San Jose: Portrait of a Second-Rate College
Observer, An
Over nineteen thousand students registered at San Jose State College this fall, two thousand more than a year ago. This rate of increase is common among California colleges, where the...
...The college has produced a surprisingly small number of academic or professional men...
...The president of San Jose has a program for the students which fits his concept of education as training...
...The State Colleges will thus be thrown into increasing competition with the University for the taxpayer's dollars, and it is unlikely their financial situation will improve...
...The faculty is well qual ified and the students are from the upper third of high school graduates...
...don't cause trouble in your department...
...they enroll over 100,000 students, twice as many as the University...
...The true effect of spending policies is clearer in a comparison of total expenditures at San Jose State and the Berkeley campus of the University...
...His advice on how to get tenure and promotion—come to class on time...
...The average cost per student at Berkeley was $2,175, or two and a half times the $820 cost per student at San Jose...
...President Wahlquist has announced his retirement, effective next September...
...San Jose, $679,391...
...However, by 1952, the college was already growing rapidly...
...Any economy in the State Colleges could be justified by reference to their "function" as defined in the Master Plan...
...The Legislature's generosity to the University is demoralizing for the State College teacher, because the state affords it by economizing in the State Colleges...
...In the delineation of of function between the schools, research and scholarship were assigned to the University and teaching to the State Colleges...
...Of course, [the students] are beset with all the problems that bother us, and I certainly have no desire to belittle the problems that surround us all and could not, if I wished to do so...
...The Berkeley library offered 124 books per student, while San Jose had only 19...
...Tame and tenured professors are easy to control because they have no intellectual energy...
...Because San Jose has no status to preserve, it is free from the cant which mars a campus concerned with its relative prestige...
...let your class out on time...
...They may be in for some great troubles and tribulations...
...This extraordinary optimism is based upon a Master Plan for Higher Education, adopted in 1960...
...From 1927 to 1952 MacQuarrie ran the school like a personal satrapy, seeking no counsel from the faculty, while he fostered the kind of practical education he had described in his inaugural address: "There exists a demand for a college offering education for immediate use and San Jose is such a college...
...In fact, it spends relatively little...
...Because of the University, California has an undeservedly high reputation for its public support of higher education...
...Only in graduate instruction are the University figures markedly higher...
...It is not wise for an ambitious student to stay at San Jose...
...But the "fast, intellectually mischievous" young men and women, who in another age would have gone to Berkeley, are deeply dissatisfied...
...F. Gilbert, Pioneers For One Hundred Years, San Jose State College, 1857-1957 (San Jose, 1957, p. 47).] In 1870 the school was moved to the town that had nothing...
...Most of the students, not aware of the difference between a good and a bad college, get their degree with the least possible effort...
...In his welcoming remarks, he begins by assuming that the main interests of his listeners are keeping their new jobs and finding a place to park their cars...
...The planners began with an excellent state university and a group of mostly second-rate colleges...
...The Master planners had to reconcile rising enrollments with limited income...
...It will be interesting to see if the new president can stimulate the college to overcome the disabilities of San Jose's history and its function under the Master Plan...
...Over nineteen thousand students registered at San Jose State College this fall, two thousand more than a year ago...
...The founders urged an ideal of cautious teaching, and their conservatism became the school's tradition...
...The Master Plan brought one major improvement—a new governing board for the State Colleges...
...In the years from 1952 to 1958, California ranked thirty-fourth among the states in the percentage of personal income (0.46%) spent on public higher education...
...They solved the problem by eliminating "wasteful" duplication, making clear delineations of function and channeling students into institutions suited to their presumed abilities...
...Will this large and growing number of students receive a secondrate education in these Colleges...
...When San Francisco proved to be too great a danger to the morals of the students, the school, by then called the State Normal School, was moved to San Jose...
...Among states west of the Mississippi, only Nevada ranked lower...
...Research libraries were not deemed nec essary for the State Colleges, whose paramount function was instruction and who were to provide facilities ap propriate only to the degrees offered...
...In the same year, San Jose had 15,784 students and spent approximately $13,000,000...
...One thousand contented professors surrounding twenty thousand happy students might be a thing of rare delight, but it is not the way to achieve academic excellence...
...In good nineteenth-century fashion, it encourages the poor to be rich...
...In California it is known to students and to the public as a "party school...
...John T. Wahlquist, a former Dean at the University of Utah, encouraged liberal education but did not consider it basic for the State Colleges: "the institutions designed to bring higher education to the greatest number at the lowest cost...
...As a consequence, the ways of autocracy became increasingly inappropriate and inefficient...
...For the State College professor, the great threat is that he may turn into a teaching machine and give the state only what it asks—instruction without intellectual excitement...
...But the education will necessarily be inferior...
...In 1887 it became San Jose State Normal School...
...Wahlquist equates education with teaching in the most literal sense...
...Instead, teaching is equated with training in an efficient nine to five environment...
...The intent and effect of the planners in separating them is to offer two kinds of undergraduate education...
...and in 1935, San Jose State College—a typical history...
...III The function assigned to the State Colleges by the Master Plan does not seem to conflict with President Wahlquist's philosophy of Education...
...expensive at the University and cheap at the State Colleges...
...California's climate does the rest...
...At San Jose, the quality of the faculty has been maintained by occasional salary increases to keep pay about equal to similar colleges...
...In 1952, a new president took control...
...This rate of increase is common among California colleges, where the shock of the population explosion has been felt year after year...
...San Jose is located in one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country...
...San Jose began its career in 1855, when a group of San Francisco citizens established Minn's Normal School to train "moral young men and women" as teachers...
...San Jose students, in common with most students in publicly supported institutions, are more dedicated to their social than their intellectual life...
...ual horizons of the students...
...There is no need for charlatanry and little exists...
...within an hour's drive are San Francisco and the universities at Stanford and Berkeley...
...There is no way of escaping the fact that a degree from San Jose is inferior...
...It would be an equivocal improvement if San Jose had to accept the evils of the prestigious university in order to gain the status of a firstrate college...
...As the Master Plan now operates, it enjoins the State Colleges to be excellent teaching institutions while denying them the means...
...Until this change, they had suffered under the manage...
...in either of these towns the Normal School would be so overshadowed by the State University, with its magnificent endowment and huge proportions, that it would be like a sickly little plant in the shade of a great oak...
...One of these second-rate colleges is San Jose State, oldest institution of higher learning in California and largest of the State Colleges...
...New drive-in education is available from seven-thirty in the morning till ten at night, dispensed from easy-to-clean concrete shelters...
...thus the Plan placed bounds on a vital part of the intellectual life of the Colleges...
...Few graduates receive fellowships or assistantships in good graduate schools...
...The University, which had the power and prestige to coerce the State College presidents into agreement, was interested only in preserving its privileged claim on state funds and in guaranteeing that the state colleges would not improve enough to encroach on their prestigious domain...
...Obviously, this distinction of function frustrates the scholarship of State College faculties and limits the intellect...
...Function" also affects the distribution of public money...
...The school passed through several changes but preserved its original character...
...The vagaries of the academic marketplace leave some stranded...
...But, meantime, let's see if we can help them live day by day with some feelings of security, some faith in our form of government, some appreciation of our institutions, and some love for their fellowman...
...In the opinion of this writer, the Master Plan guarantees that they will, because it assigns the Colleges a second-rate operating budget and largely ignores the problems of their second-rate past...
...It might seem odd that good men stay at San Jose under such circumstances, but many do...
...When taking office, he said, "I, for one, would not deny [the student] all the liberal education he can assimilate in the time at his disposal...
...President Wahlquist makes his idea of a college teacher explicit when he greets new faculty members each fall...
...in 1921, San Jose State Teachers College...
...But this only means that many of the major expenses which directly benefit the faculty and the undergraduate students at the University are charged to graduate and research needs, the province and ornament of the University...
...Sacramento has the State Capital...
...President Wahlquist seems to accept this view of college life...
...nevertheless, the State Legislature and various administrative bodies would continue to exercise greater power over them than over the University...
...1 he powers were now collected and vested in a Board of Trustees, which would have a Chancellor of the State Colleges as its chief executive officer...
...Last year, the State College Trustees requested $500,000 for research for 5,000 faculty members at the seventeen State Colleges...
...be nice to your students even if you have a headache...
...If they have the grades and money, a sizable number, with the strong encouragement of their professors, leave for Berkeley after two years...
...ment of the State Superintendent of Instruction and the random attentions of the State Board of Education, the Department of Finance, the Public Works Board, the State Personnel Board, the Division of Ar-hitecture, and the Legislature itself...
...They are so real and selfevident...
...Last fall he told the new faculty that...
...Neither Oakland nor Berkeley is the place...
...Men who are contented and who do not question the present scheme of things will prosper at San Jose...
...At San Jose there seems little appreciation of the position that good teaching arises from a creative and vigorous intellectual life...
...They had to accommodate the Plan to existing institutions—the University of California, the California State Colleges and the junior colleges...
...but, except for innocuous faculty advisory committees, Wahlquist continued to exercise enormous presidential powers...
...To locate the Normal School in San Francisco would be dropping a drop of literature into an ocean of mammon...
...Every teacher knows that study and research form the very basis of intellectual life and consequently of college teaching: scholarship and "instruction" cannot successfully be separated...
...Forty million dollars' worth of state penal architecture has permanently marred what was once a beautiful and peaceful old campus...
...If the primary distinction is that the University offers graduate training and the State Colleges do not, then, at least, the undergraduate education the State Colleges offer should be in no way inferior to that at the University...
...But in the days of their youth, they are entitled to some happiness and some optimism on the part of those who surround them...
...Berkeley spent nearly four million for its libraries...
...they likely are...
...In 1975, when an estimated 660,000 students will be enrolled in California's public institutions of high er learning, the state still plans to offer each student not only a place to sit and a book to read, but the best public education in the nation...
...In 1961-62, Berkeley had 23,000 students and spent approximately $50,000,000 for current operations...
...nor is there much sympathy for or understanding of the intellectual as a type...
...must continue to emphasize the practical aspect of education...
...The Master Plan is a formidable obstacle to the improvement of the State Colleges...
...San Francisco has several institutions that receive state aid...
...Nevertheless San Jose is mediocre...
...Inevitably, the University monopolized both basic and applied research and was designated as the repository for "unique library resources needed for graduate training and research programs...
...It was easy to decide to maintain the excellence of the university, but they made this excellence exclusive...
...Wahlquist accepted the educational philosophy traditional to San Jose State and the functions awarded to it by the legislature and enforced by the Superintendent of Public Instruction— the ultimate head of the State Colleges at that time...
...Oakland has the University...
...Indeed, the plan codified the traditional distinction between the two systems of higher education in California...
...If the faculty produces few works of major scholarship, still it bears little responsibility for the shelves of academic nonsense written by desperate men striving for promotion...
...Stockton has the State Insane Asylum...
...In supporting the new location, the State Superintendent of Education offered this argument: Where should the State Normal School be permanently located...
...the Legislature gave them nothing...
...San Jose has nothing...
...Its president during the transition from Teachers College to State College was Thomas MacQuarrie, who favored manual training and disavowed the notion that a student be required to have a "cultural education...
...our students live only one life, and the college period should be the most happy one of all...
...They opened up the junior colleges to all high school graduates, reserved the State Colleges for the upper third and the University for the upper tenth...
...The San Jose Mercury, today the town's only newspaper, reassured the townsfolk about the sort of people the school would bring: "Unlike a college or university that attracts many fast and mischievous young men, not a desirable acquisition to any community, the Normal School comprises only the most desirable class of young people...
...On the basis of current state expenditure and education costs, the Master planners predicted that, in 1975, annual budgets for higher education would be $197 millions more than projected available appropriations...
...The Master Plan and the annual budgets are supplied with figures to show that the cost of undergraduate teaching is about the same at the State Colleges and the University...
...With little pressure to publish, men do not need to sell their souls to scholarly fashion in order to keep their jobs...
...There are seventeen State Colleges in California...
...In its growth, it inexorably took on the scope of a university and became less like a teacher's training institute...
...others stay from preference...
...Yet the Colleges were to carry on "faculty research, using facilities provided for and consistent with the primary function of the state colleges...
...Except in regard to the new governing board, the Master Plan benefited only the University of California...
Vol. 11 • January 1964 • No. 1
