New Yorker named new head of BSS

Joel Kassiola, new dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at SF State, has a lot of enthusiasm -- especially for someone who has been in bureaucracies for a long time.

Professor Jerry Combs, history department chair and chair of the search committee which interviewed applicants and recommended Kassiola, said his energy and his experience will be an asset to the campus.

"When we, on the committee, were talking to our fellow faculty about the various candidates, there was a lot of enthusiasm for him," Combs said. "He's enthusiastic, very energetic and he's got a good sense of humor. And that's really a help in a bureaucracy like this."

Kassiola was dean of undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College prior to his appointment at SF State. He spent 27 years at Brooklyn, much of it in high administrative posts.

Combs said the college is similar to SF State in many ways.

"He's had experience that's urban, diverse, good, has older students, and that's going through the same kind of economic turmoil we've gone through," Combs said. "I think it's great."

The College of BSS is a "conglomeration of departments," Combs said. It includes anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, political science, psychology, and social science.

Kassiola also brings clear ideas of what a university should accomplish.

"I think the message that the university has to bring is this message of commitment to the rational process. I'm confident in this process, because I've devoted my life to it, and I see it work in the classroom."

The first step is getting people to understand the rational process, he said, and to explain what prejudice is.

"Prejudice, strictly speaking, is pre-judgement -- to have a conclusion before you've seen the evidence, before you have engaged in an inquiry," he said. "Very few people are really open-minded in the way that we require to engage in the rational process."

The challenge for administrators is to take controversies and use them to create dialogue, Kassiola said.

"If the university is doing its job, sensitive, thoughtful people will be challenged, angered, threatened. That's what a university should be about."

Kassiola has experience in using controversy to create dialogue. The campus at Brooklyn was, like SF State, diverse -- and included many groups with various religious beliefs. When some parents complained about nudes in art classes, he saw an opportunity to explain "the role of the nude in art history... and the importance, if they're sending their child to a public institution, to understand the mission of the public institution. I had to insist if they were going to get a degree from City University of New York at Brooklyn College, the student had to pass that course," he said.

"He knows his way around -- there isn't anybody who's going to buffalo him, I'll guarantee you that," Combs said.

Another BSS department chair, sociology Professor Rachel Kahn-Hut, related the fact that Kassiola is a New Yorker to his energy level and knack for conversation.

"He talked to everyone who has any responsibility in BSS" last week, said Kahn-Hut, who said she has positive expectations for the future.

"I think I've done some things this past week -- more than I'd thought," Kassiola said.

While Kassiola now brings New York energy to SF State, he was motivated to move to the west coast because of the greater visibility of environmental issues here.

"There is an awareness of the environment and an explosion of developments here," Kassiola said.

Combs said the topic of environmental studies came up in Kassiola's interviews.

"Social science faculty were excited about expanding our role in environmental studies on campus," Combs said.

Kassiola sees environmental studies as broad and inclusive.

"The environment issue is across all of the disciplines," he said. "I believe western civilization is at a crisis point, and we are in a period of transformation, and that's what we really are talking about. Everybody in social science, as well as in science, can talk about it."

SF State is uniquely situated for environmental studies, and Kassiola sees exciting possibilities in the geosciences at SF State as well as the social sciences. Besides the dynamic geographic location between the San Andreas Fault and the San Francisco Bay, SF State innovations and resources are notable.

One of the geology department resources which Kassiola hopes to utilize more is the Paul F. Romberg Tiburon Environmental Center on the bay, one of three off-campus sites. The facility is a field station for study of the estuarine environment.

Another innovation to appear at SF State in October is the Geographic Information System software, a new way of mapping the world that is not two-dimensional. One of the advances in this field is the notion of drawing international borders in the sea based on ecosystems of oceans rather than on number of miles from shore.

Kassiola proposes a class on politics and the environment -- there are currently none in political science, he said. "There would be a political theory course where we would do big jumps -- the way I did it at Brooklyn -- where we would try to, at the beginning, get students up to a minimum understanding of the nature of the environmental crisis," he said.

Kassiola demonstrates some understanding of the complexities of issues concerning the environment when talking about the multi-layered issue of the preservation of the rainforest and the problem of development.

"The position of Third World elites is really tough -- if I'm a policy maker in Brazil and I want to improve the economy in order to help the people... what am I looking at? I'm looking at a great source of economic revenue, of development. The environment gets subordinated - how do you develop it without ruining the environment? These are very critical issues."

Kassiola's 1990 book, "The Death of Industrial Civilization: The Limits to Economic Growth and the Repoliticization of Advanced Industrial Society," was billed by scientists a "leading book in the area of environmental public policy."

But he says of himself, "I'm not an authority on much. I'm in a steep learning curve - I'm trying to learn as much as I can. I'm very anxious to interact more with students."

[ back to Golden Gater Online August 31, 1995 ]

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