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President Corrigan's ViewPointViewPoint by President Corrigan is published in First Monday for the faculty and staff at SFSU on the first Monday of the month during the fall and spring semesters by the Public Affairs and Publications offices. EXT 8-1665. pubcom@sfsu.edu |
This is not at all the same physical campus it was 18 months or even a year ago. The new cafes that have sprung up around campus - on 19th Avenue, behind Burk Hall, and near the Lakeview Center; the new student apartment complex that truly is a Village; the long-wished-for center that brings all student services together in one building; an on-campus credit union that offers free ATM services and free checking for students; an upcoming Internet Cafe; the acquisition of housing for students, faculty and staff on the border of campus; and the first expansion beyond the seemingly inflexible boundaries of our 19th Avenue campus since 1954 all are making this a better community in which to live, work and learn.
These projects - and more like them - are all the work of an organization that in recent years has generated and carried out numerous projects that will benefit the campus far into the future: the University Foundation.
Yet despite its very visible record of fine work, the Foundation is far less well understood and appreciated than I believe it should be. Many on campus are unclear about the Foundation's relationship to the University, its distinct difference from foundations on other CSU campuses, and what it actually does.
The Foundation is a CSU auxiliary, a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation (formally known as the SFSU Foundation Inc.) that supports itself and, in fact, generates funds that can be used for the University's benefit. While it is not legally a part of the University, it exists to serve SFSU - "to promote, assist and enhance the educational mission," in the words of its official charter.
Our Foundation differs in a key respect from those of our sister campuses. While they focus on grants and contracts administration, we run almost all awards and projects through the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP). Until 1990, our Foundation was like others in the CSU. That year, we made a fundamental change. In response to a widely perceived faculty need for stronger and more integrated support of our whole research and sponsored programs effort, we expanded the staff in ORSP and moved responsibility for handling externally funded grants and contracts to the University. Three years later, a task force chaired by Professor Julien Wade endorsed that decision and proposed a number of refinements, which were accepted. The effectiveness of moving grants administration from the Foundation into the University shows in the dramatic rise in research awards to SFSU faculty since then, from about $9 million in 1990 to almost $43 million last year.
At this point, the Foundation began to reinvent itself to meet a new main mission: to engage in entrepreneurial ventures, particularly those that the University, as a state agency, could not undertake, and to do this for the benefit of students, faculty and staff. The Foundation Board, once, appropriately, majority faculty, began to recruit community members. In the mid-'90s, we hired our first-ever Vice President for University Advancement, Jim Collier, and made serving as executive director of the Foundation part of his portfolio. He has been assisted ably by Larry Ware in his role as the Foundation's director of administration. The Foundation Board commissioned a study, which led, in 1996, to adoption of a strategic plan. As then-Foundation Planning Committee Chair (now Board Chair) John Jacobs said, the SFSU Foundation was "about to...become something unique within the CSU system."
What does the SFSU Foundation do?
It maintains some familiar functions: It administers a small number of grants - far fewer than the 450-plus currently running through ORSP - some of them holdovers from the old days, others there because the grantor (the Ford Foundation, for one) requires they be handled through a non-profit. The Foundation also manages the University's endowment and handles funds for special events such as conferences and institutes.
In its new role, the Foundation is the major provider of food services on campus - all food outside the Student Center, in fact. It saw - and met - the need for more campus gathering spots and food services, hence the new cafes. It operates all campus vending machines outside the Student Center. It hired and oversees Chartwell's, the company that provides the meals for our residence hall students and caters many campus events.
The Foundation identifies other services the campus could use and brings them to us: an on-site car rental site, Enterprise; a new mini-mart (to be run by the Bookstore) Internet cafe, and high-end printing service, all opening soon in the Village.
These ventures, after statutory reserve requirements for foundations are met, generate seed money for future projects and also allow the Foundation to make donations to the University, to help support special programs such as the Presidential Scholars and the new University magazine. These revenue-producing ventures also help us carry out many of the "user-friendly" recommendations that emerged from CUSP I.
It is important to note that any income, such as interest, generated by faculty grants the Foundation administers is never used for entrepreneurial activities.
Nowhere has the redesigned SFSU Foundation been more markedly successful than in the area of housing. With a private partner, the Foundation developed the funding package that brought our spectacular Village at Centennial Square into being. If, in the present fiscal climate, we had pursued a student housing project through the traditional CSU route, we would have had to get in line, and the wait would necessarily have been long. (Consider the Library project.) Rather than the five-year - or longer - process we could have expected, the Foundation brought us 760 new student beds in about 21 months. The Foundation owns the Village, not to mention 180 apartments in Parkmerced (more about this in a moment).
And as part of the Village project, the Foundation negotiated an exceptional add-on: the Student Services Building, a real enhancement for SFSU students.
The Foundation also has done the seemingly impossible: It found ways to expand a campus that we have long thought was "land-locked," surrounded by neighbors who left us no room to gain much-needed land. And in the process, it is helping us to address campus housing needs. Two years ago, the Foundation succeeded in acquiring the "Tapia Triangle," from Parkmerced - 27 units right on the campus border that we are renting to faculty and staff at below-market rates.
But the biggest deal, a real coup for us, is just two months old. Late last December the Foundation closed on the purchase of three complete blocks - 153 units - from Parkmerced. This new, seven-acre property runs down Holloway from Varela to Font, and back up along Serrano. This transaction - something the University could not have done - offers tremendous possibilities, starting with the growth of a University community as we fill vacated units with faculty, staff and students. I'll have more to say in coming months about this incredible asset and what it offers the University.
What next for the Foundation? For one thing, to support future entrepreneurial efforts, it is continuing to develop its Board. It is bringing on new members with the ideas, expertise and even connections to help move good plans forward. With an active and creative Board that already includes three highly respected faculty members - with a fourth to be added at the next Board meeting - the SFSU Foundation is poised to "promote, assist and enhance" this University even more strongly in the years ahead.
Sincerely yours,
Robert A. Corrigan
President
SFSU, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132
Last modified February 1, 2002, by Webmaster & Co.