A newspaper article that appeared shortly before the first students arrived at Cal State Monterey Bay described this impression of what they would find:
The barracks are empty, the windows boarded up. The soldiers have vanished, leaving a legacy of swords, daggers and snakes painted on the buildings they once occupied."Think War," says a mural on one wall.
Soon, a different breed of thinker will take command of this sprawling Army base just north of Monterey.
By the fall of 1995, Ft. Ord will be transformed into [Cal State Monterey Bay], the 21st campus in the state university system.
Army barracks will be reborn as classrooms and dormitories, mess halls will become dining commons, and the soldiers' sports club will be turned into a student union. Some day the campus may hold as many as 25,000 students.
"It used to be we were educating people to survive war" [said a campus administrator] "Now we're going to be educating people to survive the 21st Century."56
The two sides of the sword being beaten into a plowshare are evident in the blush of success and enthusiasm of the people who have been associated with the effort to establish the new university, on the one edge--and the shaky nature of some of the conversion tasks and their costs, on the other.
From the start, the brightness of the bounty was dazzling: a new university campus for a region that, for a while at least, was overwhelmed by the prospect of economic disaster; a high-value public use for a military branch that was desperately seeking solutions to base-closure quandaries; a new university campus for a system hit hard by budget cuts and criticism.
At the beginning no one realized that each of these agendas might eventually impose opposing demands. The local business community craved rapid answers to expected economic problems. For them, the worst-case scenario would be to delay the base-conversion process. The Defense Department wanted out as rapidly as possible to reduce its costs, which constituted the reason behind the decision to vacate in the first place.
Rarely is speed a friendly ally of decisions about real estate or of defining university purpose and design. But in the Fort Ord-Cal State Monterey Bay transition, it offered certain advantages to its advocates. Indeed, some would hold that without a constant sense of urgency, the university as it is presently conceived might never have happened. Actually, that conception may be changing anyway, as unanticipated limitations and consequences emerge more slowly.57
Competing exigencies created a paradox. In the first case, the military's desire to effect a rapid and successful base conversion and the state university system's impulse to seize the opportunity demanded speed, innovation and creativity in the search for alternatives and in the review and approval processes necessary to realize them. But these same needs were fundamentally antithetical to the deliberation and debates in the legislative, higher education, and public arenas that ideally were needed to create understanding, support and lasting commitment for the new institution. Ironically, there seemed to be a fear that any prolonged deliberation would reduce the probability of establishing the university.
The paradox is consistent with the realization that the educational vision for the new campus was formed in the maneuvering involved in the quest for approval. Contending interests led to conflicting goals. These also magnified the enormity of the task of the campus administration and founding faculty, who had to give life to the misty vision that awaited them when they arrived to fashion Cal State's "21st campus for the 21st century" in about nine months (the period between the arrival of the new president and the arrival of the first students). The people constituting the founding cadre of the new university have the vision they inherited to guide them. The lists of "what went wrong" at Bakersfield and San Marcos may prove instructive here.
On another level, if the state's established new-campus review and approval procedures have not been completely undermined, they have at least been seriously challenged. The variety of resourceful exceptions that were granted in the Cal State Monterey Bay case are antithetical to the system of checks and balances designed to ensure substantiation and reflection.
In effect, when put to the test, the processes put in place by the Master Plan to ensure a separation between decisions about new campuses and politics did not hold up, creating serious questions about their strength and efficacy. In this respect at least, California is not very far from where it was 30 years ago, when the decisions on Sonoma and Turlock were made and Clark Kerr expressed his concern about the politicization of new-campus decisions. Politics played no less a part in the decision to establish Cal State Monterey Bay than it played then--despite the rational review processes that had been created and supported by the university systems.
Perhaps the more important question is how the precedents thus established will play out in future instances of land and other gifts for new campuses. The prospect of other military base closures in California as the cold war becomes colder is a real one.58
The question may prove academic if the Pentagon and Congress, which were obliged in the case of Fort Ord to transfer a number of housing units of commercial value and pay for renovation, retrofitting and site cleanup (along with perpetual security around artillery impact areas), begin to wonder where the cost savings are for them. The dawning of such a realization may come sooner than the bargaining sessions connected with the next base closure; at this point, the balance of the $150 million or so federal-fund transfer to convert Army buildings into university facilities seems problematic. At the local level, there appears to be no plan in place to contend with that contingency. Perhaps the reduced enrollment expectations resulting from the recent discovery of water-supply limitations will also mean reduction in the estimate of the needed federal funding (conversely, it would seem, the costs of a desalinization plant may increase them).
In any case, the payments and the reconstruction plan need to be kept on a fast track, since state funding depends on enrollment levels, and enrollment levels, on campus at least, depend on support and construction. As long as enrollment levels are low and state support costs are high, Cal State Monterey Bay will be an expensive campus to operate. If the water supply is not expanded and other infrastructure improvements are not made, the campus may find itself among the special group of CSU institutions with permanently small on-campus enrollments. Innovative plans to augment these with distance-education arrangements are certain to face competition from other campuses that are considering similar possibilities.
During an interview, a legislative staff member stated that with Fort Ord, the CSU system inherited an "old" campus (i.e., one built many years ago) with little money to upgrade and a weak maintenance base (e.g., old plumbing, water mains, etc.). In his words, the new campus will be "an albatross on CSU for years to come. The system already has small campuses that are killing them--San Marcos, Stanislaus, Humboldt, Bakersfield. They hurt the system because they are so small they are too expensive to operate. It will be a long time before enrollments cross the curve and create demand for still another one. Legislative estimates are that it will cost about $300 million to fix all of the buildings at Fort Ord. If the federal government doesn't renege, at best we're looking at around $150 million from them." This observation was made before the discovery of water-supply limitations and talk of a desalinization plant.
If the "21st campus for the 21st century" vision as presently conceived is pursued, it may prove to be relatively expensive to operate in any case. The number of "nontraditional" institutions in American higher education is not great, but those that do exist tend to be costly (in this case, "nontraditional" refers to curriculum rather than delivery systems--once universities identify their purpose and place on the information superhighway, all are likely to become somewhat "nontraditional"). Unit costs at the Evergreen State College in Washington State, a nontraditional institution that opened its doors in 1971 and that has remained relatively true to its vision (and consistently below its initial enrollment aspirations), have run higher than those of its sister institutions (Central, Eastern, and Western Washington State Universities) from the beginning. Its costs per undergraduate FTE student are comparable to the University of Washington's and greater than Washington State University's (the state's two public research universities). They are about 30 percent more than the average of its three sister institutions (comprehensive universities).59 An apparent willingness to consider charging higher tuition at Cal State Monterey Bay may indicate some early appreciation on the part of CSU officials of the possibility of the higher costs associated with the program to be offered there.60
Effects on other campuses in the CSU system in the form of altered priorities have been mentioned. Systemic effects can run the other way as well. The state university system has been described as a highly competitive environment, and the likelihood of permanent acquiescence among other campus presidents to persistent funding imbalances in favor of Cal State Monterey Bay is remote. It has been argued that the Cal State system imposes centripetal organizational forces that militate against innovation and deviance from system norms. In the words of one proponent of the view, who is also a CSU campus official, "You can't have an aberration in a system for long before the rest of the system forces it to change." He added that pressures also will come from students, "who will demand something like [that which] exists elsewhere [in the system]. This is particularly so for community college transfers. The community colleges will have to prepare their transferring students for what is planned as an unorthodox program at [Cal State Monterey Bay], and they may not be able to do it, and their students may not want it if they can."
The other crucial dimension of the institutional role, the new university's assumption of residential status, prompts considerations of another sort. In this case, CSU visionaries speak of Cal State Monterey Bay as a residential campus for the middle class ("the blue-collar family"). They argue that these families are being priced out of other residential institutions in California; the "average family income at UCLA is more than $85,000." According to this view, residential institutions in the CSU system will provide an alternative for lower- and middle-income people in California.
Certain aspects of the case are intriguing. One CSU administrator contemplated, "Why would we reach the place when minorities are at the point where their kids can go away to school and we believe they'll be satisfied with staying at home? In this sense, Monterey Bay is a good deal." It is difficult to evaluate such perspectives without further substantiation, but they represent important role and mission departures. In either case, they imply a dubious role for the University of California. If the UC system is to be conceded a role as the designated higher education center of California's upper-income classes, people in California should be invited to participate in the decision. The basic question is whether the widening gap between increases in the cost of attendance and increases in family income, which is not just a California phenomenon, is to be confronted head-on or whether it should be accepted and accommodated through a de facto relegation of the UC system to the upper-income classes, with the CSU system reserved for those of lesser economic means.
Still other role discrepancies may result from the residential-campus status that is essential to Cal State's case for the new institution and for tri-county residents' interest in a nearby university for "their" students. According to another campus official, this situation dictates a variety of opposing agendas: emphases on close faculty-student contact, the campus learning community, long-distance learning, global awareness, cutting-edge technologies, and serving minorities and at-risk students, especially in the tri-county area. His greatest concern was for the last of these: people, especially Hispanics, who live and work in the region: "They say they [CSU] will do something special for them, but what? The approach doesn't seem to fit. These people need a lot of structure and support services. These people come from close families. If their parents are going to send them to Fort Ord for a college education, they will want to be sure they are getting a first-rate education that will qualify them for a future career. They won't have a lot of patience for some half-baked academic experiment." He went on to suggest that it may have been too soon to think about closing down San Jose State's off-campus center in Salinas.
All of this places a lot of pressure on campus planning, and, as noted, not much time has been allotted for that. The planning process for the Evergreen State College transpired over four years before the first students arrived, and even then there were problems (students took classes in private homes, local churches and community centers; there were no faculty in some fields, etc.). Planning for Florida Gulf Coast University, currently under way, began when the president was hired in 1993. Its annual operating budget for the planning phase is $4 million. The doors will open for students in 1997.
People at Cal State Monterey Bay will not have anything approaching such resources and time, for reasons that essentially are fiscal and political. This is the legacy of the central contradiction of the approach chosen by Cal State. Students had to be brought aboard as rapidly as possible; thus, the curriculum was being planned, faculty were being hired and students were being admitted before much in the way of a program had been established. Faculty were being selected to teach classes in programs and sequences that had not yet been installed. The auguries were not good, but people rose to the occasion. Even so, what was done in crisis may well shape what happens for a long time.
Although allegiance to some of the same assumptions that helped to configure the process remains, the economic facts of the region may have changed. In July 1995, fears of a crippled Monterey economy were laid to rest when an economist advised the local Chamber of Commerce that the "1991 predictions of a crippled economy for the County over the next five to 25 years because of Fort Ord's closure have turned out to be `horse puckey.' "61
In the end, time will tell. According to a CSU observer, it is a matter of a short- or long-term vision: "In the year 2020, people will congratulate Barry Munitz for picking Fort Ord. But for the next decade, Monterey Bay will be a drag, an excess. It will not be [such a drag] 30 years from now. . . . If you ask the question, `Are there many people in the [Monterey] area?' the answer is no. The people there are around Salinas, and they still don't have a campus. But if you ask, `Will California need a new campus in the 21st century?' the answer must be yes, a residential campus. If you believe in the need for a residential campus, Monterey Bay will be very successful."
This paper ends on that note and with a hope that it may add to the expectations for delivery on the promises made. Doing so will not be easy, and it will not be cheap, but a number of people are working to make it happen. There are few other examples of campus establishment efforts that begin to approach the complexities of this task, but the decision to create a new campus at Fort Ord has been made. The university is a reality, and once formed, few universities ever go away. Perhaps this report will lead to further understanding and some permanent material support to help make Cal State Monterey Bay the successful institution the people of California expect.