Most of the freshmen entering Sacramento State this fall weren’t even alive when President Donald Gerth came here in 1984.

In the 19 years he has served as president, Sac State has done a lot of growing up. Enrollment has risen from 22,000 to 28,000. Two parking structures have gone up, as well as several buildings. Ethnic diversity on campus has increased. The percentages of Asian and Hispanic students have doubled since 1984. A thousand more undergraduate degrees are given

But the biggest change in a long time is that the longest-serving president Sac State has ever known won’t be here in the fall.

Last fall he announced that this year would be his last, stating that if he were 20 years younger, he’d do it all over again.

“I really like what I do. I’m not sure everybody believes me when I say that, but that is in fact the case,” he said.

Those who doubt his passion – just look at how he works.

His office this Tuesday morning is alive. Three assistants in his outside office are busy, but carry out their work in a hush. Gerth’s personal office has a cluttered, lived-in look. Neatly aligned piles of papers with the day’s business are placed on the floor because the amount of work he does is too much for a desktop.

At an age at which most are already retired, Gerth still puts in 12-hour days.

“Being president, if you take the job seriously, is a very time-consuming role. You’re sort of on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” he says in a gravelly voice.

His chair screeches as he gets up and walks over to one of the piles of paper on the floor and stoops over to read it, prattling off his appearances that night. A foreign language faculty reception. Then the College of Health and Human Services end-of-year function. And on to the Graduate Diversity Program award reception. Then the College of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies scholarship program. All in one night.

This weekend he’ll be traveling to Southern California to attend a meeting with the Board of Trustees, visit a CSU presidents’ event and drive up to Dominguez Hills to drop off some personal belongings that he thought would have meaning to the university.

Because of this trip, the Gerths celebrated Mother’s Day with a barbecue a week early. It’s just one example of holidays being rearranged to fit the schedule of the university president.

His energy and work ethic are what make him the envy of all other CSU presidents, said CSU Chancellor Charles Reed.

“He works all the time, he’s able to travel to Washington, Europe, Asia and he just keeps right on working,” Reed said.

But contrary to convention, retirement doesn’t mean he’s going to travel the world. He’s already done enough of that. Retirement will be a chance to stay home.

His professional activities have taken him to places like Portugal, the Philippines, Russia and China. He says Hong Kong is probably his favorite city in the world. He has close friends there.

Retirement for Gerth will not mean receding into the background. He will become part-time faculty emeritus, advise Washington on the international accreditation of universities, and continue to teach, write and read, like any lifelong academic should.

He’ll also be outlining a book on the history of the California State University system, which he will write himself using documents he’s amassed over his 45-year career with the CSU.

His office is filled with things he’s collected over the years. A signed football from the 2002 football team sits on his coffee table. Somewhat outdated pictures of his grandchildren hang on the walls, including a grandson who is now grown and attends Sac State, lying with his chin propped up in his palms. He’s an avid reader, and a fast one at that. Hundreds of books line the walls of his office.

He’s not the big, scary, powerful man some might assume a president to be. In fact, his wife says he’s sometimes shy about himself. She also says he’s honest and thoughtful and that he’ll bring his work home and study issues affecting the university for hours, even if it’s what she would call a “no-brainer.”

Gerth takes his glasses off and twists the delicate metal frame between his thumb and forefinger, trying to conjure up details from his long career.

He admits his memory isn’t that great. He can’t remember what his first year xhere was like, but he keeps all his old calendars and can look up the past in them.

He’s certainly had a lot of calendars.

Gerth was born on Dec. 4, 1928 in Chicago.

He dropped out of high school at age 16 to attend the University of Chicago. He said the atmosphere at the university was serious and intellectual. Gerth participated in student organizations and wrote an occasional political column for the school paper. Gerth graduated with his bachelor’s degree from the university in 1947. His commencement was the last day his mother was out in public before collapsing from pancreatic cancer.

Four years later, he received his masters in political science at the University of Chicago.

“There’s no question that the University of Chicago is a big influence on my life, just like I hope Sac State has a big influence on a lot of students’ lives,” he said.

After getting his masters, he was summoned by an armed forces draft board that saw his academic achievements as sufficient. The board supposedly said to him, “I think that’s about all the education anyone needs.” He then enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted.

In the Air Force he was assigned to intelligence and comptroller assignments. Stationed in the Philippines during the Korean War, he was in charge of payroll finances and was called “the bagman” by the troops because he used to carry money to them in a sack.

Gerth met Bev while at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. After Gerth came back from an assignment in New York, he found Bev had been hired to set up a computer payroll operation in his office. After a week, Gerth asked her on a date.

“He wasn’t the greatest dancer, and I like to dance,” Bev remembered, but she liked his intelligence and the two shared a connection in their conversations. After a month of seeing each other, things were going well.

“This is going to sound crazy to you,” Gerth said to preface what happened next in their relationship. “I asked her to marry me. We had only known each other a month, and she said yes. I think we were both astounded.”

That October they took their vows and have been a partnership for 48 years, proving to everyone who said they didn’t know each other long enough that their love did last.

Gerth gives his wife a lot of credit for the successes of his administration.

“The big things she’s done have to do with setting a tone. She’s Bev to the students, they don’t call her Mrs. Gerth. It’s just the way she is,” he said.

Bev, who is Gerth’s junior by three years (or four if you ask on the four days between the two’s birthdays in December: “Every year for four days I’m four years older than she is,” Gerth says), is another reason Gerth is retiring. Bev had two surgeries early this year, but emerged healthier than before.

“We need time to be together, to take care of each other. That’s what people do when they’re together a long time,” he said.

Gerth had a chance to stay in the Air Force, but the newlyweds wanted to be able to decide where they lived so they could make a home. He was released from active duty in the rank of Captain in 1956.

Gerth then began his affiliation with the CSU, which has lasted for 45 years. But Gerth never really chose the CSU – it chose him.

He was planning on going to India to write about Indian politics when the offer to teach at San Francisco State fell onto him. “At that point we had our first daughter and we were sort of scrounging our way through life. (As) graduate students, unless you come from wealthy families, and neither one of us do, you don’t have a lot of money,” he said.

At San Francisco State University, he was an associate dean of students and a government department member. Gerth, Bev and the dean of students used to get together and dance to a jukebox the dean had in his basement. They called themselves “The Stumblebums” and would learn to dance the cha-cha and rumba. The Gerths still exchange Christmas cards with the dean and his wife.

Somewhere Gerth found time to finish his thesis and earn his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1963.

He said he never intended on staying with the CSU for the rest of his career – it just happened. He said he had received offers for presidencies out of state in the 1970s – offers he refused.

He next went to CSU Chico, where he rose to being the V.P. of Academic Affairs, and then the man whose friends always said he’d become a university president did when he became the second president of CSU Dominguez Hills in 1976.

In November of 1983, he was appointed president of CSU Sacramento, much to the dismay of his university at the time. Eighty-six percent of the faculty signed a petition asking him not to leave Dominguez Hills.

Bev said that when they took their first drive to CSUS and got off the freeway, they were questioning whether they had made the right decision to come to a university with what she called a “very divisive” faculty and administrative relationship.

Retired economics professor Bob Curry had taught at the university on and off since 1970 and agreed that the years before Gerth were “turbulent years (during which) faculty and administration were at odds.”

He says the main issues were governance of the university, deciding on policies, budget priorities and the mission of the university.

“With Gerth we had a guy who nominally, if not effectively, allowed leeway to let faculty have our way and have more of a say in governing the university,” said Curry, who chaired the economics department for six years.

The mended relations between faculty and administration did not start with Gerth, he said, he merely inherited them. “He did it because he wanted none of the troubles of the previous administrations.”

Besides creating stable relations between faculty and administration, Gerth says his proudest achievement is really the students’ achievement, and the nearly 99,000 diplomas he has signed. “My first couple of years as president I signed them all personally, then I came to the conclusion that that wouldn’t work,” he said.

The man who’s spent so much time here wants a good future for the CSU. “I trust and hope that we will still very much be the people’s university of this state,” he says about the future of the CSU. He hopes that there will be no new campuses added to the system and that only centers, like the one announced in February in Placer County, will be part of the expansion of the CSU to accommodate the 500,000 students he predicts the CSU will have in 10 years.

“That’s what ought to be the future, but politically it’s going to be very difficult to keep campuses from being formed. That does stretch the resources of the system because the overhead from independent campuses is greater than the overhead from operating centers,” he said.

And over 45 years he’s developed a commitment to the CSU that can be found in his work – and his home’s entryway. The Gerths have a specially-woven rug from Beijing in their hall with the CSU seal woven into it. The two even had a mosaic of the seal in their swimming pool at a previous residence in Gold River. They went back several years after selling the house and attempted to purchase the mosaic, but the new homeowners decided they kind of liked it.

His inveterate dedication to the university will make it hard to sever his ties, he said.

But he has no doubt that his successor, Alexander Gonzalez, current president of CSU San Marcos, will have any problems with governing the university. “Alex is a competent, seasoned administrator and leader, and I think he is going to do very well,” he said, adding that the trustees were wise to bring in a president from inside the CSU system.

Once Gonzalez moves in on July 1, Gerth says he will be supportive and responsive if asked for help by Gonzalez, but otherwise he’ll be detached.

“My role once I leave the presidency is to keep my hands off. Absolutely no question about that,” he said. “And I’ll have to work on it because we’re not leaving town.”

His close proximity to the university after his retirement will make it hard to distance himself, he said, but he believes he’ll have no problem disciplining himself. “I’m sure I’ll be able to do it because I know I’ll have to. It’s kind of like taking medicine every day … I know I have to.”

Bev says her husband’s concern for the future of CSUS is just part of his love for it.

“You don’t work at a campus for 19 years and want it to fail,” she said.Gerth said he would like to see the continued development of the School of the Arts once he leaves and a downtown performing arts center built.

Some would say his high points would be the establishment of the School of the Arts, creation of the Center for California Studies, and the Office of Research, Graduate, and Extended Programs, which was first directed by Bob Curry. “Those were three fundamental contributions that I think occurred because of him,” Curry said.

The Research and Sponsored Projects was a division of the Office of Research that sought out grants and academic support for faculty and sometimes students. It was developed in the mid-1980s with Curry, who credits Gerth with connecting research with teaching and elevating serious scholarships on campus.

His administration was no doubt influenced by some more light-hearted elements as well. “It’s good for an organization to have points of humor,” he said, referring to how he jokingly refers to Sac State’s greatest competition, UC Davis, as “Brand X.”

“I don’t do that because I don’t respect Davis … a little competition never hurt anybody.”

Perhaps the most endearing (or annoying) characteristic of this campus is the chickens, which Gerth tends to regard as “quaint.” His theory on the origins of the poultry population is that Marda West, a biology professor who first came to campus in 1966 and passed away last year, used to incubate eggs and released some of the chicks. “My attitude about the chickens is to keep them thinned out.” The chickens have left a mark on his time here. He received a chicken trophy from the College of Arts and Letters with an inscription that read “You’ve done much to ‘crow’ about!”

His time as head of the university has not been without its low points. In 2001 at the winter commencement ceremony, guest speaker and publisher of the Sacramento Bee Janis Heaphy gave a realistic and unsentimental lecture to graduates that garnered booing from the audience and some national media attention.

“I was embarrassed for the university by the booing that happened. I was proud that almost none of our students took part in it,” he said. “The interesting thing about what Janis Heaphy said is that events have demonstrated very clearly that she was absolutely right on target.”

His last semester here has been a tumultuous one- for the world, the state and the CSU. War in Iraq, state budget deficits, rising tuition fees and the CMS scandal have all rocked the media, but have left barely a ripple in Gerth’s mind. His attitude is that you have to take everything in stride.

“This is the fourth time I’ve been through what might loosely be called a budget crisis. This is by far the most serious,” he says. “By far.”

“I think the major thing wrong with CMS is that we didn’t do it 25 years ago,” he said.

Gerth said he was among a minority of presidents in the 1970s who called for a comprehensive technology between the different campuses. “I’ve always been a bit of a maverick … I don’t just do things because that’s the way we’ve always done them.”

In 2001, Gerth came under fire for mandating the campus switch to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for peak classroom hours of 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Students bemoaned their lack of input in the matter and even staged a sit-in in front of Gerth’s Sacramento Hall office.

“I would have secured a firm agreement with the students at the very beginning of the discussion. I thought I had that agreement. It turns out I did not,” he said, expressing regret about the situation.

He has also been criticized for being distant from faculty and students.

“His relation with the (faculty) union has not been a particularly close one,” said Jim Chopyak, president of the California Faculty Association at CSUS, adding that Gerth’s job is a difficult one.

But Gerth refutes his relation to students.

He says he’s around the campus a lot, but because it’s so big, some students have never seen him. “I don’t walk around the campus with an entourage or a sign saying, ‘Gee, I’m the president.'” He maintains that he was available to all who wanted to see him. His home phone number is even in the telephone book in Placer County, and he tried to get it listed in Sacramento as well to be more available to students.

But Gerth says the high points outnumber the low because the high points happen “all the time, and damn near every day.”

One high point was the tribute in his honor held two weeks ago in the University Union Ballroom

A humorous skit made light of his passion for cheese. He saw the couple from “The Stumblebums.” The CSUS Community Advisory Board presented him with a painting of himself standing in front of what could be the 99,000 students he’s seen graduate over the years. All his accomplishments from so many years of service came back to him that night.

He expects to receive a videotape of the event soon.

“Ten years from now when I’m a little older, I can’t be much grayer, but a little older, it’s going to be wonderful to be able to look at that,” he said.

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