The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is California's system of public universities. Headquartered in Long Beach, the system includes 22 campuses and seven off-campus centers, and serves more than 460,000 students. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the California State University is a part of the state's three-tier system public postsecondary education plan, which also includes the California Community Colleges and University of California systems.
Established in 1960, the CSU system traces its history to the California State Normal Schools, which were chartered beginning in 1857. The system is governed by a 25-member Board of Trustees, which appoints the Chancellor as the system's chief executive officer. The system employs 63,375 faculty and staff members.
The CSU is the largest public university system in the United States and awards the most bachelor's degrees of any public university system in the country. Since 1961, more than four million people have received degrees from the CSU system. It offers more than 1,800 degree programs in about 240 subject areas."Graduation Facts | 100,000 Graduates Strong" (). Blogs.calstate.edu. Retrieved on 2013-07-15.
History State Normal Schools
The California State University system traces its history to the Minns Evening Normal School, founded in 1857 by George W. Minns in San Francisco. The school was a normal school, an institution for training teachers, 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 established in Los Angeles in 1882. In 1887, the California State Legislature dropped the word California from the names of the San Jose and Los Angeles schools, renaming them State Normal Schools.
Other state normal schools were founded at Chico (1887) and San Diego (1897). However, at this time they did not form a university system in the modern sense, as each normal school had its own board of trustees and was governed independently.
In 1919, the State Normal School at Los Angeles became the Southern Branch of the University of California; in 1927, it was renamed the University of California at Los Angeles.
State Teachers Colleges
In May 1921, the legislature enacted a 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 placed under the supervision of the Division of Normal and Special Schools within the new California Department of Education. The colleges were managed from Sacramento by the deputy director of the division, who was subordinate to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, the head of the Department of Education, and the State Board of Education.
From 1921 to 1960, the State Teachers Colleges operated under a combination of centralized financial control, but with limited supervision over the presidents of the colleges, giving them substantial autonomy in day-to-day operations. According to Clark Kerr, J. Paul Leonard, president of San Francisco State from 1945 to 1957, once described his position as "the best college presidency in the United States—no organized faculty, no organized student body, no organized alumni association, and...no board of trustees." At the same time, state law treated the colleges as state government agencies, subjecting their budgets to the same financial controls as other state agencies, unlike the independent University of California.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the institutions evolved from normal schools, that is, vocational schools narrowly focused on training elementary school teachers to impart basic literacy to young children, into teachers colleges that provided a full liberal arts education and whose graduates were fully qualified to teach all K–12 grades. Charles McLane, the first president of the Fresno State Normal School (now California State University, Fresno), was a major advocate for the transition to a broad liberal arts education for K–12 teachers. McLane had founded Fresno Junior College (now Fresno City College) in 1907. When he founded the Fresno State Normal School in 1911, McLane arranged for it to co-locate with the junior college and synchronize schedules so teachers in training could take liberal arts courses there. San Diego and San Jose also subsequently expanded 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 they lacked express authorization from the board and 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" (after the Foundation's president, Henry Suzzallo) 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 (who would be expected to put them back in their proper place). 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 (with the acquiescence of college administrators) 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 (then on the brink of its own decentralization project) 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 (who had succeeded Leonard in 1957), 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: (1) a systemwide board independent of the rest of the state government; (2) the right to award professional degrees in engineering and the doctorate in the field of education; and (3) 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 also the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction), 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 (CSC) and the board became the "Trustees of the California State Colleges."Cal. Stats., 1961 reg. sess., ch. 12, pp. 540–571.
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".California Education Code Section 66010.4. 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 (whenever they thought UC was not looking) 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" (in that state college faculty members would inevitably demand reduced teaching loads to make time for research) 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 (12 out of 80). 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.