The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is a public university system in California, and the largest public university system in the United States.[1] It consists of 23 campuses and seven off-campus centers, which together enroll 457,992 students and employ 56,256 faculty and staff members.[1] In California, it is one of the three public higher education systems, along with the University of California and the California Community Colleges systems. The CSU system is officially incorporated as The Trustees of the California State University, and is headquartered in Long Beach, California.
Established in 1960 as part of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the CSU system has its roots in the California State Normal Schools that were chartered in 1857.[4] It holds the distinction of being the leading producer of bachelor's degrees in the country,[4] with over 110,000 graduates each year. Additionally, the CSU system contributes to the state's economy by sustaining more than 209,000 jobs.[4]
In the 2015–16 academic year, CSU awarded 52% of newly issued California teaching credentials, 33% of the state's information technology bachelor's degrees, and it had more graduates in business, criminal justice, engineering, public administration, and agriculture than all other colleges and universities in California combined.[5] Altogether, about half of the bachelor's degrees, one-fourth of the master's degrees, and 3% of the doctoral degrees awarded annually in California are from the CSU.[5] Additionally, 62% of all bachelor's degrees granted to Hispanic students in California and over half of bachelor's degrees earned by California's Latino, African American and Native American students combined are conferred by the CSU.[6]
The CSU system is one of the top U.S. producers of graduates who move on to earn their PhD degrees in a related field.[7] Since 1961, over four million alumni have received a degree from the CSU system.[4] CSU offers more than 1,800 degree programs in some 240 subject areas.[8] In fall of 2022, 11,181 (or 40%) of CSU's 27,741 faculty were tenured or on the tenure track.[9]
Today's California State University system is the direct descendant of the Minns Evening Normal School, founded in 1857 by George W. Minns in San Francisco. It was a normal school, an institution that educated future teachers in association with the high school system and the first of its kind in California.
The school was taken over by the state in 1862 and moved to San Jose and renamed the California State Normal School; it eventually evolved into San Jose State University.[10] A southern branch of the California State Normal School was created in Los Angeles in 1882.[11] In 1887, the California State Legislature dropped the word California from the name of the San Jose and Los Angeles schools, renaming them State Normal Schools.
Later, other state normal schools were founded at Chico (1887) and San Diego (1897); they did not form a system in the modern sense, in that each normal school had its own board of trustees and all were governed independently from one another.[12][13] By the end of the 19th century, the State Normal School in San Jose was graduating roughly 130 teachers a year and was "one of the best known normal schools in the West."[14]
In 1919, the State Normal School at Los Angeles became the Southern Branch of the University of California; in 1927, it became the University of California at Los Angeles.[15]
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In May 1921, the legislature enacted a comprehensive reform package for the state's educational system, which went into effect that July.[16] The State Normal Schools were renamed State Teachers Colleges, their boards of trustees were dissolved, and they were brought under the supervision of the Division of Normal and Special Schools of the new California Department of Education located at the state capital in Sacramento.[16] This meant that they were to be managed from Sacramento by the deputy director of the division, who in turn was subordinate to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (the ex officio director of the Department of Education) and the State Board of Education. By this time it was already commonplace to refer to most of the campuses with their city names plus the word "state" (e.g., "San Jose State," "San Diego State," "San Francisco State").
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The resulting administrative situation from 1921 to 1960 was quite complicated. On the one hand, the Department of Education's actual supervision of the presidents of the State Teachers Colleges was minimal, which translated into substantial autonomy when it came to day-to-day operations.[17] According to Clark Kerr, J. Paul Leonard, the president of San Francisco State from 1945 to 1957, once boasted that "he had the best college presidency in the United States—no organized faculty, no organized student body, no organized alumni association, and...no board of trustees."[18] On the other hand, the State Teachers Colleges were treated under state law as ordinary state government agencies, which meant their budgets were subject to the same stifling bureaucratic financial controls as all other state agencies (except the University of California).[17] At least one president would depart his state college because of his express frustration over that issue: Leonard himself.[17] (One of the lasting legacies of this era is that Cal State employees, like other state employees (but not UC or local government employees) are still paid by the state controller and receive their employment and retirement benefits from CalPERS.)
During the 1920s and 1930s, the State Teachers Colleges started to evolve from normal schools (that is, vocational schools narrowly focused on training elementary school teachers in how to impart basic literacy to young children) into teachers colleges (that is, providing a full liberal arts education) whose graduates would be fully qualified to teach all K–12 grades.[19] A leading proponent of this idea was Charles McLane, the first president of Fresno State, who was one of the earliest persons to argue that K–12 teachers must have a broad liberal arts education.[19] Having already founded Fresno Junior College in 1907 (now Fresno City College), McLane arranged for Fresno State to co-locate with the junior college and to synchronize schedules so teachers-in-training could take liberal arts courses at the junior college.[19] San Diego and San Jose followed Fresno in expanding their academic programs beyond traditional teacher training.[20] These developments had the "tacit approval" of the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, but had not been expressly authorized by the board and also lacked express statutory authorization from the state legislature.[20]
In 1932, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was asked by the state legislature and governor to perform a study of California higher education.[19] The so-called "Suzzallo Report" (after the Foundation's president, Henry Suzzallo) sharply criticized the State Teachers Colleges for their intrusion upon UC's liberal arts prerogative[21] and recommended their transfer to the Regents of the University of California (who would be expected to put them back in their proper place).[19][22] This recommendation spectacularly backfired when the faculties and administrations of the State Teachers Colleges rallied to protect their independence from the Regents.[19] In 1935, the State Teachers Colleges were formally upgraded by the state legislature to State Colleges and were expressly authorized to offer a full four-year liberal arts curriculum, culminating in bachelor's degrees, but they remained under the Department of Education.[19]
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During World War II, a group of local Santa Barbara leaders and business promoters (with the acquiescence of college administrators) were able to convince the state legislature and governor to transfer Santa Barbara State College to the University of California in 1944.[23] After losing a second campus to UC, the state colleges' supporters arranged for the California state constitution to be amended in 1946 to prevent it from happening again.[23]The period after World War II brought a great expansion in the number of state colleges. Additional state colleges were established in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Long Beach from 1947 to 1949, and then seven more state colleges were authorized to be established between 1957 and 1960. Six more state colleges were founded after the enactment of the Donahoe Higher Education Act of 1960, bringing the total number to 23.
During the 1950s, the state colleges' peculiar mix of fiscal centralization and operational decentralization began to look rather incongruous in comparison to the highly centralized University of California (then on the brink of its own decentralization project) and the highly decentralized local school districts around the state which operated K–12 schools and junior colleges—all of which enjoyed much more autonomy from the rest of the state government than the state colleges. In particular, several of the state college presidents had come to strongly dislike the State Board of Education and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Roy E. Simpson, whom the presidents felt were too deferential to the University of California. Five state college presidents led the movement in the late 1950s for more autonomy from the state government: Glenn Dumke at San Francisco State (who had succeeded Leonard in 1957), Arnold Joyal at Fresno State, John T. Wahlquist at San Jose State, Julian A. McPhee at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Malcolm Love at San Diego State.[24] They had three main objectives: (1) a systemwide board independent of the rest of the state government; (2) the right to award professional degrees in engineering and the doctorate in the field of education;[24] and (3) state funding for research at the state college level.[25]
The state legislature was limited to merely suggesting locations to the UC Board of Regents for the planned UC campus on the Central Coast.[26] In contrast, because the state colleges lacked autonomy, they were vulnerable to pork barrel politics in the state legislature. As early as 1932, the Suzzallo Report had noted that "the establishing of State teachers colleges has been partly the product of geographic-political considerations rather than of thoughtful determination of needs".[27] In 1959 alone, state legislators introduced separate bills to individually create nineteen state colleges. Two years earlier, one bill that had actually passed had resulted in the creation of a new state college in Turlock, a town better known for its turkeys than its aspirations towards higher education, and which made no sense except that the chair of the Senate Committee on Education happened to be from Turlock.