Clinton's Monerey message

President Clinton christened the newest addition to the California State University system with words of praise for higher education and staunch defense of affirmative action Monday morning, as 22,000 onlookers gathered amidst construction shrapnel and makeshift buildings in Monterey.

Standing atop a hastily erected platform on the CSU Monterey Bay campus, the president reassured skeptics with talk of future opportunities the CSU's 21st campus will provide.

"I ask anyone who's cynical about America's future to look around," Clinton said to the masses gathered on the site of the former Fort Ord army base.

Critics who charge California has taken a disproportional hit from defense cutbacks point toward the loss of 35,000 troops as a precursor to economic hardship for the region. But Clinton shared another view with the capacity crowd.

"Instead of a place that is a shell, an empty shell, they're now going to have a vital university," he said of the Monterey Bay community. "They had 4,000 applications for the first 600 places open there. And within just a few years, they'll have thousands and thousands of people there, creating more jobs than were there when Fort Ord was running at full steam. That is the future of America -- working together, working for tomorrow."

The university's slogan is "A Work in Progress" and that would seem to be an understatement on what appears to be a dusty, sprawling construction site. Workers outnumber students, librarians wear hard hats to work in a building that has yet to house a single book and room numbers are spray-painted on makeshift buildings like graffiti.

Similarly, administrators are still finalizing educational programs that will require students to use the latest in computer technology, know a second language and perform some sort of work to get a degree. Even though the 590 students enrolled for the fall semester have yet to be told what they must do to graduate, they do at least have a school mascot: the sea otter.

The last of the Army's 35,000 troops pulled out 11 months ago, making the changeover from military facility to university one of the fastest base conversions in the country.

At a time when the CSU system is strapped for cash, the 1,400-acre Monterey Bay campus is a billion-dollar asset the state could hardly afford to refuse. Renovation of the campus is being financed largely through federal base conversion funds.

At 45 square miles, the one-time Army base is only slightly smaller than the city of San Francisco, and was the largest military facility in the country to be shut down. Although the campus covers only 5 percent of the base acreage, it will be the dominant institution on the site.

Nearly 70 percent of the base will be set aside as open space -- much of it land long used for artillery practice where live shells remain buried. An additional 14 percent will be turned over to neighboring cities such as Seaside and Marina for commercial development. The military will hang on to 12 percent of the base to continue operating its prestigious Defense Language Institute and Naval Postgraduate School.

With the closure of Ft. Ord, the Monterey region lost about $423 million a year in military salaries, services and contracts. But the university already has helped revive the local economy with its construction contracts, well-paying jobs and influx of students.

"As far as being an anchor tenant, we probably couldn't have brought in anything better," Kathleen Ahern, a spokeswoman for the Ft. Ord Rescue Authority, which is coordinating conversion of the base, told the Los Angeles Times. "The wonderful thing about a campus is when students aren't in class, they spend and eat constantly."

In addition to singing the praises of the new campus community, Clinton also addressed statewide issues, such as the idea that middle class wages are not rising because of affirmative action and immigration.

"There are people that will tell you that the real reason middle class wages are stagnant is that ... we have too many immigrants, or that affirmative action is destroying opportunities for the middle class," he said.

Later he said, "we should never, ever, ever permit ourselves into a position where we forget that almost everybody here came from somewhere else and that America is a set of ideas and values and convictions that make us strong."

[ back to Golden Gater Online September 7, 1995 ]

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