[ Golden Gater Online - December 11, 1997 ]
by Michael Joe
Staff writer
Nowadays it's hard to believe that university president Robert Corrigan once made a regular habit of taking his dog for walks around campus.
He sat in the sun, and on the lawn, chatting with students -- about classes mostly -- even joking with them and sharing a laugh.
You can almost imagine him passing out free hot dogs at basketball games. Those were the rosy days before his image changed, before the tumult, and long before the rumors.
"I not going anywhere. There's the rumor I'm taking a foundation job or going off to Washington," he said last week during a rare interview in his office. "I'm not. I'm not, really."
He was hired here in 1988 from a chancellorship at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, a parallel jump facilitated by an unflattering audit of his public spending habits while at UMass. The audit was made public three years later, when the world seemed to be crashing down all around him.
He has the experience to run a public university with a diverse student body, his advocates pointed out in 1988. Back when he taught at the University of Iowa he created an ethnic studies department, the first of many accomplishments that proved he understood ethnic issues and sensibilities at a university with roots firmly in the ethnic struggles of the 1960s. But he would later be characterized by some in the campus community as insensitive, even ignorant.
Corrigan was touted for his ability to raise private money -- invaluable in the era of higher-education cuts -- and a skill he has proven here and during frequent trips to Washington, D.C..
In Boston, people remember his political savvy, stamina and work ethic. "Ambitious? He's too ambitious," complimented one Boston colleague.
Those who voted him in as SF State's 12th president said he would take them into the next century. Now, people are wondering if he has stayed too long. The honeymoon ended, torn apart by a combination of outside forces and internal struggles.
The problems that haunted Corrigan at the beginning of his tenure are the same problems he faces now: faculty unrest over a promotions/raise policy, enrollment bursting at the seams, class cuts, ethnic tension and a general feeling among students that they are paying more for less.
Long-time professors and administrators remember all the trouble in 1990 and 1991. The climate was different back then, they say. Everyone was on pins and needles, and when the chemistry was right, it sometimes turned downright hostile.
If something wrong could happen, it did, in arguably the most tumultuous few semesters since the student strikes of 1968.
He said he didn't suspect he'd incur a backlash after he approved a Black Politics course in political science from the College of Ethnic Studies, which argued he was diluting its presence in an effort to diversify the curriculum.
He caved into pressure from the Academic Senate to remove Marilyn Boxer, then-vice president of academic affairs, and reverse the university's faculty promotions policy. At the time, the Associated Students and the Academic Senate both had votes of "no confidence" against him.
Deep budget cuts were made in the fall of 1990 by Gov. Duekmejian, fees increased 20 percent, classes were cut, older faculty members were offered early retirement packages and Corrigan was burned in effigy in the campus plaza.
Much of the high-profile conflict then came from disgruntled students, as it does now.
When two students were arrested by the Department of Safety, he was blocked from entering the administration building by a mob of students demanding the charges be dropped, and the image was front-page news in the San Francisco Chronicle the next day.
What followed was, for him, a series of unfortunate incidents. A woman attacked him in the bookstore. At a San Francisco black-tie social, three students verbally attacked him and his wife, Joyce, reportedly because she is black. Death threats were made to his administrators.
He became a target, he said, so he went into hiding. He characterized it as a policy move that was needed to protect the image of the university.
"I made the decision. My 20 years of dealing with a campus was going to change," said Corrigan, 62, a child of the Depression raised in working-class Springfield, Mass.. "There was incident after incident that went well beyond discourse and was viewed from the outside."
"It's a hard position to be in," said Mark Phillips, the academic senate chair. "We live in a time when we blame the leader. It's true of deans, chairs, and it's true of the president."
Corrigan said his relationship with ethnic studies has improved, and people in the college would agree. He also said his relationship with the faculty is better, but faculty members say it couldn't have gotten much worse.
"It took me a while to understand the culture of SF State," said Corrigan. "This is a campus that went through great changes in the '60s and little change since then."
The politically active students -- many of them in student government -- still paint the ugliest picture of the president.
They didn't witness the worst of his troubles, but they do remember when Corrigan sent an assistant -- and not himself -- to talk with students who were divided along battle lines over the first version of the Malcolm X mural, before it was sandblasted off when people said it contained racist symbols and slogans.
Depending on who you talk to, students view his seclusion as a sign that he is disinterested, or worse, that he is the invisible hand behind their frustrations.
Students charged that the office of Student Affairs was so concerned students might get out of hand, it tried to direct student government politics. When Proposition 209 passed last year, students directed most of their anger at Corrigan and demanded a public pronouncement that he would break the law by defying 209.
Some vocal members of the Pan Afrikan Student Union, who are sympathetic to an independent Palestinian state in the Middle East and who helped put up the first Malcolm X mural, have labeled Corrigan a Zionist for his ties to the Jewish community.
Corrigan can't stand being in the same room with more than five people of color, student leaders joke among themselves. "That nurturing environment is not here," said Aimee Barnes, Student Center Governing Board chairwoman. "What mechanisms are in place to be in touch with students -- the needs of the students. Welfare reform. Mechanisms for 209. Bilingual education."
What, specifically, should he be doing? "I don't know what I want him to do," comes one typical reply, "because I don't know him."
It is not his style these days. He walks around campus either looking at his shoes or off into the distance with a marine's thousand-yard stare. It's sad in a way, when an educator feels he must avoid his students.
"By the way, it's a good technique to isolate the president," said Corrigan. "The personal loss is contact with the students."
[ Golden Gater - December 11, 1997 ]