In 1991, when the U.S. Army decided to vacate most of Fort Ord, a moderate-sized base situated about six miles north of Monterey, the conversations about converting the base soon converged on high-tech research, clean industry and education. In a comparatively brief period, a California State University residential campus--Cal State Monterey Bay (CSUMB), soon to be known as "the 21st campus (of the CSU system) for the 21st century"--arose as the phoenix that would bring new educational and economic life from Fort Ord's ashes.
Statutory authorization for the CSU system to establish this new institution was completed when the Governor signed the authorizing legislation late in 1994. Students began classes at Cal State Monterey Bay in September 1995. The elapsed time from the base-closure decision to the opening of the new university spanned about 48 months.
An economic downswing, reduced higher education budgets, and Cal State service cutbacks notwithstanding, pressures on the statewide CSU system in the form of future enrollment demand are expected. Cal State university administrators anticipate an increase of more than 100,000 students between 1995 and 2005.
Even before this need became clear, however, the prospect of a gift of facilities and real estate by the U.S. Department of Defense was an irresistible one. The value of the land and buildings--with waterfront and vistas--was quickly set at about $1 billion. While it is possible to retrospectively criticize aspects of the decision-making process regarding the new campus (as this report does), it is also easy to understand that discussions about whether or not to accept a gift of this magnitude would be over almost before they began.
Warmed by the promise of oceanfront property in the heart of one of California's vacation spots, the interested groups and authorities that usually provide the checks and balances necessary to ensure a thoughtful decision-making process soon fused into a coalition of allies: Democrats and Republicans, civilians and soldiers, locals and legislators, community colleges and universities, private and public institutions, governors and senators, coordinating boards and university systems.
From the beginning, the various anxieties and interests awakened by the base-closure announcement and benefaction induced, shaped, and drove the search for evidence of need for a new higher education enterprise in the region, the resultant institutional concept, and most of the more creative aspects of the review and authorization processes. As a vision of a new campus developed, uncertainties about needs and costs were dismissed almost as rapidly as they arose.
When all of this started, Cal State Monterey Bay was, in the idiom of academe, lacking a theoretical base; the body of knowledge that formed in its support paralleled the decisions to seek and justify the gift of land and facilities. Such concerns as the conditions of the conveyance, the institutional concept and role, the system and state approval processes, and the search for funding soon entwined in an improvisational pas de trois wherein each performer's next step was determined by another's last, in time with an original score that was being composed as it was being played.
Support from California State University for the new enterprise, slow at first, accelerated quickly. But there had been no case made for a new campus in Monterey County prior to the federal decision to depart Fort Ord, and there was no a priori image of a new institution--a Monterey Athena that would spring forth fully conceived from the forehead of a Long Beach Zeus. Indeed, the concept was still forming even as this report was being written.
Much of the case for the new campus has rested on the premise that it would alleviate the system's impending demographic pressure, although that reason came later. Full-time enrollment at the new campus was at first predicted to reach approximately 25,000 by the year 2010. Early in 1996 this estimate was cut by two-thirds (to between 5,000 and 8,000 students) because of newly discovered problems with water requirements (Cal State officials continue to adhere to the 25,000 figure but explain that this will require most students--many of whom may never actually visit the arid campus--to take courses via computer and other distance-education media).
A few concerns have been present from the beginning. Some residents of the area worry about the effects of the new university on the Monterey way of life. The talk of a "21st-century campus" that emphasizes "futuristic and problem-solving education," academic clusters, and the use of two-way television and other technologies summons uneasy local references to UC Santa Cruz--the place "where Volkswagen buses go to die." Others worry about the effects of the new institution's presence on other area institutions, especially community colleges, several of which experienced enrollment reductions following the base closure. Cal State Monterey Bay's commitment to offering lower-division courses has aroused concerns that subsequent interlocal agreements have not fully assuaged.
Officials at private institutions in the area seem to have accepted the new campus as a fait accompli and are participating in collaborative planning efforts, but they also hope, with some concern, that the new institution will not replicate their established program emphases.
For their part, CSU system officials speak of close working relationships with local community colleges and the UC Santa Cruz research center at Fort Ord. The military's Defense Language Institute, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Monterey Institute of International Studies also are considered potential partners.
Cal State's emphasis on promoting the new campus as a residential university rather than as a commuter campus was and is crucial to the demographic case for the new school. The Monterey Bay area is relatively free of strong population growth (indeed, concerns about a population decrease associated with the base closure stimulated community resistance to the military's decision to leave), and there is not a sufficient local population base to justify a full-fledged commuter university. The resultant case for a residential campus, therefore, sounds a bit like a self-fulfilling prophesy: the presence of the university will contribute to local population growth, which will in turn enhance the need for the campus.
While acknowledging the system's future need to accommodate new students, it is nonetheless fair to ask whether pressure will be manifest in the Monterey region. Cal State officials have argued that since the new campus will be a residential one, it will draw students from across the state and thereby relieve pressure on statewide enrollment demand. By this reasoning, tri-county (immediate region) population projections, which are modest, are not terribly important. But this argument seems strained, a product of the a posteriori reasoning that followed the decision to establish a new campus even though regional growth projections were not sufficient to justify it.
For the residential concept to work, many potential Cal State students will need to be encouraged to break their localized commuter habits, move out of their home cities, and relocate to places such as the Monterey area. In other words, students from other demographically impacted regions of the state are expected to arrive at the residential campus, increase the population base in the Monterey area and thereby both relieve the statewide demographic crunch and leave local tri-county graduating high school students to the community colleges (while adding other new students to these institutions' potential clientele through joint arrangements with Cal State Monterey Bay).
The physical beauty of the Monterey area and the promise of low-cost student housing, made possible by the absence of need for capital outlay for residence facilities, are the high cards in the state university system's hand; the comparative remoteness of the area, the scarcity of employment opportunities for students while in school, and the recently revealed water-supply and infrastructure problems are some of the lower ones.
There is an important federal interest in all of this, although the persistence of federal resolve would be difficult to measure. Federal authorities would like to accomplish an exemplary base-conversion effort to demonstrate the nation's commitment to peacetime pursuits and validate a model for other localities that may face comparable situations in the future.1
In a perfect world, the Pentagon's and Cal State's interest in an exemplary base-conversion demonstration project would have included consideration of costs as well as benefits. So far, much more attention has been devoted to extolling the bargain than identifying the real costs. Yet the case for further reflection draws from the same economic and demographic conditions as the arguments for hasty action. Other military bases are slated for closure. Unless Californians want a lot of residential campuses in their state university system, and want their future university and college campuses to be located regularly on the sites of vacated military bases (places chosen not for educational or demographic reasons), a review of the approval process that led to the creation of Cal State Monterey Bay seems essential.
Larger questions also arise. If the Cal State Monterey Bay case is any indication, California has returned to conditions similar to those that existed at the time the state's Master Plan for Higher Education was created in 1960. Then a pressing concern for the universities was the growing politicization of decisions about the need for and placement of new campuses. The Master Plan called for processes to inform those decisions and ensure a separation between higher education and politics.
The conversion of Fort Ord to a university campus may not reflect all the features of the Oklahoma land rush, but few could insist that the decisions were shaped solely by a list of educational priorities. The procedures put in place by the Master Plan were largely disregarded, and the lack of discussion over the ramifications of that for future governance is disconcerting.
The recent history of education planning in California grew out of a confidence in systematic needs and cost-benefit analyses that began to form at the end of World War II, when the prospect of millions of veterans descending on undercapitalized campuses evoked concurrent jubilance and perplexity among college administrators and state legislators.
Over the next decade and a half, an implicit commitment was made to a comprehensive decision-making process that would stress planning, explicitly identified criteria and priorities, and the inclusion of managerial oversight and statewide planning agencies to ensure that changes were monitored and decisions were justified by strong evidentiary need. In most aspects of this model, California led the western states and perhaps the country. Analysis replaced politics, and priorities replaced boosterism, or so it seemed.
The particular aspects of the situation that prompted the model outlined in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education have been described by Clark Kerr as follows:
We in the University of California became nervous. Was the Legislature going to take over? We were particularly sensitive to Turlock and Sonoma because in 1944 the state Legislature had given the University--not requested by it--the Santa Barbara State College, which later on (after 1958) became a great asset to the University, but in 1944 it was imposed on the University. We were not anxious to see such intrusions by the Legislature into what we considered the internal affairs of higher education happen again. We were all very conscious then of our claimed autonomy. We were deeply concerned by any indications that the political process was taking over.2
The Master Plan called for a system of coordination to be added to the governance structure, itself a model of professionalism with its two university systems and system offices. The coordination component is represented in the present California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC). Under this new structure, the purposes of university systems and the roles of a statewide coordinating board were to be accomplished through a more objective treatment of what otherwise would be political decision processes.
The events that led to the creation of Cal State Monterey Bay, however, suggest that politics never really relinquished its traditionally dominant place in the process, and it is difficult to avoid an impression that the accouterments of rationality that developed during the decades since adoption of the Master Plan never fully took hold.3 In this respect the situation is not much different from the political decisions that resulted in the placement of public universities in unexpected locations before the Master Plan.
The experience also suggests that the organizations established to ensure objectivity and perspicuity in what are intrinsically political matters--in this case, state coordinating boards vested with the authority to approve or reject proposals for new college campuses--are constitutionally unsuited to the task. Their delegated powers prove illusory in a politically charged situation. In view of the inherently political nature of such matters, should the state higher education coordinating board even have campus approval authority? Or should the responsibilities of such boards in such matters center on the specification of criteria, the objective assessment of costs and benefits, and the communication of findings to the Legislature? These, however, are comparatively minor questions. The more important questions are these: Should the organizational systems of the state universities be reconsidered in light of California's present and projected needs? Are conceptions from 1960 of residential/commuter and teaching/research universities and university systems appropriate for California's 21st-century needs? Does the case of Cal State Monterey Bay argue for either revisiting or finally burying the Master Plan?
Different perspectives persist. The most popular one is that the CSU system was given a lot of land and buildings and the promise of additional money to convert barracks, orderly rooms, service clubs, dispensaries, and PXs into university classrooms and ancillary facilities. If the gift truncated certain established processes, reordered campus priorities and frustrated the discipline the systems ostensibly have come to accept as part of the state's Master Plan, so be it.
A more subtle position is represented by the question, "Is this really what California needs?" This report reviews the steps by which authorities at all levels did not adequately address that question.
This much seems certain: Cal State Monterey Bay is a foregone conclusion. The university is there, and that will not change. Still, something might be learned from the experience. This report proceeds from that possibility.4
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