1 research outputs found
Ambrose Nichols oral history interview, "From San Jose to Sonoma State: An Academic Odyssey", Origins of The California State University, 1988
No full textOral history interview with a primary focus on the origins of the California State University System and the 1960 master plan for California higher education. Nichols was the first president of Sonoma State College.Transcripts and cassette tapes of oral history interviews with various individuals involved in the formation of the California State University system.Origins of
The California State
University
Ambrose Nichols
Interviewed
by
Judson A. Grenier
An Oral History Project
of the
Archives
UUU Archives
CSU, Dominguez Hills
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Oral History Pilot Project on the Origins of the CSU System
AMBROSE NICHOLS
FROM SAN JOSE TO SONOMA STATE:
AN ACADEMIC ODYSSEY
Interviewed by
Judson A. Grenier
in 1988
Processed by CSU Fullerton Oral History Program
November 1988
COPYRIGHT
This is a transcription of an interview conducted for the
California State University Archives under a grant from the
Office of the Chancellor, CSU.
Scholars are welcome to utilize short excerpts from any of
the transcriptions without obtaining permission as long as
proper credit is given to the interviewee, interviewer, and the
institution sponsoring the project. All uses of this
manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the CSU
Archives and the interviewee. Therefore, scholars must obtain
permission from California State University Archives before
making more extensive use of the transcription and related
materials.
None of these materials may be duplicated or reproduced by
any party except the California State University Archives.
However, because it is the goal of this project to preserve and
make accessible significant documentation relevant to the
history of the State Colleges, copies of any unrestricted
transcriptions may be obtained at cost by writing to the CSU
Systemwide Archivist at California State University, Dominguez
Hills, Carson, California, 90747.
Copyright (c)1988 by the Board of Trustees
of The California State University
PREFACE
The purpose of this oral history pilot project is to
record and make available to researchers using the California
State University Archives the reminiscences of individuals who
participated in the creation of the California State Colleges
from 1959 to 1965.
The creation of the California State Colleges in 1961
united fifteen formerly independent colleges into a single,
identifiable system, with its own Board of Trustees and a
Chancellor to serve as chief executive officer. Using a
formula which stressed systemwide planning in the allocation of
resources and programs, The California State Colleges sought to
offer Californians quality higher education at reasonable
cost. The key to the success of the California State
University was the decision to adapt a plan, incorporated into
the Donahoe Higher Education Act of 1960, dividing higher
education into three distinctly separate segments. Under the
act, the California State Colleges were mandated to emphasize
undergraduate and master’s level programs, while the University
of California campuses were to emphasize graduate education,
and the California Community Colleges were to focus on
vocational training and college preparation.
The California State University, starting from a base of
fifteen campuses and 95,000 students in 1961, has grown to
where it now provides a wide variety of innovative programs to
more than 320,000 students on nineteen campuses. It is the
largest system of higher education in the United States and is
known as one of the strongest institutions of higher education
in the country.
In September 1979, the Board of Trustees created the
California State University and Colleges Historical Archives,
to be housed on the Dominguez Hills campus. Since its
establishment, the Archives, as a systemwide project, has been
jointly supported by the Chancellor’s Office and CSU Dominguez
Hills, through the funding of a professional archivist.
The Archives currently houses a collection of materials
received from a variety of sources. These include the
Chancellor’s Office, the CSU Academic Senate, and private
individuals who had previous dealings with the CSU, such as
former Chancellor Glenn Dumke, former Trustee Paul Spencer, and
others. Consequently, the Archives holds some personal papers
as well as official systemwide documents. As part of its
collection policy, the Archives also has a responsibility to
collect individual recollections and oral histories of the
early System and pre-System years.
iii
Short-term goals of this oral history project are to make
available the recollections and reminiscences of former members
of the Board of Trustees, the State College-University of
California Liaison Committee, and the Master Plan Survey Team,
as well as other individuals who participated in the formation
of the California State Colleges from 1959 to 1965.
For the long run, the project has three purposes. First,
it will help to increase interest in the history and
accomplishments of the California State University. Next, it
will, hopefully, be a tool to aid in the acquisition of
additional materials concerning the System now in private
hands. Finally, it will serve as a model and learning device
to develop a more comprehensive oral history program. If the
pilot project is successful, as many interviews as possible
will be conducted under the expanded program with the System’s
retired trustees, former vice-chancellors and college
presidents, current senior management, state legislators, and
other important individuals who have been influential in the
growth and development of the state university.
Funding for the project is provided by the Office of Vice
Chancellor, Administration, Dr. Herbert L. Carter. We thank
the interviewee for generously giving of his time. We also
acknowledge the work of the Oral History Program at CSU
Fullerton for the use of its facilities in processing this
interview. Transcribing was performed by Shirley de Graaf,
proofreading and index by Lynn Finger, and final preparation by
Teryne Bell.
Lawrence B. de Graaf Jacquelyn K. Sundstrand
Judson A. Grenier CSU Archivist
Project Co-Directors
MEMBERS, CSU ARCHIVES ADVISORY BOARD
Betty Blackman
John Brownell
Mayer Chapman
Robert W. Cherny
Lawrence B. de Graaf
Glenn S. Dundee
Donald R. Gerth
Judson Grenier
Arthur Hall
Claudia H. Hampton
James Harris
Louis H. Heilbron
Donald B. Leiffer
Gloria Lothrop
Theodore Meriam
Carol J. Numrich
Morris Polan
W. Ann Reynolds
Phillip V. Sanchez
John Smart
Jacquelyn K. Sundstrand
IV
Sonoma State College President Ambrose Nichols (left) joins Assemblyman William Bagley
Chancellor Buell Gallagher (with shovel), and Senator Joseph Rattigan at dedication of
Rohnert Park campus on September 23,1961.
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PILOT PROJECT ON THE
ORIGINS OF THE CSU SYSTEM
This interview with Dr. Ambrose Nichols (AN), the first
president of Sonoma State College, and prior to that a
long-time professor at San Diego State College, was conducted
at his office in Rohnert Park on June 24, 1988. It is part of
the ongoing research project into the origins of the California
State University. The interviewer is Judson Grenier (JG).
JG: I do have a copy of the vita that you let me have, but
usually it is fairly routine in these interviews to get a
little more background information. So I wonder if you
could tell me where you were born and reared?
AN: I grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, and moved to San Jose
[California] in 1926. So I had the rest of junior high
school and senior high school, and my first three years of
college at San Jose.
JG: You started out in the Corvallis public schools, did you,
and then moved to San Jose when you were in junior high?
What did your father do for a living?
AN: He was an educator. He was principal of a high school in
Corvallis. I have no memory of that. He taught what was
then called manual training, and later was called
industrial arts. He really made his career in industrial
arts and vocational education. We moved to San Jose
because he became the city director of industrial arts and
vocational education, which later led to his being
principal of the technical high school in San Jose, and
doing student-teacher supervision in industrial arts at
San Jose State Teachers College, as it was called then.
My first year in San Jose I went to the training school
junior high on the campus of San Jose State. Then after
graduating from junior high I went to San Jose High
School, which was then also on the campus of San Jose
State. They were all in that same Washington Square,
along with lots of open space, and the public library and
some tennis courts and so forth. It’s remarkable how that
campus has changed.
JG: Your association with the state colleges goes back a long
way then?
AN: Right. I went to San Jose State from 1931 through 1934,
then transferred to [U.C.] Berkeley and got my bachelor’s
degree at Berkeley in December of 1935.
NICHOLS 2
JG: Was there any reason for your transfer?
AN: Yes. I was wanting to be a chemist, and as you may or may
not know, in those days the teachers colleges didn’t offer
bachelor’s degrees in subject matter fields. You could
take a pre-secondary program, with the idea that if you
wanted to become a chemistry teacher at the public school
level you could get a pre-secondary, and then you had to
go to Stanford or Berkeley to get the secondary in the
fifth year.
JG: I see.
AN: So many people transferred after two or three years, and I
was one of those that transferred to Cal.
JG: Once you had your degree in hand, what then?
AN: I was lucky enough to get a chance to go to graduate
school at the University of Wisconsin. I was there from
January of 1936 to June of 1939. So I finished up in
chemistry at the University of Wisconsin.
JG: Those were heady times at the University of Wisconsin.
AN: Yes, they were.
JG: A lot of ferment in the air.
AN: Exactly. Glenn Frank was president, and then Dykstra, who
later came to UCLA, was president at the time I finished.
At my graduation in June of 1939 one of the speakers was
H. V. Kaltenborn. Remember that name?
JG: I certainly do. He had such a rapid speaking voice, were
you able to understand him?
AN: Yes, and he was kind of high-pitched. He was in fine
fettle. He talked about Hitler, of course, and about what
was going on, his experiences.
JG: You graduated right before the war started in Europe?
AN: Right. That very summer. Those graduate years, of
course, included Edward VIII*s abdication, it included
Anschluss, it included lots of things. The invasion of
Albania [by Italy].
JG: Let me ask you what your dissertation area was?
AN: It was inorganic chemistry. And I did a paper on rates of
oxidation of manganese compounds by gaseous oxygen—
NICHOLS 3
so-called auto-oxidation. And nobody is the least bit
interested in that at this time, and very little at that
time. It is one of those things that I was absorbed in
for those couple of years I was doing my research. I had
a wonderful experience at Wisconsin, and cherish that
connection. I was a teaching assistant in the inorganic
chemistry program, which supported me through those
graduate years. In fact, I got married before ray last
year. I married a girl I met at San Jose State. We’re
still married, we’re celebrating our fiftieth anniversary
in another few weeks.
JG: That’s wonderful, congratulations.
AN: Well, we think we’re going to make it.
JG: Yes, you will. After you graduated then, with your
degree, where did you go?
AN: I went to San Diego State. And that was a great good
fortune for me, because I had some interviews and
opportunities, but nothing worked out by the time I was
ready to leave Madison, so we came home to California, and
we spent some time with my parents in San Jose, and then
we spent some time with my wife’s people in Santa
Barbara. But while we were in the Bay Area we went out to
Berkeley just to kind of browse around the campus, and my
brother-in-law and I were walking across the campus, and
he said, ’’Are your records on file at California Hall?"
And I said, "I think they are, but maybe we had better
check." We went in, I identified myself, and said I was
hoping to find a chemistry teaching position at the
college level, and the receptionist, Alice Greer— I’ll
never forget her— she said, "Just a minute." She went in
to see Herman Spindt, who was the placement director
there, and pretty soon she came back and beckoned me in,
and Herman Spindt was talking with Walter Hepner, the
president of San Diego State, who needed a chemistry
teacher. So we made an appointment to go down and see
him. He had a summer home in Soquel. So my
brother-in-law and sister drove us down to meet the
Hepners. He climbed down from the water tank that he was
repairing, and we had an interview sitting on a bench out
in his yard. This was in the time of Culbert Olson, who
was governor, and he was at war with the legislature, and
the budget hadn’t been passed even though it was the fifth
or sixth of July, something like that. The position had
been filled back in February and the person . . . in fact,
I’m not sure but what there were two people over the
interval who were appointed. But when the budget wasn’t
passed— and this was a new position that was in the
budget— the person who had been given a provisional
NICHOLS 4
appointment withdrew, so they had a vacancy at that late
date, and I just fit the slot. That’s the story of my
life right there.
JG: An amazing story. So you joined the staff at San Diego
State when it was still a teachers college?
AN: No, the transformation from the state teachers colleges to
the state colleges was in 1935. So I went to San Jose
State when it was San Jose State Teachers college, but I
was appointed to San Diego State College.
JG: It had already begun to move into fields other than
teaching?
AN: Well, how much real change this meant in the coursework
that was offered I don’t know. I think they had the
equivalent of a chemistry major and a history major and
other majors, but they just had to be treated . . . at
least at San Jose we were indicated in the registrar’s
office as pre-secondary in history or in physics or in
mathematics, whatever. Of course, there were many people
who were getting credentials and degrees in elementary
education and special secondary credentials, and so on.
JG: How about during the war years?
AN: Well, I was at San Diego State in 1941, and when the war
started in December we all were scurrying around to find
out where we fitted into the operation. And by July of
1942 I had a position as a physicist at what was then
called the U. S. Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory. It’s
now called the Naval Electronics Laboratory. But at that
time it was concerned with both underwater sound and radar
and all sorts of electronics as far as naval
communications and operations was concerned. And it so
happened that right at that time radar was just being
installed in the fleet, in many cases, and so they
established a radar operators school. We operated in
Point Loma, just inside the gate of the Fort Rosecrans
Reservation. And I taught radar operation from 1942 to
1943, beginning about July. But during that year
everybody else was leaving San Diego State to go into some
kind of service, so they wanted me to come back and teach
three days a week.
JG: So you were teaching in two places then?
AN: Yes. I was teaching chemistry, and serving as acting
department chair in the fall of 1942 and the spring of
1943. So I would go to the campus on Monday morning, and
at noon I would get in my car and eat my lunch on the way,
NICHOLS 5
and arrive at the laboratory at one o ’clock, and I would
work through the rest of the day schedule. But then on
Monday night I would do a practical watch supervision
exercise from 7 p.m. until 1 a.m. to make up the time that
I was away. And then I would come in all day Tuesday.
Then Wednesday I would do the same thing, the campus until
noon. Of course, it was a crazy schedule, but there were
a lot worse things to be doing in 1942. And I had some
wonderful experiences. We had students from bootcamp, we
had students from ships that were coming in for repair or
maintenance. We had marine officers, we had naval
officers, we had ratings, we had boots, we had a complete
spectrum of naval personnel at the lower level. But at a
certain point, that spring of 1943, the navy decided that
its instructors should be uniformed personnel rather than
civilians. So I started scurrying around again, and ended
up being appointed to the Radiation Lab at Berkeley, which
was part of the Manhattan Project, doing uranium
chemistry, and various things, all which were classified
at the time, and all of which is obsolete at this point.
I was at the laboratory then from 1943 until 1945. And
when the war was over I was brought back to San Diego
State. So that’s the war interval.
JG: So you arrived back at San Diego State just as the G.I.
Bill began to pump large numbers of veterans into
education.
AN: What were you doing at that time, if I might ask?
JG: I was in high school.
AN: You, then, were going to college with a lot of veterans?
JG: I graduated from high school in 1947, so I had the
pleasure of being taught with veterans.
AN: It was a marvelous period. San Diego State had an
enrollment of about 2,400 at the time I went there in
1939, and the enrollment dropped. I think in about 1943
it was less than 1,000. Then by 1944 it began to come up
again, and by the time I came back it was maybe 1,500.
And by the end of that year it was about 3,000. We had
drafts of students coming in as their eligibility cleared,
and as they had the right number of points to be
discharged. So we had a lot of expansion, and we had
temporary labs built out beyond the permanent structures.
JG: In 1946 if you could have guessed the maximum enrollment
San Diego State would attain, what would you have
guessed?
NICHOLS 6
AN: I have no idea. I would have said about 5,000 or 10,000
at the outside. The idea of its having 32,000 just blows
my mind. And, of course, the campus when I was there
included only the quad building and the lab school, which
is now— at least the last time I was there— still mainly
physics and astronomy. The administration building wasn’t
built yet. It was in the quad facility. So it was a
small patch. There was parking everywhere. And there was
even a parking shed that had been built by and for
faculty. So if you were part of the original group you
could have a shelter for your car on the campus.
JG: Were you chair of the department?
AN: Eventually. I went through that cycle. I was acting
chair during the time that Dudley Robinson, who was the
head of the department, was in the navy. Then we went
into a new pattern, with schools that were then called
divisions. Dudley Robinson was an old-timer. I think of
myself as sort of an old-timer, but he just died within
the last year or so. He was the head of the chemistry
department all the way through those years. Then he
became head of the school of physical sciences. Then I
took a turn as chair of the department, and we rotated on
a two-or three-year cycle. But department chairmen were
quite different in those days from what they are now.
JG: Who was president of San Diego?
AN: Walter Hepner. He was president, I think, from 1935 to
1952. And then Malcolm Love, and he was president from
1952 to something like 1971.
JG: Had you known Malcolm Love before he became president?
AN: No, I hadn’t.
JG: Where was he brought in from?
AN: I believe he was president of the University of Nevada.
And where he was before that I’m not sure.
JG: Was he a popular president?
AN: Yes, I think he was. Actually, as far as I’m concerned,
both Walter Hepner and Malcolm Love were remarkably fine
presidents and people. They were totally different in
their style. Hepner, as did many of the presidents of
that era, had come up through public school
administration. I believe he had been superintendent of
the Fresno schools. And, in fact, it turned out that my
father and he had known each other through administrative
NICHOLS 7
conferences and so forth, because my dad had been a high
school principal. My dad also knew Roy Simpson, because
Roy Simpson, the state superintendent, had been
superintendent in Gilroy, I believe. So they would go to
meetings and see each other. But getting back to Hepner,
he was a very open individual, as far as I was concerned.
I felt that although he was a strong president in the
sense that his decisions were his and nobody else’s, a lot
of the things that more recently would be processed in
different ways he handled directly himself, as most
presidents did in those days. I thought he was a very
fair man, a very thoughtful man. And I kept in touch with
the Hepners. They lived in La Jolla after he retired, and
we saw them a number of times. I had a great deal of
regard for him. Malcolm Love came in and he was very
successful, I think. He was responsible for the creation
of the [faculty] senate at San Diego State.
JG: Could you tell me about that?
AN: It*s kind of an interesting story. The word ’’senate”
means all sorts of things to different people depending on
your history and context. But the faculty in the state
college system, I think, ranged from people who were very
zealous in representing faculty viewpoints and faculty
rights and privileges to many who were not at all
concerned. So there was not a groundswell of development
effort, but I think there was a trend in the direction of
more formal recognition of faculty participation and
consultation. And the ACSCP [Association of California
State College Professors] was organized, and AAUP
[American Association of University Professors] was
organized.
JG: This was in the mid-fifties, or the early fifties?
AN: In the mid-fifties. Of course, there had been AAUP for
many y
