If the past can tell us anything about the future, then our campus could be in for a bumpy ride when our new president, Alexander Gonzalez of San Marcos State, comes to town.

Gonzalez, picked by the Board of Trustees to handle one of the oldest and biggest state universities in California, has had a presidential administration at San Marcos both praised for its efforts to expand a budding state school, yet criticized for relations with faculty, administration expenses and a lack of sensitivity to students.

After his appointment as president of San Marcos by Chancellor Charles Reed, Gonzalez used his political savvy to get things rolling for the small commuter campus, establishing brokering agreements with county and state officials to ease the campus commute.

He’s been at the helm of a campus that has doubled in size during his 6-year tenure, with a recent $78 million building plan that outlines a state-of-the-art library, athletic facilities, student housing and a student union all set for completion this year.

His emphasis on fundraising from mostly the local community and wealthy families – such as the cereal baron Kelloggs – from corporations and alumni have led to the accelerated growth and funding of different building projects and student financial aid.

But his administration, despite the patches of sunshine, has not been free from its share of storms with faculty.

The MBA program was under fire last year when a CSU audit, initiated by Gonzalez, accused faculty and administrators at the business school of personally benefitting from inappropriate allocation of funds.

Such findings were not supported, says California Faculty Association President and business professor George Diehr.

“Gonzalez’s claim that the program made unallowed expenditures that he knew nothing about is refuted by many documents with his or his vice president’s and/or Dean’s signatures authorizing payment,” Diehr says. “Many believe the audit was motivated by his desire to discredit faculty and union activists.”

There have been complaints that he tried to kill shared governance between faculty and administrators, attempting to exert authority through an autocratic, top-down corporate model, according to a San Marcos-area newspaper, the North County Times.

Though Gonzalez has limited the number of classes taught by faculty to nine units, Diehr says that opportunities for faculty research have not been a priority.

Diehr also claims that Gonzalez has also hired more administrators than recommended for the size of the campus, computing the excess cost to be over $2 million a year.

Such funds for the “bureaucratic bloat,” he says, could have been allocated to the hiring of tenure-line faculty to alleviate the growing faculty/student ratio in classes.

And Gonzalez didn’t seem too sympathetic to the financial needs of students when he approved a recent 155 percent increase in student parking fees from $62 to $158, this spring, an additional gouge to students’ pocketbooks on top of the system-wide $72 tuition hike.

Gonzalez definitely has solid administration experience in the CSU that makes him qualified to be our next president — through both prosperous and tumultuous times at San Marcos State, though his past and present presidential appointments have been a shoe-in. Gonzalez applied for the Sac State position only after he was asked to by Reed.

He knows the workings of a commuter school and rapid student growth at a CSU – one semester, San Marcos experienced a 20 percent student enrollment jump. He knows how to manage campus expansion and the need for communication with political bodies and the local community for the sake of the institution’s interests.

What he lacks, however, is responsiveness to student and faculty needs, and overemphasized administrative hiring, a constant theme throughout his six-year term at San Marcos.

If Gonzalez’s performance in San Marcos can give any clue about his future administration at Sac State, we can anticipate that he’ll be able to manage, as President Donald Gerth has, the needs of a rapidly expanding commuter campus; yet we can also expect a replay of some of the weakest aspects of Gerth’s administration: little collaboration and communication with faculty and students, high costs for administration and a rigid bureaucracy.

It looks to be a bumpy ride — or what should be called “business as usual.”

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