistant George Murray, a grad student in English and Black Panther Minister of Education. In protest, the Black Students Union and the Third World Liberation Front (a coalition of the Black Students Union, the Latin American Students Organization, the Filipino-American Students Organization, and El Renacimiento, a Mexican-American student organization) strike and present their set of 15 "non-negotiable" demands, which include the expansion of the College's new Black Studies Department (the nation's first), the creation of a School of Ethnic Studies, and increased recruiting and admissions of minority students.
After a week of confrontations between students and police, the College is closed. Campus facilities sustain widespread minor damage. A faculty grievance committee finds that George Murray was suspended without due process.
In November 1968, President Smith resigns, and S. I. Hayakawa is named acting president. Hayakawa reopens the campus within a week, and when striking students position a sound truck at the corner of 19th and Holloway, he climbs up and gains international attention by disconnecting the speaker wires to make his own speech.
The campus closes early for the holidays. When it reopens in January 1969, the SF State American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1532, which had earlier demonstrated in December, resumes its picket line around the campus. In addition to urging the Trustees to negotiate with the students, the AFT is striking over teaching workload and other labor issues.
In late February 1969, the SF State AFT local announces a tentative strike agreement, and on March 20 an agreement is signed between representatives of the Third World Liberation Front, the Black Students Union, and campus officials.
On March 21, 1969, after months of strife, the strike officially comes to an end, with both sides claiming victory: the administration, for having kept the campus open and reserving the right to regulate faculty and staff hiring and admissions, and the strikers for having established the School of Ethnic Studies and expanded the Black Studies Department.
San Francisco State College becomes California State University, San Francisco. Although the campus celebrated the change to university status, "San Francisco Staters" objected to their alma mater's new name.
Paul F. Romberg is appointed SF State's tenth president. He is the only president in the CSU system to have served as president of two CSU institutions -- in 1967, he had served as founding president of California State College, Bakersfield.
Governor Reagan signs a measure changing CSU, San Francisco's name to San Francisco State University, making law what most of the campus community already called itself. In fact, when the school's name was last changed -- from SF State College to CSU, San Francisco in 1972 -- only the word "College" was deleted from the sign in front of the campus, leaving "San Francisco State."
SFSU's Student Union opens. The need for a cultural and social center of SF State's campus had been acknowledged as far back as 1931 ("Cal has its Stephens Union, Stanford has its Quad, and State has its . . . corridors?" quipped one SF State "Bay Leaf" editorial). Paffard Keatinge Clay designed the building to provide SFSU with a "village" center, incorporating ideas expressed by students. The building's two jutting towers, which represent "sound" and "silence," continue to draw praise and criticism -- Herb Caen likened it to "two sinking ships" -- as well as more than 18,000 visitors a day while classes are in session.
NEXA (originally known as "Science and Humanities: A Program for Convergence") is founded under a development grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), offering team-taught courses to link the "two worlds" of science and the humanities.
On the occasion of SFSU's 75th graduation, President Emeritus J. Paul Leonard returns to the campus he helped build and delivers a commencement address to thousands of bachelor's and master's candidates -- many times the number of the entire student body in 1945, when he was president. Leonard exhorts the new graduates to understand "that education is transformation" and to have the courage to "move into the conflict, into the arena where the action is; to get your hands dirty with experience" because "learning is freedom."
Disabled students hold Awareness Day, complete with checkers for the blind and an appearance by Miss Wheelchair California 1976.
President Romberg secures a federal lease for 25 acres of San Francisco Bay shoreline in Tiburon for $1 and establishes what will later be renamed in his honor as the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies -- a national and international center for environmental research and education.
SFSU, in cooperation with the San Francisco Community College District, begins holding 300 continuing education courses (most of them business-related) in a new, 8-story building on Fourth and Mission Streets in downtown San Francisco. This is California's first such city/state joint venture in education.
The Urban Mission Task Force is established to examine ways for SFSU to link its programs more closely with the community, resulting in the growth of internships and other forms of field-based learning that will eventually provide opportunities for thousands of students.
State legislature approves transfer to SFSU of the Sutro Library, a branch of the California State Library with special collection strengths in natural history, Mexicana, and records of the Pacific voyages of discovery. The Sutro Library will eventually share a building with the Labor Archives & Research Center, founded in 1985 by trade union leaders, historians, labor activists, and university administrators as a unit of SFSU's library system.
After President Romberg retires, Chia-Wei Woo becomes SF State's eleventh president and the first Chinese-American president of a large university. In addition to placing a new focus on faculty research at SFSU, Woo will stress making SF State "The City's University" and will strengthen SFSU's international curriculum and Pacific Rim ties, starting a business school program in London, and other programs in Shanghai and Paris.
San Francisco State Week, the largest celebration in the history of "the City's University," shows off SFSU as a "life-enriching resource for all people of our cosmopolitan area, at all points in their lives."
Robert A. Corrigan becomes SF State's twelfth president. A recognized authority on the American poet Ezra Pound, he has a strong interest in ethnic studies, having established the Afro-American Studies and Women's Studies programs at the University of Iowa, where he taught English and American civilization from 1964-1973.
San Francisco's third annual New Vaudeville Festival takes place at SFSU, where it originated, featuring performers and groups, including Avner the Eccentric.
In October, hundreds gather to mark the 20th anniversary of the student-faculty strike. Film star Danny Glover, who was an SFSU student during the strike, tells the crowd how the strike affected his outlook as an actor, and that the same issues that students were striking for in 1968 -- among them racial equality and ethnic studies -- need to be fought for today. "We didn't give up, and you can't either."
SF State's Educational Opportunity Program gets a 3-year grant to begin a faculty-student mentorship program designed to improve retention and graduation rates for students of color.
Amid a national shortage of nurses, SFSU's School of Nursing creates a pilot program for second career students leading to an accelerated master's degree. Classes fill up immediately.
SFSU receives nearly $10 million in 1987-88 for research, instruction, and public service.
AudioVision, created at SF State to provide audio description of movies, plays, and TV shows for the visually impaired, premiers internationally at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1991, AudioVision will win an Emmy for engineering achievement.
The campus community pulls together after the Loma Prieta earthquake; SFSU faculty and student volunteers offer health assessments, counseling, and meal delivery to its nearby neighbors in Park Merced, especially the elderly.
SFSU receives $976,000 from the National Science Foundation to offer recombinant DNA workshops for high school teachers. The program is the only one of its kind in the country.
SFSU's new student residence apartments open, providing living space for 578 students in a national design award-winning high-rise with ocean views.
Ralf Hotchkiss, engineering professor, wins a $260,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" for his innovative wheelchair design and the establishment of low-tech factories in third-world countries.
SFSU's landscaping wins an award from San Francisco Beautiful, which calls the University's landscaping efforts "more in keeping with a private garden or a public park than an institution."
The Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism opens with $100,000 start-up support from the Gannett Foundation. The Center's aim: to help the profession reach its goal of matching the ethnic makeup of the nation's news rooms to that of the population by the year 2000.
The Roving Resume Writers of the Bay Area Homelessness Project -- created by SFSU students -- is profiled on ABC-TV's "World News Tonight" and receives $250,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to expand its work.
SF State music professor Wayne Peterson wins the Pulitzer Prize in music for his composition, "The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark."
SFSU now has more than 100 community-related programs, institutes, or centers, offering students credit and real-life experience while addressing such varied issues as the health of San Francisco Bay, quality child care, small business success, work force retraining, and K-12 student math skills.
The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs reports that the number of faculty receiving grants or other awards has doubled in the last year, and that the award total has increased by 23 percent, to $14.9 million.
SF State opens its Conservation Genetics Lab -- one of the only two such facilities in the U.S.
SFSU's College of Extended Learning hosts a grand opening for its new Downtown Center, which triples SFSU's downtown space for professional job training/retraining and allows the University to meet the growing demand for such programs. Located at the very edge of San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch, this Center will house SF State's nationally acclaimed Multimedia Studies Program, the largest in the nation.
The Cesar E. Chavez Institute for Public Policy is established. The Institute will help create a base for academic research on critical issues facing Raza Communities in California.
SFSU moves up from fifth to fourth place nationally as an overall producer of ethnic minority graduates (all groups, all disciplines) in the second annual survey by the educational journal "Black Issues in Higher Education."
After a construction period beginning with a ceremonial "sky-breaking" in which alumni artists Annette Bening, B.D. Wong, and others become the building's "godparents," the new Arts and Industry addition is opened. The building includes state-of-the-art facilities, including a 47' x 52' film sound stage, an animation studio, recording and mixing rooms, CAD/CAM labs, an art gallery and exhibit preparation facility, 30 film- and sound-editing labs, and the August Coppola Theatre -- a 150-seat film screening room.
The Western Association of Schools and Colleges' reaccreditation team describes SF State as "a vital and energetic institution with extraordinary promise; an institution that cares deeply about its students, a campus committed to multiculturalism and to opportunity for a wide range of students . . . an institution that cares also about its community and that contributes regularly and substantially to the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. We were impressed, we were challenged, we were stimulated."
With some $300 million over 10 years, SFSU's capital outlay program is the largest in the CSU system.
SF State's varsity forensics team is ranked #1 in the state, and #2 in the nation.
SFSU's Cinema Department produces one of four national winners and one of five additional finalists in the prestigious Eastman Scholars competition.
SFSU's Journalism Department's student newspaper, "Golden Gater," wins multiple awards in the annual "Best in the West" competition sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Publishers.
Students completing SFSU's post-baccalaureate pre-med program achieve an 85 percent medical school acceptance rate.
SFSU opens its new Humanities Building -- the largest classroom building on campus, containing museum exhibit and conservation space, a conference center, presentation and seminar rooms, and computer-equipped labs, all surrounding a triangular courtyard.
After nearly 10 years of research, S.F. State astronomers Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler make an historic discovery of two new Jupiter-sized planets within 35 light years of Earth, including one that could potentially contain the requisite elements for organic life. Less than three months later, they discover another planet nearly 40 light years away. Their work receives immediate, international recognition; their discovery is TIME magazine's cover story.
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at commencement, calling SF State "A great public university . . . A university that takes the education of all people seriously: women, minorities, immigrants, refugees. Everyone who is willing to work hard and accept responsibility is welcome here."
The Commission on University Strategic Planning (CUSP) is created by President Corrigan and SFSU's Academic Senate. This 24-person body -- whose elected and appointed members include faculty, staff, students, and administrators -- will begin the most extensive and broadly participatory self-examination in the University's history. CUSP is charged with developing a structure, process, and timetable for the strategic plan for implementing the University's mission:
- To create and maintain an environment for learning that promotes respect for and appreciation of scholarship, freedom, human diversity, and the cultural mosaic of the City of San Francisco and the Bay Area
- To promote excellence in instruction and intellectual accomplishment, and
- To provide broadly accessible higher education for residents of the region and state, as well as the nation and world.
President Corrigan is tapped by U.S. President Bill Clinton to chair the national committee of the America Reads literacy program. Speaking at the White House kick-off for the program, Corrigan states that the program "gives our students the opportunity to serve their communities in meaningful ways, involves universities in improving the lives of the people around them, and utilizes the energy and expertise of our students and faculty to heighten the achievements of children."
Of the 347 new tenure-track faculty hires made between fall 1988 and fall 1996, 74.6 percent have been women and people of color, with 41.5 percent people of color and 54 percent women. By the fall 1996 semester, 26 percent of the full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty were minority and 39.5 percent were women.
The Morrison Artists' Series, originally established at SFSU in 1956 to "offer the finest music in the most accessible way," opens its 40th anniversary season of free concerts by world-renowned chamber music groups. This alliance between a large public university, a private trust, and a nonprofit performing arts presenter is recognized nationally as a model of cooperation and innovation.
Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC), SFSU's new honors science program for traditionally underrepresented students, is added to already existing programs in SFSU's Unified Plan to enhance and support minority science education from kindergarten to the Ph.D. level. Funded with a yearly grant of $400,000 by the National Institute of Health, the five-year-long MARC is projected to receive approximately $2.2 million.
The Marian Wright Edelman Institute for the Study of Children, Youth, and Families is inaugurated at SF State. In addition to offering an interdisciplinary bachelor's degree program in Child and Adolescent Development to prepare the teachers, service providers, policy developers, and graduate-level researchers who are so urgently needed in the field, the Institute commits to serving as a powerful tool of outreach, advocacy, and research.
The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair -- the cornerstone of SFSU's new Jewish Studies Program, and the first endowed chair ever devoted to Judaism and social responsibility -- is established by philanthropist Richard Goldman to focus on the teaching and research of Jewish ethics and civic responsibility in the fields of health care, business, education, and politics.
SF State now offers more than 200 undergraduate and graduate degrees. Forty nine departments offer courses with an internship, service- or field-based learning component, enrolling approximately 1 in 10 students in any given semester. By graduation, over 20 percent of SFSU's students have had such a community service experience.
Grants and contracts to SFSU continue to rise, more than doubling over the last six years, reaching a projected $24 million for 1996-1997. The University increasingly finds itself keeping company with "research" universities -- becoming, for example, one of the few comprehensive universities to be truly competitive for prestigious RO1 grants from the National Institutes of Health.
San Francisco State University celebrates 100 years of opportunity.
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Archived Information. Last modified March 20, 2009, by University Communications