Faculty Hall of Fame 2021, Virtual Ceremony

Faculty are nominated for this award once they retire from service at CSUB and have fully separated from employment on campus. Again, thank you to our inductees for their years of service, dedication, and outstanding work as faculty members at CSUB. We hope you enjoy this event and we look forward to seeing you all soon with a proper reception. Thank you! Greetings to my CSUB family and welcome to the 2021 CSUB Faculty Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. I am with you today as President of Cal State Bakersfield but in my heart, I am Dr.

Lynnette Zelezny, professor of psychology. Teaching was my first love and my calling. Teaching gave me what every leader in higher education needs, a grounding in the classroom, where the magic happens between professors and students, where the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment begins, where ambition and talent are nurtured, and where a foundation for lifelong learning is built. The four professors we honor today are among the finest in a long tradition of excellence established by our renowned faculty over the decades but there is another element of distinction for the 2021 class of inductees.

This year we are celebrating our 50th Anniversary. As we look back on the remarkable life of our beloved university, we give thanks for the scholarship, research, and service that our faculty have contributed to the world. A place, any place is better for having a university at its cultural center. Bakersfield, Kern County, and the region are better for CSUB and they are better for you, our faculty. When we send our students out into the world we ask them to remain a part of our CSUB family.

We invite them to return often but a university is not so much a place as it is a shared set of ideals of values and principles, of traditions, of aspirations. When our students and alumni speak of the life-changing experiences they’ve had at CSUB a beloved professor is always at the center of the story. A professor who opened a door in the mind they didn’t know existed. A professor who went above and beyond to get that student an internship or a job. A professor who showed empathy and patience.

A professor who understood that our students CSUB students work harder than most to have the opportunity to study with us and that the dedication deserves their cultivation and respect. Professors like the ones we honor today. As we celebrate our 50th Anniversary, it is fitting that three of our four honorees were founding faculty members here at CSUB. Can you imagine that, to see a blank slate in front of you, knowing that an entire community’s dreams and hopes rest in part on your shoulders.

Today we know that CSUB is an exceptional university because they were successful in building a bastion of scholarship research and hope, here in the Southern San Joaquin Valley. It is with the deepest appreciation that I ask you to join me in congratulating, Dr. David Ost, Dr. Steven Suter, Dr. Louis Wildman and today we honor the memory of the late Jack Coash. Educators know that the deepest satisfaction comes from knowing that our students have left our classroom armed with the knowledge they will need to lead enriching and productive lives, but it is a special honor to have the esteem of your peers to know that your colleagues here at CSUB were inspired by your example, by your willingness to serve, by your keen minds and passion for teaching.

On behalf of Cal State Bakersfield, we express our heartfelt gratitude for the difference you have made, the difference you’re still making as expressed through the lives of the generations of students you have guided, thank you. On behalf of CSU Bakersfield, I would like to salute Dr. John “Jack” Coash. He was the founding Dean of the School of Sciences and later the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences here at CSUB from 1968 to 1987. He was one of our most treasured Geology professors.

In fact, he taught a Geology course each year despite his administrative dues. He established the John and Emily Coash scholarship endowment. In 1941, he was drafted and served over three years in the Army Signal Corps. Like myself, a proud veteran. In 1947, he graduated with a BS with honors from Colorado College. In 1949, he received his Master’s of Science in Geology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and in 1954, he graduated with his Ph.

D. in Geology from Yale University. From all of us here at CSUB we want to welcome him to the Faculty Hall of Fame. I’m honored to be able to tell you a little bit about Jack Coash and his many contributions to CSU Bakersfield. Jack was one of the original founders of CSUB. He arrived when the campus was just a wide-open field and he served as the Dean of Sciences and later as the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences until his retirement in 1987, after 19 years of working at CSUB.

In addition to his administrative duties, he taught every year and he delighted in taking Geology students out into the field to show them the many geological features in the region.

07:41 - Before he arrived at CSUB, Jack Served in the Army Signal Corps overseas and later he received his Ph. D. from Yale and he taught for 17 years at Bowling Green State University and it was there that the National Science Foundation recognized his accomplishments and talents and hired him as a supervisor for their summer program for teachers in India and after being there uh in that program the national science foundation hired him to work in Washington D.

C. where their headquarters are and it was from there that Jack was hired to come out to Bakersfield to help found this new State College. According to Jack they only had two years to build, to put the curricula together, to hire faculty, and to recruit students, and you can imagine how much work that must have been, how stressful that was, and with the fate of the college and the university at stake.

08:52 - But with Jack’s international experience and his work ethic, he was up to the challenge and while Jack was at CSUB he founded the School of Science later the School of Arts and Sciences and he also founded the Department of Geological Sciences as well as the California Well Sample Repository. For those of you who don’t know what that is, the Repository remains the only facility in California that provides permanent storage of geological samples and data for the public.

It still serves as a major resource for academic research for governmental regulation agencies, for industry, and it is one of the campus’s main connections to the community and Jack was the founding director in 1975. He was also instrumental in establishing degree programs at the bachelor’s level and master’s level in Geology and after he retired Jack continued to contribute in many different ways to CSUB in the community. Jack Coash made impactful long-lasting contributions to CSUB and the community sadly in march 2019 Jack passed away and we miss him.

We owe Jack a sincere debt of gratitude for his dedicated service in building successful thriving programs and institutions from scratch. His instrumental role in transforming CSUB from a vacant field into a thriving university and his founding of a successful school undergraduate and graduate programs and a major community resource makes Jack Coash very worthy of the CSUB Faculty Hall of Fame, thanks. All right, so I guess the first thing I want to say is that while I submitted the nomination form to honor Dr.

Louis Wildman, several of our colleagues from the Department of Advanced Education Studies support and helped out helped in putting together this nomination. Why did we nominate Dr. Wildman for the Faculty Hall of Fame? I think in terms of pre-k thought 12 educational leadership and education more broadly in Kern County this guy’s a legend. Before the pandemic when I could get out in the community and talk with educational leaders when I would mention my affiliation with CSUB almost always folks would ask about Dr.

Wildman. Then they’d tell me stories about him and whether it was about how he would give an impromptu concert on the marimba or about his ethic of care, that was so evident in his mentoring and coaching of educators. If you know Dr. Wildman then you know how deeply he cares about people. He’s also a prolific scholar in the field of Educational Leadership but he hasn’t just published pieces for other scholars in the field. He has shared his expertise widely over the years with our community.

For example, through editorials in the Bakersfield Californian, so we nominated Dr. Wildman for this award because his impact on our community has been profound. This is a better community for children and families because of his life’s work here at CSUB and I’m glad that the Faculty Hall of Fame committee agrees.

12:32 - Well, thank you Dr. Wisman for such kind and generous remarks. As I was thinking about this, I was thinking about maybe some of the principles that I’ve tried to follow a few thoughts about educational administration. First of all, I approach educational administration from a Liberal Arts perspective, not as narrow training. My focus has been on understanding, rather than learning a set of rules and regulations, and procedures. Although those are certainly important, I look for a little broader perspective than that.

I believe educational administrators should live what the schools they lead teach. For example, we teach the importance of regular physical exercise and we, therefore, should as administrators practice that ourselves. Just as I’m against waste and natural resources, I’m also against waste in human resources. The great antidote of course to waste in human resources is education. While educating all is expensive, it is far more expensive not to make general education the norm for most everyone.

Public schools are the foundation of our democracy and democracy requires an educated citizenry. Closely related to the goal of utilizing human resources is the concept of affirmative action, with the goal of attaining proportional representation. Among qualified candidates, the least represented candidate should be chosen. Over the years I have sought to help schools become learning communities, where there is a sharing of knowledge where everyone is trying to learn, where there is enjoyment in learning, and where decisions are made on their merit rather than on their ownership.

While schools are for students, they are also for teachers and administrators who spend their lives within these institutions. The way that the public treats educators demonstrates the extent to which the public values education. Finally, I believe there are at least two paths for learning in most courses. One path involves students learning predetermined course objectives. The other path includes self-directed students and faculty pursuing their interests in the course.

Educators have debated the merits of these two models of learning for centuries. One side is teacher-centered and based on the idea that learning occurs as a result of the transmission of knowledge from the teacher to student. The other side is student-centered and assumes that learning is a process of discovery by the student. The pendulum of practice has swung back and forth over the years between these two bottles. We want students to gradually take over more and more responsibility for their own learning but if students don’t have experience guiding their own learning, they are not suddenly going to become self-directed learners.

For example, many students have taken private music lessons where the teacher told them what to practice for the following week’s lesson, unfortunately once the lesson stopped many students stopped playing their instrument because they had not gradually become self-directed learners. I believe there is a good reason for both learning paths and that the finest schools feature both. As Emmanuel Kant said, “education partly teaches man something and partly develops something within him.

” Well again, I want to thank Dr. Wisman for introducing me. I want to thank my colleagues in the Advanced Studies Department and of course, I want to thank CSU Bakersfield for hiring me for over 30 years. I want to thank Dr. Wiseman for being here and being able to do this for me and I do appreciate it very much. Dr. Wildman, likewise it is an honor. You are a giant upon whose shoulders we stand in the department of advanced education studies and without all your hard work that you’ve done over the past decades here at CSUB and in the broader community, we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on so we continue your work, your vision for equity-minded leadership for all, especially the marginalized and the underrepresented that you spoke about.

And I just want to I want you to know that we are honored to have nominated you and we thank you for all your dedication to this community over the years. Well thank you very much, I also want to thank you guys on the Faculty Hall of Fame Committee. We really appreciate you guys selecting Dr. Wildman for this award. It’s my great pleasure to have nominated Dr. Steve Suter for the Faculty Hall of Fame Steve and I team-taught a course since 1978. We ventured out into something that not too many professors do and he was like me interested in doing something different in the classroom and it’s very rare for people to team teach and it’s a great experience for students especially since Steve and I come from two very separate disciplines.

Mine in the Humanities and he in the Social Sciences and I must say I learned a great deal from him. I don’t know if he learned anything from me but we had a good time adjusting to each other, enhancing each other’s disciplines, and sharing insights. We taught this course, it started out, I believe calling it brain and human values, and then it morphed into another thing and finally, it’s still in the book, says Personhood and it gives students credit and Psych and in the Humanities the both the C and the D and it was a great experience and of course Steve has done many other things.

He of course was among the first faculty to come to the campus and he was instrumental. He had I believe a six-year program summer program NSF for the students. He was always promoting research. His field was the first the Biofeedback. He had a Biofeedback Lab and was doing a lot of research with students in Biofeedback and that led him to go to NASA and I’m sure he’s going to talk about that where he did biofeedback, to help with the space motion sickness.

So he brought great research skills as well as teaching skills to the campus and then he and his wife Penny started a Vision Lab and did a lot of work on vision and obviously gave the students a great experience in doing research in that area and I know he is was instrumental in developing the lab facilities for Psych. He was instrumental in developing some courses, the cognitive site course, the brain and consciousness course, and some others and I just think he’s so worthy of being a Faculty Hall of Fame person because he contributed so much to the campus, in teaching and research, in collegiality.

He was always a very collegial colleague and my years with him were just great and so I think he’s worthy of nomination. I’m very proud to be able to nominate. This is a great honor to be nominated by Jackie Kegley of all people to be in the CSUB Faculty Hall of Fame after all the things that she’s contributed and I’m very grateful to be nominated by her and selected by the committee. I started thinking earlier today how it came to this and my first thought was when I first visited the campus.

Almost everybody else who’s around who got hired at CSUB visited the campus during an interview. Well, there was no campus to visit when I was interviewed. They were building it. So I got here and I was staying at my motel on Union Avenue, that was the place to stay at that time with Union Avenue the motels and I thought I would drive out to check out the campus and I got to a chain-link fence and a locked gate and I got to watch the construction workers.

This was in August of 1970 working on the place. I mean that was really my first kind of memory I had you know I have some physical memories like that. The courtyard area in the middle of the campus used to fill up with tumbleweeds and I captured one day in the 1970s and kept it and last year I got an email from a student who from way back and he wanted me to do a letter of recommendation for him and I said sure. He said, “hey doc do you sell the tumbleweed,” because I kept it in my office and I said, “yeah.

” So I’m talking from Glenside, Pennsylvania and I still have it and it’s a nice one. It’s a good size tumbleweed, but in between the locked chain-link fence, and today I kind of think of major things that occupied my time in addition to teaching. Well, maybe I should talk about teaching first one of the things that.

24:04 - I know it’s probably striking to Dr. Kegley, also is that we have had so many first-generation students and also in the early days, we had many we called them returning students and they were both very, they’re all you know interesting people to kind of get to know. They’re a little bit different than your fresh out of local high school 19-year-old students. So that’s been really interesting and rewarding and I think we have an awful lot of impact. I mean I’ve always enjoyed advising students, also some people think that’s maybe a bit of a pain but I always found that kind of rewarding.

I like to teach introductory Psychology. I did that for many years because the students there were all new and fresh and like empty vessels to be filled and everything was just amazing to them. That you could that you would talk about and then maybe at the other end I spent a lot of time working one-on-one with students in a research setting and they too, it was fun to see them drink things in except it was at a different level. My research, I got interested in psychology the science of psychology, and my research has always involved a bunch of electronic equipment and then later on computers and small rooms and mysterious electronic processing going on and electrodes on people’s heads and but students come into that setting and they don’t know anything about any of the equipment.

They know knew very little about what goes on in biofeedback or visual processing and they would learn all that and we would work together for hours and hours and weeks and weeks and co-author papers and they would act as collaborators and I never told them, they were mostly undergraduates, I never told them that I was getting them to do things that it’s usually Ph. students who do that in graduate programs. I just didn’t tell them and they would go ahead and read papers and we would talk about what was important in them and we talked about how to analyze data what we should look for and then after we analyze it what did it all mean.

We would spend time with stuff like that so anyway I really enjoyed all of that. I also thought about what did along the way what did I really contribute and I was thinking about that different ways did I do anything that somebody else couldn’t have done or it was special and the only thing that I could really think of is that I think I tended to bring good spirits to the classroom and students appreciated that even though the material might be difficult they did not feel particularly intimidated and they felt that they would be.

They were open to participate and I and I did maintain a certain level of humor. I remember one student, later on, told me and I was pretty good at judging when I could joke with the student and when I shouldn’t and she said, “oh Dr. cedar I have a question. ” She asked a question and uh and I said because I kind of knew her any way I said, “well uh you know they have this saying that there’s really no stupid questions but I stand corrected actually,” and she reacted fine to that because I knew that I was picking on the right person there.

Anyway, but I think I tended to bring that those good spirits to. It was the National Science Foundation grants that Dr. Kegley mentioned, I spent quite a bit of time going out to the high schools and giving talks in science classes to recruit students, applicants, for these summer programs where they would come out to the university and do research and I developed a lot of contacts in the high schools. That eventually developed, for those contacts, let me develop yearly psychology field days that we had at the university where we would just invite students to come out and then other people in psychology would do presentations and then that gradually expanded to behavioral science field days and that was in the probably the late 1970s, early 80s.

I remember one time I was standing up on the bridge we call in Dorothy Donahoe Hall looking down doing the opening, during the opening, “hi how you doing thing,” and the whole central hallway was filled. I think we had 700 students, high school students that time, was full of students and they were getting ready to disperse to different classrooms to hear presentations from oh probably you know we had maybe 20 or 30 different classrooms going for them to pick up things.

Later when I was the Research Ethics Review coordinator, I spent from 1999 onward coordinating protection of human and animal research subjects. At some universities and it may be more common than unusual there’s an adversarial kind of relationship between people who protect subjects and people who do research with those subjects. That was not true at CSUB and I think I contributed to that. To having a kind of wealth and welcoming collaborative atmosphere and I had a lot of a lot of faculty would come to my office and get advice about writing up their protocols and things.

Remembering some of our earliest vision research involved babies. Where we were studying vision development of very young babies, as young as three weeks old and we would put electrodes on their head and measure brain activity. Well really while they’re looking at things and we could figure out what their acuity was because we couldn’t say which is better one or two you know to develop acuity but at that time the Bakersfield Californian had marriage announcements and birth announcements right underneath that.

31:53 - Those are the good old days and we would cut those out of the newspaper and then lookup phone numbers and then when we needed six-week-old babies, I was a recruiter. I would get on the phone and I would just do cold calls and it was almost always mom’s and say you know, “hi this is uh Dr. Suter I’m working, I have a grant from the National Institutes of Health and we’re studying development of vision and babies and I wonder if…” and some of them would say, “come on this is this is the friend of Heralds from the office right?” You know or you’re gonna sell me magazines you know and I would get past that and then explain what it was about and almost always the moms would the moms and sometimes dad would come along would bring their little babe out and they would get a nice Polaroid picture of themselves, strip of paper they had the baby’s brainwave recordings on it and an absolutely free parking pass for that day at the university.

But uh anyway I think I think the good spirits maybe helped out a little bit, a little bit there. The team teaching with Jackie, Jackie drew me into the Carnegie Foundation Science Humanities Convergence project in the late 1970s that she was she was coordinating that and wondered if I wanted to be involved and eventually it turned out we were a good match for a course and Dr. Kegley explained what those courses were about but we literally, I mean we interacted in the classroom a lot and not just learned from each other but I think the two of us together were added up to something that was a little bit more than if we were doing that separately.

I mean we literally converged science and humanities converge right there in front of the students and I think many of them picked up on that. That led, that became sometimes an honors course and then that led to me being on the honors council when Dr. Kegley took over, when she became director of the Helen Hawk Honors Program when I helped out with some things in the honors program later on. Vision lab and as Dr. Kegley said was really fun stuff. The early 1980s the late Ed Sazaki helped put together the vision lab and the other Dr.

Suter and myself were the were the founders and we did so much research over the over the years working with students and I remember, not just the research and going to meetings and stuff. One thing that stands out is there’s an international vision conference once a year in Fort Lauderdale and for a while we had the Bakersfield beach party. There were enough of us involved in vision research at the vision lab in Bakersfield and enough of our graduates that are kept kind of spread out into other programs we’re working on PhDs and we’re elsewhere that we’d get together and get together and have an evening on the beach and that was a lot of fun.

We had vision lab reunions, the last one we had was just a few years ago at one of my colleagues retired colleagues Jess Deegan in psychology, he started as a vision lab student. Came back became chair of the department and has retired but he moved to Colorado and we had a reunion there and people drove from Washington State and California and here and there to come to that reunion. Did a lot of work right from the get-go that involved Ed Sazaki also with developing facilities and getting equipment.

We didn’t have any facilities equipment, I mean there’s you know there’s no there’s no psychology building on campus. So our facilities have always been renovations of existing facilities and over the years we we’ve had four major renovations that I coordinated. At first with Ed Sazaki was participating but then he became a full-time administrator and then I was doing it. That yielded it was almost always involved taking big rooms and cutting them up and to make a bunch of small rooms, so they would be psychology labs where we could take our mysterious equipment and sit down and collect data.

We also acquired quite a bit of equipment we had to get it someplace and there were grants to participate in and so I was responsible for that also but I did that from the early 1970s until I till I retired. People I remember a lot of people but I’m not gonna start mentioning that. I guess I could go high school students two I have two friends on Facebook who are who were high school students in the National Science Foundation programs in the 1970s they have since retired but they’re friends on Facebook.

So many college students I mean students that you know you make friends with and you hope you’ve had a good impact on and you’ve learned things from students as well faculty colleagues that I team-taught with I team-taught with some people in psychology also and staff and in psychology, the GRASP office technicians you know I spent a lot of time a lot of time with those folks over the years. So anyway, uh I guess that is a is a look at what happened after that chain-link fence.

When I read the criteria for the CSUB Hall of Fame it strictly aligns with the professional responsibilities of faculty and it reads that in at least one of the three areas that are our professional responsibilities teaching, scholarship, and service, that there should be excellence. So first thing I thought of as well what do you mean by excellence and I’m a fantasy baseball player, so what we use in fantasy baseball is when they try to evaluate players by if they got hit by a truck and they had to be replaced by somebody else would there be value over the replacement person.

So in in this context a replacement would be another PhD in Biology with the same fields as Dr. Ost so that and I think the criteria is the same for tenuring of faculty. Is if a faculty member left and you hired somebody with the same area of expertise would there be something missing that couldn’t be replaced you know in terms of either their teaching niche or their research niche or their service niche but I think when you make a commitment to tenure somebody what you really deserve in return as somebody that can fill a niche that somebody else just couldn’t have done.

They can define what that niche is for themselves, but it should be something that there would be a vacuum that would not be filled if they were not there. So I’m thinking well in David’s case well how do we define excellence in those three niches and I think the easiest way to do it is just to ask yourself does the person have national standing in one of the niches. So we’re not just home counting somebody, but they’re recognized beyond you know their immediate area.

In all three areas, I don’t want to go into my form you know my formal letter that I wrote but there’s lots of uh lots of niches that David has that are international and national very important organizations um let me look at my notes here: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Department of Education, National Science Foundation, Kettering Foundation, the California State University System- in its entirety, as well as CSUB. So I looked at all three areas and he really had national standing in all three and then for me personally I think what’s important is you know the reality is that faculty are, for the most part the faculty profession is independent contractors meaning uh you go in if you do your job if you’re a good teacher an excellent scholar and you’ve done your service, you’re pretty much allowed to define what your niche is going to be but not everybody defines that niche in terms of something that involves true leadership at the institutional level and I think for me to take the time to really write a nomination.

I don’t know if I would have motivated to do that unless it were someone like Dr. Ost that was a true leader in terms of CSUB and CSU as well as just being solid at the individual level across the board. Now what is leadership? I think it’s getting people and organizations to move in a direction that they would not otherwise have moved and that ends up being a direction that aligns with really what your true mission and values are and then thirdly that movement has some permanence to it.

Nothing’s forever but there should be some enduring consequence in David’s case, actually I nominated him for some things that were more personal in nature. I came to CSUB in 1978 so my nomination is based on what I knew he did for CSUB from 1978 onward and that was well a couple things. At the personal level he was in the founding faculty cohort and I was shortly behind that maybe six to seven years behind that. Well David you know in combination with about six of his good friend.

When I came in 78 it was one of the biggest cohorts in a long time I think we had 18 or 19 new faculty that year but they took it upon themselves to really at the at the whole university level to invite us to dinners to and basically to socialize us that what type of institution they made CSUB to be and to make sure that that had some was carried on to the next generation and what that involved was a strong commitment to students everybody professes a strong commitment to students but again you know you can pretty much set your own agenda as a faculty member and people may think that we get into this because we love teaching we love students but many of us get into it because we love our we love learning for ourselves and love our academic area.

So, and then the way uh universities get prestige at the national level is through their you know the research contributions of their faculty. But David understood that at CSUB what our what our real mission was that we’re working in an area where there’s very few students that are going on to college etc. and he understood that really we were all about uh advancing our students. Okay so in addition to and it was probably over at least two years maybe three years but this group of six or seven faculty David being one of the ringleaders would meet with us we just talk about all sorts of things and have fun but it was clear their you know their commitment that we were to be truly a public university but centered on excellent teaching.

And then at the personal level as well, he, I worked with him he was a Dean of Extended University Division and he took it upon himself and he I know he gives a lot of the credit to his predecessor Dr. Roy Dull but they with what they did at the Extended University is they delivered academic programs in remote regions and special publics that that there’s no way the state of California could ever afford to deliver those programs. So they had to be self-supporting, you had to figure out ways to actually pay for those programs pay for all the faculty of the salaries, the infrastructure.

without state support and deliver them. Well as you can imagine that’s about the time online education came into being and in those early years, he was not only the champion of online education, but I think I can say the only champion. I think he faced a lot of aggression from faculty that were not in the least bit interested and passive aggression from other administrators that were siding with their faculty and the way he got those programs on board is basically mentoring and working with individual faculty by individually faculty member to stitch together the programs to get the support that really you needed at the level of the whole university.

So it boiled down to if a degree program had 20 requirements, you’ve got to find 20 faculty members one with each of those areas of specialization that that you could nurture and you know help them embrace the value that we have access is one of our missions and that this is the way to do it and slowly by slowly CSUB came on board and I think you look at what happened with COVID in the last year and what would have happened without you know his early efforts to really nudge CSUB as hard as he could in terms of you know non-traditional traditional means of delivery and then personally he mentored me and got me thinking about should I consider going into academic administration and he when he retired he kind of greased the wheels where I could become his Interim replacement and I actually spent the last 12 years before my full retirement in academic administration.

So, he was a personal mentor as well okay. I nominated him that the nomination was successful then subsequently I learned about things that he did that I really was not aware of that really go back to the foundation of the entire CSU Master Plan or CSUB or CSU their niche in the entire master plan of the state of California as well as some you know monumental programs in the CSU now like the FERP program the pre-doctoral support program, the Institute for Teaching and Learning, uh and David I should probably leave that to him because he was there at the time and he fully understands but I got a sense later that that that really he’s a trailblazer in terms of the entire CSU as well.

I want to thank the committee for you know identifying me somehow. You know historically there aren’t very many people around who remember me out there. I started thinking about what was going on with you know the university at the time. That’s 51 years ago when I joined the faculty.

51:06 - That’s before FM radio, that’s before eight track tapes, and it was during the Vietnam War. Lots of things going on. There were I think five or six universities that were being established new when I was coming out of my graduate cocoon. There was Evergreen and Washington, Governor State in the Midwest, Empire State in New York, Permian Basin in Texas and then there was Cal State Bakersfield. Now Cal State Bakersfield you know didn’t appeal to me you know.

There were other institutions that I had contract offers from uh I was in Washington D. C. at the time working with NSF and AAAS. So I had national visibility, not necessarily reputation but visibility and there’s a very different connection there but Jack Coash started recruiting me I mean he’d show up at one of my meetings and then we’d go someplace and you know he started talking about Cal State Bakersfield and it was going to be a teaching institution.

Not just how to teach but student-centered teaching and now that’s very unique at the university setting. You know they you know as mark was saying and I thank him for his details much of university instruction is based on the faculty members personal agenda. I mean they want to talk about fish bones or you know the birds and uh there goes cytillas tridecamentalitis you know and they get excited about that and that’s good. Passion is good, there’s no doubt about that but it’s terrible for teaching you know that in that sense.

So all right I came to Cal State Bakersfield because you know Coash convinced me it was going to be student-centered system. Now I didn’t know how they’re going to do that you know it was a new university so well maybe there’s something going on about it. They hired Paul Romberg to come in and he hired his academic team. Now the academic team was unique with Jack Coash and Tom Watts and some of the, they were all student-centered individuals. That’s what they wanted it to be and that’s what it they pushed for but there was a problem.

The state system would come in the CSU and chancellor’s office would gradually become more formulated and in that formulation they would develop the policies the rules the regulations the allocation of budget and all those formula but that didn’t exist on the campus in Bakersfield and then they got the academic side. For example, Jack Coash wrote the curricula for all the sciences and mathematics the course descriptions the programs the requirements for graduation so everything was student centered right from the start before they hired anybody faculty-wise.

So this was very good but then the whole process went on hiring a faculty. The interesting thing is the faculty came from all over they came from Yale they came from you know Harvard you know that was their intent they wanted faculty that were diverse in background and in training and in strategies of teaching. So that’s you know that’s how the history of where word came and that’s what I stepped into in 1970 was this dynamic situation. Dynamic in terms of the administration which was very unusual.

They didn’t have an academic senate Paul Romberg and the academic vice president wanted to have an administrative structure in which the faculty participated so they had a College Council, everybody participated. The president was there, faculty representatives were there, and the decisions were made by the College Council, which was unheard of because you you’re supposed to have a top-down management that says faculty go do this you know and that isn’t the way it was set up.

So Mark indeed what we had was not just me you know, it the whole process was fluid and going on and we pretty much uh. Well I can say that it was exciting. All right as extended university now as Professor Evans pointed out my predecessor already had contracts with certain agencies out there in the delivery of systems classwork, coursework, such as China Lake the Naval Weapons Center we had a contract with them to deliver programming from this School of Business.

56:36 - They and the mechanism worked well okay when I became Dean of the Extended Universe of Extension at that time as it was called the salary of the previous Dean was paid for by the university um and so I was interim for a year and then I became permanent and was told no now you’ve got to be self-supporting. The university isn’t going to give you anything. They’re not even, we’re not even going to give you space. You have to pay rent too. So that was what I ran into well that’s a problem, but we can solve that.

So with the extension with extended university concept I saw the operation of not just extending courses out into the community of you know knitting or certificate courses for insects or things like. I saw the problems of the service region. Now when the chancellor’s office came into existence, they established service regions where campus x was responsible for this geographic area. Dr. Jim George encouraged me and I wasn’t sure for it but he encouraged me to move into Antelope Valley and deliver programs there all the degree programs we could muster up there and figure out you know.

But the problem was Antelope Valley was not in our service region, so it meant you know a little pirating or whatever. But what I did instead is I talked to Northridge and San Bernardino and they said we don’t want to do it Northridge has already involved the Channel Islands you know campus being developed. And we moved ahead with that and we didn’t move just you know in terms of individual courses we laid out whole programmatic operation. So that we knew what course when and how many you know would go and it had to be self-supporting and we continued that for you know for several years.

At the same time, I was responsible for taking ITV prior to that instructional television was somebody else’s domain and the Provost said well here you take it. You know which I did and so instructional television rade which at that point we were simply just broadcasting to high school students out in the area and a few other things and we operationalized it. We got the 60+ in group involved to do community kinds of things to offer programs on how to support their people you know older people in rest homes and things like that.

We involved the Civil Defense people so that they could use it as a remote site in cases of emergency and then with Clark Sanford’s encouragement, we started thinking about linking our saddle or the television over the mountains to Antelope Valley. Oh we invested you know some monies in in putting up transmitter towers all the way and so the community the operation continued to grow up there and I think everybody knows now it has become independent in most ways.

And so now that was regional programs. I also realized we had a problem with English students. How do we bring in foreign students to our programs without giving them the opportunity to study English? So, I explored what other campuses did and then I set up the intensive English language program. I hired Jen Titus to set it up knew him to design it put it in place. We started out by having contracts with Japanese Airlines to train their pilots in English for, so they could talk to control towers and in flight.

So, for five years we had caught in that contract always had like a cohort of 20 or so. We recognized that you can’t offer programs off campus if you don’t provide the students resources and that was a great revelation for many people, they couldn’t understand how we came up with that. Then we offered uh Mark’s Environmental Studies Degree program online and we went through WASC accreditation no problems. Finally, I just wanted to comment on teaching, instead of investing in systems that encourage teaching.

You know that address the student needs or any kind of student learning. Let’s change that let’s just give an award for good teaching. It’s a lot cheaper than trying to invest in anything and so if you look around campus now from what I could see. There are a lot of awards for teaching and doing whatever but there isn’t any systematic investment in the departments to accomplish those things so. It’s not unlike the military it’s a lot cheaper to give somebody a medal than you know to do anything else rewarding and people were happy with medals and people are happy with awards so.

And I’m happy with this award. So with that I’ll close and I one thing I forgot to mention I really feel embarrassed about this is to thank Curt Asher for his, he’s been pushing this archival history effort as long as I can knew him and of course that probably came started after I’d already retired I don’t know but his dedication to it was is very good. Hello my name is Kristen Gallant and I serve as the Outreach and User Engagement Librarian here at CSUB serving as a committee member for the Faculty Hall of Fame is one of the many jobs in my work here on campus this past year has impacted so many lives and I want to take a moment to thank all of you for watching this video.

Honoring our faculty is a way for our university to express our appreciation and respect for those who have contributed their life’s work to improve the quality of scholarship and student learning and yes even livelihoods of those who study at CSUB. The accomplishments of this year’s inductees directly impacted how advising and teaching continued to be offered at our great institution with ties to the National Science Foundation our faculty helped recruit students into the sciences and provided cutting-edge learning environments for our students.

The championing of online education and student-centered learning have also been contributions by this year’s inductees. Their legacies continue to impact our students and faculty and with that we offer up our heartfelt thanks to doctors Wildman, Suter, Coash and Ost. .