California State University
The California State University is a public university system in California, and the largest public university system in the United States. It consists of 22 campuses and seven off-campus centers, which together enroll 461,612 students and employ 63,375 faculty and staff members. In California, it is one of the three public higher education systems, along with the University of California and the California Community Colleges systems. The CSU system is officially incorporated as The Trustees of the California State University, and is headquartered in Long Beach, California.
Established in 1960 as part of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the CSU system has its roots in the California State Normal Schools that were chartered in 1857. It holds the distinction of being the leading producer of bachelor's degrees in the country, with over 110,000 graduates each year. Additionally, the CSU system contributes to the state's economy by sustaining more than 209,000 jobs.
In the 2015–16 academic year, CSU awarded 52% of newly issued California teaching credentials, 33% of the state's information technology bachelor's degrees, and it had more graduates in business, criminal justice, engineering, public administration, and agriculture than all other colleges and universities in California combined. Altogether, about half of the bachelor's degrees, one-fourth of the master's degrees, and 3% of the doctoral degrees awarded annually in California are from the CSU. Additionally, 62% of all bachelor's degrees granted to Hispanic students in California and over half of bachelor's degrees earned by California's Latino, African American and Native American students combined are conferred by the CSU.
Since 1961, over four million alumni have received a degree from the CSU system. CSU offers more than 1,800 degree programs in some 240 subject areas. In fall of 2024, 11,135 of CSU's 27,505 faculty were tenured or on the tenure track.
History
State Normal Schools
The California State University system is the direct descendant of the Minns Evening Normal School, founded in 1857 by George W. Minns in San Francisco. It was a normal school, an institution that educated future teachers in association with the high school system and the first of its kind in California.The school was taken over by the state in 1862 and moved to San Jose. Renamed the California State Normal School; it eventually evolved into San Jose State University. A southern branch of the California State Normal School was created in Los Angeles in 1882. In 1887, the California State Legislature dropped the word California from the name of the San Jose and Los Angeles schools, renaming them State Normal Schools.
File:Kendall Hall as seen from Laxson Auditorium-01006.jpg|thumb|right|The Northern Branch of the State Normal School, founded 1887, became California State University, Chico.
Later, other state normal schools were founded at Chico and San Diego ; they did not form a system in the modern sense, in that each normal school had its own board of trustees and all were governed independently from one another. By the end of the 19th century, the State Normal School in San Jose was graduating roughly 130 teachers a year and was "one of the best known normal schools in the West."
In 1919, the State Normal School at Los Angeles became the Southern Branch of the University of California; in 1927, it became the University of California at Los Angeles.
State Teachers Colleges
In May 1921, the legislature enacted a comprehensive reform package for the state's educational system, which went into effect that July. The State Normal Schools were renamed State Teachers Colleges, their boards of trustees were dissolved, and they were brought under the supervision of the Division of Normal and Special Schools of the new California Department of Education located at the state capital in Sacramento. This meant that they were to be managed from Sacramento by the deputy director of the division, who in turn was subordinate to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education. By this time it was already commonplace to refer to most of the campuses with their city names plus the word "state".File:StateNormalSchool1915.jpg|thumb|right|San Diego State Normal School, founded 1897, became San Diego State Teacher's College in 1923.
The resulting administrative situation from 1921 to 1960 was quite complicated. On the one hand, the Department of Education's actual supervision of the presidents of the State Teachers Colleges was minimal, which translated into substantial autonomy when it came to day-to-day operations. According to Clark Kerr, J. Paul Leonard, the president of San Francisco State from 1945 to 1957, once boasted that "he had the best college presidency in the United States—no organized faculty, no organized student body, no organized alumni association, and...no board of trustees." On the other hand, the State Teachers Colleges were treated under state law as ordinary state government agencies, which meant their budgets were subject to the same stifling bureaucratic financial controls as all other state agencies. At least one president would depart his state college because of his express frustration over that issue: Leonard himself.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the State Teachers Colleges started to evolve from normal schools into teachers colleges whose graduates would be fully qualified to teach all K–12 grades. A leading proponent of this idea was Charles McLane, the first president of Fresno State, who was one of the earliest persons to argue that K–12 teachers must have a broad liberal arts education. Having already founded Fresno Junior College in 1907, McLane arranged for Fresno State to co-locate with the junior college and to synchronize schedules so teachers-in-training could take liberal arts courses at the junior college. San Diego and San Jose followed Fresno in expanding their academic programs beyond traditional teacher training. These developments had the "tacit approval" of the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, but had not been expressly authorized by the board and also lacked express statutory authorization from the state legislature.
State Colleges
In 1932, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was asked by the state legislature and governor to perform a study of California higher education. The so-called "Suzzallo Report" sharply criticized the State Teachers Colleges for their intrusion upon UC's liberal arts prerogative and recommended their transfer to the Regents of the University of California. This recommendation spectacularly backfired when the faculties and administrations of the State Teachers Colleges rallied to protect their independence from the Regents. In 1935, the State Teachers Colleges were formally upgraded by the state legislature to State Colleges and were expressly authorized to offer a full four-year liberal arts curriculum, culminating in bachelor's degrees, but they remained under the Department of Education.During World War II, a group of local Santa Barbara leaders and business promoters were able to convince the state legislature and governor to transfer Santa Barbara State College to the University of California in 1944. After losing a second campus to UC, the state colleges' supporters arranged for the California state constitution to be amended in 1946 to prevent it from happening again.
The period after World War II brought a great expansion in the number of state colleges. Additional state colleges were established in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Long Beach from 1947 to 1949, and then seven more state colleges were authorized to be established between 1957 and 1960. Six more state colleges were founded after the enactment of the Donahoe Higher Education Act of 1960, bringing the total number to 23.
California State Colleges
During the 1950s, the state colleges' peculiar mix of fiscal centralization and operational decentralization began to look rather incongruous in comparison to the highly centralized University of California and the highly decentralized local school districts around the state which operated K–12 schools and junior colleges—all of which enjoyed much more autonomy from the rest of the state government than the state colleges. In particular, several of the state college presidents had come to strongly dislike the State Board of Education and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Roy E. Simpson, whom the presidents felt were too deferential to the University of California. Five state college presidents led the movement in the late 1950s for more autonomy from the state government: Glenn Dumke at San Francisco State, Arnold Joyal at Fresno State, John T. Wahlquist at San Jose State, Julian A. McPhee at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Malcolm Love at San Diego State. They had three main objectives: a systemwide board independent of the rest of the state government; the right to award professional degrees in engineering and the doctorate in the field of education; and state funding for research at the state college level.The state legislature was limited to merely suggesting locations to the UC Board of Regents for the planned UC campus on the Central Coast. In contrast, because the state colleges lacked autonomy, they were vulnerable to pork barrel politics in the state legislature. As early as 1932, the Suzzallo Report had noted that "the establishing of State teachers colleges has been partly the product of geographic-political considerations rather than of thoughtful determination of needs". In 1959 alone, state legislators introduced separate bills to individually create nineteen state colleges. Two years earlier, one bill that had actually passed had resulted in the creation of a new state college in Turlock, a town better known for its turkeys than its aspirations towards higher education, and which made no sense except that the chair of the Senate Committee on Education happened to be from Turlock.
In April 1960, the California Master Plan for Higher Education and the resulting Donahoe Higher Education Act finally granted autonomy to the state colleges. The Donahoe Act merged all the state colleges into the State College System of California, severed them from the Department of Education, and authorized the appointment of a systemwide board of trustees and a systemwide chancellor. The board was initially known as the "Trustees of the State College System of California"; the word "board" was not part of the official name. In March 1961, the state legislature renamed the system to the California State Colleges and the board became the "Trustees of the California State Colleges."
As enacted, the Donahoe Act provides that UC "shall be the primary state-supported academic agency for research" and "has the sole authority in public higher education to award the doctoral degree in all fields of learning". In contrast, CSU may only award the doctoral degree as part of a joint program with UC or "independent institutions of higher education" and is authorized to conduct research "in support of" its mission, which is to provide "undergraduate and graduate instruction through the master's degree." This language reflects the intent of UC President Kerr and his allies to bring order to "a state of anarchy"—in particular, the state colleges' repeated attempts to quietly blossom into full-fledged research universities, as was occurring elsewhere with other state colleges like Michigan State.
Kerr explained in his memoirs: "The state did not need a higher education system where every component was intent on being another Harvard or Berkeley or Stanford." As he saw it, the problem with such "academic drift" was that state resources would be spread too thin across too many universities, all would be too busy chasing the "holy grail of elite research status" for any of them to fulfill the state colleges' traditional role of training teachers, and then "some new colleges would have to be founded" to take up that role. At the time, California already had too many research universities; it had only 9 percent of the American population but 15 percent of the research universities. The language about joint programs and authorizing the state colleges to conduct some research was offered by Kerr at the last minute on December 18, 1959, as a "sweetener" to secure the consent of a then-wavering Dumke, the state colleges' representative on the Master Plan survey team.
Dumke reluctantly agreed to Kerr's terms only because he knew the alternative was worse. If the state colleges could not reach a deal with UC, the California legislature was likely to be caught up in the "superboard" fad then sweeping through state legislatures across the United States. A "superboard" was a state board of higher education with plenary authority over all public higher education in the state—the number of states with superboards went from 16 in 1939 to 33 by 1969. Dumke was determined to prevent UC and the state legislature from reducing the state colleges to mere UC "satellites", the dark fate they had narrowly escaped in 1935. At the outset of negotiations, Wahlquist had already shot down Kerr's suggestion of the "Santa Barbara route", because the state colleges were well aware that Santa Barbara had languished under the Board of Regents' mismanagement for 15 years. Kerr never attempted to reformulate his proposal as a threat, but the specter of his "unstated threat" haunted the state colleges for the remainder of the negotiations. At least under Kerr's terms the state colleges would finally have their own systemwide board, and to Dumke, that was the most important thing. To ensure this compromise at the core of the Master Plan would stay intact through the legislative process, it was agreed that the entire package could be enacted only if the state legislature, the State Board of Education, and the UC Board of Regents all agreed with its two main components: the joint doctorate and the new board for the state colleges.
Most state college presidents and approximately 95 percent of state college faculty members strongly disagreed with the Master Plan's express endorsement of UC's primary role with respect to research and the doctorate, but they were still subordinate to the State Board of Education. In January 1960, Louis Heilbron was elected as the new chair of the State Board of Education. A Berkeley-trained attorney, Heilbron had already revealed his loyalty to his alma mater by joking that UC's ownership of the doctorate ought to be protected from "unreasonable search and seizure." He worked with Kerr to get the Master Plan's recommendations enacted in the form of the Donahoe Act, which was signed into state law on April 27, 1960.
Heilbron went on to serve as the first chairman of the Trustees of the California State Colleges, where he had to "rein in some of the more powerful campus presidents," improve the smaller and weaker campuses, and get all campuses accustomed to being managed for the first time as a system. Heilbron set the "central theme" of his chairmanship by saying that "we must cultivate our own garden" and stop trying to covet someone else's. Under Heilbron, the board also attempted to improve the quality of state college campus architecture, "in the hope that campuses no longer would resemble state prisons."
Although the state colleges had reported to Sacramento since 1921, the board resolved on August 4, 1961 that the headquarters of the California State Colleges would be set up in the Los Angeles area, and in December, the newly-formed chancellor's office was moved from Sacramento to a rented office on Imperial Highway in Inglewood. This location gained the unfortunate nickname of the "imperial headquarters". In 1965, the chancellor's office was moved to a larger office space, again rented, on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Buell G. Gallagher was selected by the board as the first chancellor of the California State Colleges, but resigned after only nine unhappy months to return to his previous job as president of the City College of New York. Dumke succeeded him as the second chancellor of the California State Colleges. As chancellor, Dumke faithfully adhered to the system's role as prescribed by the Master Plan, despite continuing resistance and resentment from state college dissidents who thought he had been "out-negotiated" and bitterly criticized the Master Plan as a "thieves' bargain". Disappointment with the Master Plan was widespread but was especially acute at Dumke's former campus, San Francisco State. Dumke retorted that his critics' ambitions to turn the state colleges into "baby Berkeleys" were "unrealistic". Looking back, Kerr thought the state colleges had failed to appreciate the vast breadth of opportunities reserved to them by the Master Plan, as distinguished from UC's relatively narrow focus on basic research and the doctorate. In any event, "Heilbron and Dumke got the new state college system off to an excellent start."