CSUMB Magazine
President's Letter - Fall/Winter 2019
Published Dec. 20, 2019
In the early 1990s, Monterey County’s leaders faced an economic crisis with the closing of Fort Ord. They turned that crisis into an opportunity by enabling the founding of a new university.
This academic year, we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of Cal State Monterey Bay. Created in 1994, CSUMB owes its existence to the political leaders, community visionaries and education pioneers who helped launch our university.
The story of our founding provides an important reminder of what people can accomplish when united in a common cause, of what a fledgling institution can accomplish when it fully accepts a challenge to meet an ambitious deadline.
For the first year of its existence, CSUMB was not only hiring its faculty and staff, admitting its first group of students, and coming up with an innovative new curriculum, it was also transforming an abandoned military base into a college campus.
Many elements of the founding story of CSUMB continue to drive our efforts today.
We are committed to serving the communities that helped create us. We provide educational opportunities for the underserved populations of our region. We are working with a wide range of groups to make sure more of our region’s students are able to pursue a higher education, while collaborating with local community colleges to educate more teachers for area schools. We are creating academic majors, such as our recently launched physician assistant program, to address specific local needs.
The spirit of innovation that marked our founding is fundamental in so much of what we do. We continue to tap into the can-do spirit that marked our beginnings as a university.
When President Bill Clinton spoke at our dedication ceremony in 1995, he said: “There is nothing that we have to do at the national level as a people that we cannot do if we follow the directions that you have laid out here: common sense; common ground; higher ground. … Think about what we have in common. Think about possibilities, not problems. Believe in the future.”
As demonstrated in this edition of the magazine – we celebrate our 25th anniversary, and the future of CSUMB has never looked brighter.
Sincerely,