San Francisco State University

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


September 10, 2001

It was a pleasure to greet so many faculty and staff at the opening faculty meeting on Aug. 27. To those of you who could not join us in Knuth Hall that day, let me extend a warm welcome as together, we embark on another academic year. Because my remarks at that meeting touched on issues and initiatives that involve us all-in particular, a major planning project that gives us a gr eat opportunity to work together as a campus-I have chosen to devote this Viewpoint to highlights from that speech.

Enrollment and Budget: Despite Herculean efforts made by many faculty and staff in this room, we emerged from Touch Tone registration considerably below [by a projected 900 FTE students on an annual basis] the enrollment target on which our CSU funding is based. This is very distressing, but not fatal ... [In a summer meeting with senators and chairs] I announced that ... there would be no need for a tax or the continuation of last year's salary savings program ... I am still able to honor that p romise, despite the shortfall in enrollment.

The chancellor's office could well decide to reduce our base budget by $2.7 million to distribute to campuses that have come in over enrollment target. If such action is taken, we have been promised a "loan" of $2.7 million to get us through the year. Presumably if we increase our enrollment by 500 FTE for next year, the loan is forgiven and the funding is permanently restored ... Let me also stress that we are not losing enrollment. It is higher now at 21,000 than it has ever been, but we are not gaini ng enrollment at the rate necessary to make target.

The impact of the much-heralded "Tidal Wave II" ... is hitting the state in a very differentiated fashion ... For a variety of demographic reasons, the force of the impact right now is in Southern California. In the Bay Area, residential birthrates are down. Of the major cities in the U.S., San Francisco has the lowest ratio of children to adults, the lowest for any city in California. Right now, there are several thousand fewer students in the San Francisco Unified School District than there were five years ago.

Changes in Our Student Population: Historically, ours has been a fairly typical urban campus: largely commuter, drawing students from the immediate region, with a high percentage of older and re-entry adults. I think we are about to see some change ... Without any special effort we are already drawing a larger "traditional" college population than in the past ... In the last decade, our students have become younger. Almost 40 percent of our undergraduates are now under 21-up from 32 percent nine years ago. First-time freshman enrollment has grown by 62 percent in the last nine years, and more of these young students are coming to us from beyond our longtime "feeder" high schools ... Our out-of-state enrollment, while still small, is growing without any targeted effort on our part. We rank fifth nationally in the number of transfer students. We are increasingly attractive to international students, ranking third in the nation among master's degree granting institutions in international stude nt enrollment.

Becoming a "Destination Campus": We may want to build on this trend quite deliberately, and set out to become what the chancellor's office has termed a "destination campus"-a campus of choice for first-time freshmen, transfers and graduate students who live well outside a comfortable commute ... The immediate benefits of becoming a destination campus are clear: We develop a new source of students to counterbalance the steep decline in local area college-age students [and] we help to accommodate t he surge of students that is currently overburdening some of the other CSU campuses.

Choosing to become a destination campus will enable us to thrive, to grow our academic programs, to continue on an exciting path. But it will also change our student mix, and that in turn will require us to increase student housing, as well as to focus more on the "quality of life" resources that are important to a younger, resident student population: intercollegiate and intramural athletics, recreational facilities, social opportunities, and the like ... With its many implications for every aspect of life at San Francisco State, the destination campus concept is worthy of much more discussion-and we will be discussing it soon in the broader context of an all-campus planning effort.

Faculty Grants, Fund raising Reach Highs: Last year, we reached a milestone: faculty research grants and contracts totaled approximately $40 million ... Over the last two years, our grants and contracts total has risen by some 66 percent! ... Private giving is the success story of the decade ... This year, we again exceeded our CSU fund-raising goal. Our grass roots support continues to grow, as evidenced by a 250 percent increase in annual fund donors in the last five years. Our en dowment totals have grown even more rapidly-an almost 500 percent jump in that same period. We rank ninth nationally out of 540 comprehensive campuses in the amount of private money we raised last year.

Reaccreditation Plaudits, Recommendations: The major project-and the major success-of the last year was our 10-year reaccreditation. The WASC team that visited the campus described San Francisco State University as "an energetic, dynamic university involved in revitalizing its urban mission...an engaged university that genuinely cares about its community ... a much stronger institution than that observed during the 1992 accreditation review."

Of course, the team identified areas in which it saw a need for further work. It made eight recommendations ... Chief among them are a call to us to refine our processes for setting priorities and time lines for implementing our strategic initiatives; to improve communications between various campus constituencies, better linking administration with staff, faculty, and students; to offer more training opportunities and support to department chairs; to provide strong financial support for our assessment efforts; and to focus on the graduate program, developing a strategic vision and criteria to guide support, growth, and program development.

Next Step: "CUSP II": Now, after three years of living with our CUSP strategic plan, and in the wake of a major external review, is the perfect time to draw on this material and embark on a second wave planning process modeled on CUSP, but different from CUSP.

We haven't enacted every one of those 156 CUSP recommendations. And perhaps we shouldn't. It could be that the campus environment has changed enough to make some recommendations obsolete or no longer meaningful. Others demand funding beyond our current ability to obtain. New issues may have emerged-ones not considered by CUSP, or at least not reflected in the plan. Certainly, we are changing ... In the past 13 years, we have hired almost 500 new tenured or tenure-track faculty. Two hundred sixty five of these new colleagues have come to us since the CUSP committee began its work in 1995. You, our newer colleagues, are the University's future. And we want to engage you in helping now to set a path for yourselves and your institution.

Starting very soon-in a matter of weeks-we'll be taking that next step, embarking on a second-wave planning process modeled on CUSP. We know what made CUSP work ... First, joint planning by the President's Cabinet and the Academic Senate. Second, a structure that didn't just allow for but actively invited wide campus participation. Third, my active involvement throughout the entire process. We're going to proceed the same way this time ... Within a matter of weeks, you'll be hearing about the structur e and process, that for a simple lack of imagination, we are calling CUSP II-suggestions for a compelling new title are not only welcome, they are encouraged.


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