In the 1950s, when I first started paying attention to the talk of the town, an oft-repeated aphorism said there were three "sacred cows" in Sonoma County, institutions that were so valuable to the community that they got what they asked for when they asked.
The favored trio was, in no particular order, Memorial Hospital, Exchange Bank and Santa Rosa Junior College. (I'm sure, if pressed - no pun intended -these civic pundits would have included The Press Democrat.)
Welcome to the 21st century. Since the millennium, Exchange Bank, for the first time in its 120-year history, got caught up in a downturn and had to suspend the Doyle scholarships for the first time. Memorial Hospital, built by donations from the community in 1950, the largest fundraising in the town's history, faces its stiffest competition yet as the health care industry expands. And The PD, as we know well, has a new owner, just the fourth in its 155 years.
They told us the new millennium would bring great change, and it's come. At the other "sacred" institution, Santa Rosa Junior College, they are welcoming their fifth president in the school's 94-year history.
It seems like a good time to look back at where the junior college has been and, perhaps, explain why it has more than held its own through times of challenge.
BROOK TAUZER, whose 31-year SRJC tenure as history instructor, dean and the school's first academic vice president, has some thoughts about its success. Tauzer, who has written histories of the college from the 1970s to 2001, observed last week that SRJC "has always operated with quiet confidence; always, because its life has evolved and evolution means stability."
That evolution, Tauzer will tell you, begins with the strong roots planted in the first president's administration.
Floyd Bailey has become something of a legend in the educational community. His guidance through the school's first years has made him more of a father figure than an administrator.
He became dean of the 3-year-old institution in 1921, while its 32 students were still sharing a campus with Santa Rosa High School.
The first dean, an obviously impatient man named Clyde Wolfe, resigned with the prediction that the school was destined to be "no more than a bump on the top side of the high school."
Bailey, a science instructor, determined that would not be the case. He recruited an outstanding faculty, fielded a football team that trounced four-year colleges, counted the growing enrollment and, by 1927, fostered an election that established a separate junior college district.
By the end of the 1920s, SRJC's 300-plus students crowded the high school, and Bailey and his board of trustees eyed the 40 acres to the north - a pretty parcel of oaks and wild flowers that the city and the Chamber of Commerce had purchased for a park in honor of Luther Burbank when he died in 1926.
The park development had slowed to a halt with the stock market crash of '29 and, in 1930, the trustees made an offer for the land.
This was Floyd Bailey's campus. He paced the property to visualize where buildings and paths would be. He spent so many hours walking beneath and around the old oaks that his wife asked him to wait until dark, lest observers think there was something wrong with him.
The building program, at the height of the Great Depression, created the nucleus of the permanent campus - Pioneer Hall, Luther Burbank Auditorium, Analy Hall, Tauzer Gymnasium (named for Brook's father, Clarence "Red" Tauzer, a lawyer and state senator who was a member of the first board of trustees as well as the first football coach.).
Construction of this grouping around the quad, as well as the science and industrial arts buildings, was achieved with the aid of the federal public works projects of the FDR administration.
By the time Bailey retired in 1957, the college had 2,000 students and had established strong community roots that still hold it firmly.
THE TENURES of the four presidents, Tauzer suggests, can be seen as the foundation, formation, fruition and fulfillment years. If the Bailey years were the Foundation Years, Randolph Newman's presidency represented the Formation Years.
Newman, chosen by Bailey to be his successor, was president from 1957 to 1970, but his influence spanned a previous 10 years when he served as Bailey's administrative assistant, with two semesters as acting president.
As Bailey planted the roots, Newman provided the cultivation. Using Tauzer's alliteration, the Newman years become the Formation Years. Armed with a doctorate in education and the respect from the broader college community, which no less than four times made unsuccessful attempts to lure him away from Santa Rosa, Newman established the direction for the curriculum, keeping pace with times that required occupational programs, attention to ethnic minorities and community services. Tauzer estimated there was a new program for every one of the Newman years.
THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS handed the next president, Roy Mikalson, a mature institution ready for Tauzer's Fruition Years.
As Tauzer points out, community colleges mirror their communities from city to state to nation. Mikalson's 19 years, from 1971 to 1990, were the growth years in the county, the city and certainly the college. One might call them the Explosion Years.
With growth came budget concerns, and the challenge was to grow without sacrificing quality. Mikalson navigated the complex financial seas, including a productive relationship with state officials, which kept the fiscal ship afloat. Trustee Al Maggini acknowledged the corporate aspects of the president's role when he said, at Mikalson's retirement, "Roy's work in Sacramento has been a model for CEOs."
EDUCATORS HAD BECOME corporate in many ways, and this was the climate that Robert Agrella took on when he became president in 1990.
Playing by Tauzer's rules, we can call Agrella's time the Fulfillment Years.
Building on what had succeeded in the past, the college continued to grow - still a "junior college" however, electing to keep that name while others in the state system changed to "community college." Keeping the name was a salute to that "quiet confidence" and community respect that had brought it thus far.
Timing is everything and luck prevailed as a major bond issue that provided building funds was passed by the voters just before the economic downturn, allowing for a new library, student center, culinary arts building, the spectacular Petaluma campus and much more.
NOW THE COMMUNITY greets the fifth president in this distinguished line. We offer Frank Chong an institution in an area crowded with people it has trained and/or sent on to higher learning, a faculty with a proud town-and-gown heritage and a stability born of those solid stages of evolution dating back to the evenings when Mr. Bailey paced off the pathways to
educational success.
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