President Corrigan's ViewPoint ViewPoint 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

October 1, 2001

During my fall faculty speech I typically take a few moments to highlight some of the achievements and successes - both individual and collective - of the last year. This August, the things I wanted to say to you about the coming year consumed the allotted time. But I did not want the opportunity to take an appreciative look at our colleagues to pass us by. As our WASC visiting team leader said in his final campus meeting, "This is a pretty remarkable place," and the truth of his words is borne out in the following paragraphs. Please remember, however, that these examples of our excellence in the many arenas of academic life are a necessarily partial list - illustrations, not a catalogue.

Academic Initiatives: Associate Vice President Richard Giardina led the preparation for our WASC reaccreditation, and it became the major enterprise and major success of the year.

Our first true Summer Semester was an unqualified success - thanks in great part to the YRO Task Force headed by Associate Vice President Gail Whitaker. Enrollment substantially exceeded our projections and Summer Semester revenue has proved critical to our budget for the year.

Thanks to the leadership and persuasive skills of Undergraduate Dean Pro Tem Jerry Combs, we made significant progress in a very difficult area: reducing unmet student demand for courses.

Our Multimedia Studies Program, long a pride of the College of Extended Learning, went online, responding to demand from prospective students around the world. When CEL tested online multimedia studies last year with two courses, students from as far away as Mozambique, Brazil and Ireland participated. This is both an exciting venture in truly global education and a sound pragmatic move, given the current volatility of the local multimedia industry.

With legislative support and funding, and with leadership from Gail Whitaker, we collaborated with Caņada College to establish the Pathways program. It allows San Mateo community college students to earn an SFSU bachelor's degree in their home area by taking their upper-division classes at Caņada. The colleges of Education and Science & Engineering offered the initial programs.

We're also using technology to reach students where they are, enabling those who cannot come to campus to pursue degrees. Using video and the Internet, we are training teachers to work with the visually impaired at five sites throughout the state. We're one of only two such programs in California (The other is UCLA).

Faculty Grants and Contracts: Aided by strong leadership from Paul Fonteyn and Bruce Macher, we reached a milestone last year: approximately $40 million in faculty grants and contracts. Several major grants this year reflect our commitment to faculty development - both of SFSU faculty and of that diverse faculty of the future we seek to nurture here.

With a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation - the only one in the nation awarded to a non-Ph.D. granting institution - we're helping to strengthen math and science teaching in San Francisco middle and high schools and at the same time, helping to develop the math and science teachers our schools so desperately need. Professor John Stubbs heads the project, which teams our graduate and upper division math and science students with master teachers in the district to give individual scie nce or math classroom teachers the support they need to do a better job.

Two programs funded through the National Institute for Mental Health are giving both students and faculty new research opportunities. The COR - Career Opportunities in Research - program prepares junior and senior minority students for success in a Ph.D. program in a mental health field. The University of Michigan, Emory, and NYU provide summer research experience for our students, and four of them had that opportunity last summer. Sacha Bunge, associate professor of psychology, is our COR director.

SFSU junior and minority faculty interested in mental health research have access to finding through the MRISP - Minority Researcher Infrastructure Support Program - directed by Professor Rafael Diaz. Psychology faculty John Kim and Linda Juang have won funding to pursue research projects through MRISP. We are, by the way, the only university in California to have both a COR and an MRISP program.

Our California Studies Program led the way in an issue of recently-recognized national significance: contamination of American Indian artifacts. With a grant from the National Park Service, Program Director Lee Davis and Niccolo Caldararo put together a three-day conference that drew national attention. Working with the Hoopa Tribal Museum, we created an artifact analysis lab on campus, and chemistry Professor Peter Palmer conducted preliminary artifact tests.

In another first, history Professor/Institute on Disability Director Paul Longmore won a first-ever grant from NEH to fund an institute in the area of disability studies. The institute, a resounding success, attracted national attention, as it set out to develop the role of disability studies in the humanities.

With a $2 million grant from the California Endowment, we are addressing two critical statewide issues: the need for health care providers to serve low-income, ethnically diverse communities and the untapped pool of trained immigrant health care professionals. In collaboration with City College, we are helping these trained professionals gain U.S. certification and work in underserved communities. The "Welcome Back" project is directed by Dr. Jose Ramon Fernandez-Pena and operated through Community Heal th Works, a 10-year old partnership between the departments of health education at SFSU and City College.

An Engaged University: Our turnaround of San Francisco's formerly troubled Head Start program drew widespread community attention and praise. Under the new stewardship of our Urban Institute, in just one year we won three major funding increases, expanded sites, served more children and families, and added full-day slots, vital for working parents. The campus Head Start team includes Executive Director Jean Van Keulen; Program Director Greta Yin; nursing professor Charlotte Feretti, who brought S FSU nursing students into the program; and Vicki Casella and CET, the source of computer technology training for the program's teachers.

Serving Students Better: The Village at Centennial Square opened fully in mid-spring, adding 760 much-needed housing units. The new Student Services building at the Village also opened in the spring. It gives us something we have long wanted: a site where students can find in one place all the key offices serving them. The first floor One-Stop center collects the most frequently used services right in one room. We've extended hours into the evening, to better serve the many students who aren't on campus during regular business hours.

Telling Our Story: With the guidance of Publications Office Director Janet Wade and Editor-in-Chief Adrianne Bee we launched a new University magazine - a full-color, professional publication that we circulate to some 100,000 alumni, donors, friends, faculty and potential students. The forerunner of this magazine, the Centennial edition, won a national award last year.

There is more - much more - that is worthy of note, and I will find the occasion in the near future to continue this account of the many ways in which the people of this University demonstrate their tremendous energy, talent and excellence.

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