In an interview with Mustang Daily, California State University Chancellor Timothy White talked about semesters, online learning and Cal Poly’s place in the CSU.
Mustang Daily: Welcome to Cal Poly.
Timothy White: Happy to be here.
MD: When you’re thinking about Cal Poly compared to the rest of the CSUs, what place do you see it having within the system?
TW: It’s one of our strongest campuses. It obviously has a great history, well over a century, what is it 1901? When I went to Fresno, we always admired students from the programs at Cal Poly. You like your own campus where you go, but this campus has always been one of the real jewels of the California State University, even back in the day when it wasn’t. You know it was for its first 50 or 60 years the CSU didn’t exist, but now it does. It obviously has both a culture about it in terms of the Learning by Doing motif, which is really very, very positive. In fact, I was just in with the faculty and we were talking about the fact I was going to visit all 23 campuses. And in some respects, that’s Cal Poly, to learn by doing. You know I’m tactile learner, I like to see the place and touch it and talk about it and I learn that way. And this campus, the faculty, staff administration and students have been drawn together by the approach no matter what their discipline is. There’s an application of it that helps bring those lessons in it of how they help society. The other niche part of San Luis Obispo is the agricultural work, the environmental, the architectural work. You take the unique advantage of the geographic location. And finally I would say it’s one of the best campuses because it’s built these public-private partnerships to preserve the public nature of San Luis Obispo. The word privatization of the CSU is a sort of third rail, Holy Grail.
MD: It’s a scary word.
TW: It’s a lightning rod, but I think we have to say it’s really an important thing to be serious about to preserve the public nature of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and the other 22 campuses. So it’s not public-private partnerships just to have them or to privatize in the sense of the Ivy League privatization, but rather to maintain access for Californians at an affordable cost and have very high-quality programs. And so as I’ve been introduced to this campus and done all my advanced reading before my visit today and tomorrow, there’s a lot of business folk who said they want to help with facilities and professorships and student scholarships, etc. That’s a public-private partnership, but it certainly kept us as a very wonderful public institution, which is my DNA. And finally I would say related to your question, I am a product of the CSU. I went to two campuses as a student back in my time and then just recently had one of my boys graduate from another campus so I’m also part of this as a parent. So here’s my chance now as chancellor to give back to the state and say how do we do things going forward. In the economic and political and social world we have today, how do we position San Luis Obispo and the other 22 campuses so they are successful not today — because we are successful today — but what do we have to do today so in five years, 10 years, 30 years down the road? We preserve the legacy of this great system. And that’s really what I’m trying to get my arms around and learn about. Learning by doing.
MD: There’s kind of an idea among the students here that between Cal Poly and the CSU, there’s a gap between them. Is that something you’ve seen in your time here, or when you took office as chancellor?
TW: I think one could in any sort of organization — take General Motors, you could say the Corvette division is better than the Buick division. Well, some people would say yes and others would say no. Everybody would probably agree it’s different. And so as I look at the 23 campuses, I see the commonalities across the enterprise: the teaching-learning environment, the research applied on societal problems, the social mobility of students. But I also see the distinctiveness of the campuses. Some are mature campuses like San Luis Obispo, it’s been around a long time, San Diego, Long Beach, San Jose, etc. Others are young, immature campuses. Not in a pejorative way, but Channel Islands is 10 or 11 years old, so its growth and development are in a different sense of criteria than what Cal Poly’s growth and development should be. And I don’t want us to kind of regress 23 campuses to a common denominator. I want the unique strengths of each campus and the unique needs of each campus to be able to flourish. So every campus’s slope would be like this (motions up), but the actual variables and criteria are going to vary across the 23 campuses. You know I spent most of my career at the University of Michigan, which is really a two-campus system. But then at the University of California, which is a 10-campus system. And there is a difference between Santa Barbara and Berkeley. But we never talk about who’s superior. That’s really a counterproductive discussion. It’s how do we take our strengths and our assets and make world-class efforts on both campuses. And we don’t want Santa Barbra and Berkeley to look the same, as a state. You can have some programs at Santa Barbara that that’s the place you go for that program — you don’t go to Berkeley, you don’t go to Riverside. I think the same thing at the Cal State is you don’t want every campus to have the same major and be sort of cookie cutter. One size doesn’t fit all. And so I’m trying to find a way to leverage the system’s power, with the quilt of 23 beautiful squares glued together, until our whole exceeds the sum of the parts. It’s how to make every campus express its unique identity and programs and approaches for research.
MD: One issue that’s coming up right now on this campus in terms of its unique identity is quarters and semesters, I’m sure you know. The recommendation by the task force was to have quarters, President Armstrong gave you a recommendation and the student vote was 90-10 to stay on quarters. So what do you think they all missed that you saw and made you think the best path for all the CSU is to move forward and go ahead with semesters?
TW: Well, first I’ll say I fully respect and acknowledge and understand folks, both students and faculty, who say that quarters are the preferred option. There’s an equal number of people in America actually, probably 80-20 would say semesters are preferred. Across higher education, colleges in America, probably 80 percent are semesters and 20 percent are quarters. That’s not any reason to make a decision on but it’s just sort of a fact. I personally taught and have done research in both trimesters at Michigan, which quite frankly is the one I love the best. Started right after Labor Day, finished right around Christmas, had almost a month off in January, and then you were done in the end of May so you had a good summer break period to work in the middle. Berkeley, I’ve been there when it was both quarters and when it went back to semesters. And the other places I’ve been in Idaho and Riverside were quarters. So I’ve seen it all. To answer your question I understand the perspective of why quarters are better for some people. You have the chance as a student to have contact with more professors, etc. Instead of doing it twice a year, you do it three times a year. I’ve got the math on that. There are some students, however, here and elsewhere in the system that will find a class or a course to study very, very challenging. And by the time you get into a quarter and it’s the second or third week where the first exam happens, takes four or five days to get the results. Now you’re in the fourth week and you say, ‘Oh my God, I’m failing.’ You make an appointment with your professor or TA and now it’s the fifth week, ‘What do I have to do to get back on the good side?’ Now it’s the second exam in week six and you haven’t had any chance for intervention. And for students who are in a real challenging environment, if you had a semester you can kind of dig out of that hole because you have another four or five weeks to say, ‘Man I underestimated what it takes to be successful.’ And so there’s that learning environment of success. Another point I would raise is cost. You have to buy reading materials three times a year. That’s more expensive than buying it twice a year and using more of it. I’m not an economist but I think if you start and stop something two times a year instead of three times a year, it’s less expensive. Registrar, the grading, the inertia for faculty, the production of course syllabi. Again, it’s less inertia and cost to do it twice a year.
MD: I’m curious, is there any plans from your office to be able to look at that and say exactly what that would save?
TW: I think we should probably try to do that. But I haven’t made the decision yet. I’m certainly wanting to be very clear and to have a conversation and to say my prediction coming in is what we should do. What I didn’t want to do is come in and have a conversation about something that started before my time, keep my own views to myself, then make a decision have people say, ‘See he did it in secret, he really wanted to drive it this way and he didn’t know.’ So I’m trying to be very simple and open and honest about why I feel this why. And the final thing I think is a future issue is six campuses today are quarters. I imagine the technology in the future, the ability with Academic Senate engagement and faculty engagement, that we might be able to have some courses cross the 1,000-mile campus. That a drop-dead marquee professor at San Diego State teaching a class in archeology would be of interest to architecture students at San Luis Obispo. So if we were both on semesters, we shouldn’t have to start and stop exactly the same — it’s not a common calendar, rather roughly the same size of an educational term starting roughly within a week of each other and stopping within a week of each other — there would be a way in which faculty’s classes could be accessed by students at San Bernardino, all over, even at Channel Islands. What a wonderful way to use our system-level resources better than we do? Two more points, then I’ll get off the topic. I understand the campus perspective. I’ve been a campus guy my entire life. This is the first time I’ve not been on a campus. I’m going through withdraws. But my responsibility now is for the system. And I never want to make a decision that’s going to hurt anybody. And if I can make the system stronger as a system, then that’s what my responsibility is. I’m not going to do it without consultation. Others may come to a different decision, and that’s fair, but when I make a decision I want everybody to know the values and principles that led me to an important decision. If they were sitting in this seat they may have taken the same facts and done something differently, and I got that. But what I don’t want people to do is think I’m not being open and transparent about the discussion. And finally there’s a very strong interest in the state in California that goes well beyond the interest of a single campus, even a given system, is to give more ability for students — good students — to migrate from a community college to a Cal State system. And again, either all or the vast majority of them are semesters. And so those articulation agreements will work a lot better if we’re all semesters. And so there’s compelling reasons to do it, there’s sound reasons not to do it. There’s a compelling academic reason not to do it, and the work will take a lot of work and effort. And students here have never experienced anything other than quarters. And so when they say quarters are better than semesters, as an academic, I say where’s your control experiment? But I respect it and I got it. And so I’m going to be careful and thoughtful about it. And I know there’s emotion around it.
MD: You’ll see the protestors tomorrow.
TW: Good, I look forward to talking to them.
MD: One question I have about your response, saying that it’s all still ongoing, no decision has been made. Campus was told about a month and a half ago that the tentative deadline was 2020 to begin converting at Cal Poly. How did that progress to something that would be communicated to campus?
TW: So I started in January. I’m kind of a — Friday night party starts around 10, I got there about 1 in the morning. So a lot of stuff preceded me. And so I sat down with the six presidents, looked at some analysis they had gotten, some reports, we had discussion among us. There were some Faculty Senate involvement and it was something the system was trying to do, was get this done. And so I didn’t realize there was resistance anywhere. I just thought it was a project that needed to be finished up. And so then I started, I got the nod from Jeff Armstrong who said his personal disposition was to go to semesters, but then after the task force did their thoughtful work, he was reconsidering what is best for San Luis Obispo. He shared that with me and the other presidents. And I have not sat down with Academic Senate; it’s still a work in progress.
MD: Are you talking systemwide Academic Senate?
TW: Systemwide. Los Angeles, Bakersfield are ready to go. They, in fact, are going to go next year. They’re going to start the process. It’s about a two-and-a-half year process. Part of the concern is who’s going to pay for it, and the system’s going to pay for it. And the system’s going to pay for it 75 percent. And the campus has to pay 25 percent. I’m a big believer in co-paying; it keeps costs down and gives ownership up. Then there’s Pomona, San Luis Obispo, East Bay and San Bernardino. The idea is to stage these over six or seven years. Because of the concerns here and the other initiatives that San Luis Obispo has underway, and Jeff, your president, was very clear with me: He thought it would derail those initiatives already launched here. And so I said fine, let’s put the Cal Polys at the end of the train. And, assuming the consultation leads to that decision ultimately, that way it doesn’t get in the way of the near-term initiatives underway. And it also lets me distribute the cost out over a six- or eight-year period of time, depending on how long it’s going to take, rather than a whole bunch of money over a one-year period of time when our economy is still a little bit underwater. So it’s good financial management in distributing the cost over time, which allowed Cal Poly to not rush into something. It allows me to finish my consultations. But if my consultations lead to it would hurt the learning environment, it would hurt students, and there’s evidence for that, I’ll say ‘OK, time out.’ And I don’t want to drive decisions other than to make us better. And my responsibility is for the system being better, as well as each campus in the system being better. And that’s probably where my view may end up differing from a given campus’ point, because our jobs are different. And you have trustees’ interest, and elected officials’ interests as well.