Chancellor, California State University
CSU Board of Trustees Meeting
September 23, 2009
Thank you, Chair Bleich.
On behalf of the board, and all of the CSU employees and community, let me thank you for your service to the CSU and to this board. You have the opportunity not everybody gets – that of serving your country at the highest level. We wish you well as always.
This has been an extraordinary challenging time. I have been a public servant for 40 years, and I have never seen a budget that can change on a daily basis. It is nothing short of an economic meltdown.
Over the summer, we have been preparing for new cases of the H1N1 or swine flu on our campuses.
There have already been a couple of cases reported at CSU campuses since the start of the new academic year, and you all have probably read about outbreaks on campuses across the country as students return to begin the school year. Last week it was reported there have been more than 13,000 cases identified at more than 250 universities.
All of the presidents and I have met to talk about preparation on how to handle outbreaks of cases on campuses this fall – we had a “test run” of sorts last spring when the first cases were reported. At Long Beach, San Diego and onboard ship for Maritime, the campuses isolated students and did a good job of communicating with the public, parents and students.
We are prepared for more cases this fall, and are using good common sense in terms of managing larger numbers of students coming down with this flu.
Our health centers are prepared and our risk management folks have developed campus preparation guidelines that have been distributed and posted on the web. The main advice is to follow all of the common sense guidelines that we can and not panic.
A number of our campuses have been hosting the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) accreditation reviews this year.
WASC has completed the reviews of Chico, Sacramento and San Marcos. The accreditation of Chico was extended 10 years to 2019 – which is highly unusual in length and a credit to Chico’s faculty and administration.
The accreditation of Sacramento and San Marcos were also extended by 8 years each to 2017. The Maritime Academy, Los Angeles and Long Beach are well on their way to re-accreditation and scheduled for final review.
Congratulations to all – I know these are a tremendous amount of work for each campus to go through.
In an effort to compete for additional federal stimulus funding, the CSU has submitted an application to the US Department of Energy for more than $77 million in federal funding to install smart grid technology at all 23 campuses. The equipment would give us real-time information on our energy use so we can eliminate inefficiencies. Once up and running, we would potentially be able to reduce 90,000 megawatt hours per year at a savings of $20 million annually.
On the outreach front, at the end of August, Dominguez Hills hosted two very successful events.
As part of our African American initiative we hosted “Super Saturday” for students and their parents to get information on how to get to college.
We also partnered with Univision for an education fair that attracted 20,000 families and community members. That really demonstrated the need to reach out to parents and students from underserved communities about going to college.
Chair Bleich, that concludes my remarks.