To tell the story of a university, and to describe its culture or cultures, is to establish the terms of its future possibilities and to provoke a community debate. We provide historical and cultural background in order to enrich and refine the context of the self-study, which is admittedly focused on the present and the future. We also seek to profit from experience. We find in our story reason to think the questions we are asking today have been of importance to those who were here before. This Introduction sketches in broad strokes the portrait of our campus society in terms of its political culture; it anticipates some of the more specific discussion of culture and climate (including sub-cultures and micro-climates) contained in Chapter V "Institutional Culture" (Theme One) (cf., e.g., Bauer 1998:2); and it asserts the principal philosophical position of our work: growth comes through knowledge, and it can be painful as well as enlightening. The practical corollary of this position is this thematic self-study, which is not a reduction of a university to numbers of staff or library volumes, but a structural and functional assessment within a specific context. We want to emphasize two key points about our self-study: one, that we regard it as a step or stage in a continuing process of experimentation with different forms of communication; and, two, that we are advocates for honest and open self-reporting and self-criticism, in the conviction that this is the best policy for an educational institution. We believe these are the keys to internal and external accountability.

In a way, a construction of context engenders the production of community where none might otherwise arise. Talking about ‘our’ story and ‘our’ ways spawns the ‘us-ness’ that sometimes we feel we lack. We have been told we are very past-oriented (WASC Report 1990, excerpted in Chapter II), backing, as it were, into the twenty-first century, yet this conservatism co-habits with a visibly non-traditional student population, an aggressively pro-technology work force, a politically energized professoriate working in a wide array of traditional, technical and post-modern fields, and an administration that seeks to adopt the most current educational management approaches. If we still are enthralled by our romantic past of movie stars riding Arabian horses, great philanthropists and political leaders, the majestic growth from boys’ agricultural school to multi-purpose university, we are no less entangled in our relationship with the sweep of the present and the future. We engage in everything from international projects and regenerative studies to service-learning in local communities and forums on the role of business in higher education. These are subjects of daily conversation.

The re-accreditation review of our campus conducted in 1990 by WASC also forms part of our story. The three major issues raised by the Commission were related to future direction and the quality of decision-making (Themes One, Three, Four), diversity (Theme One), and general education (Theme Two). Some background and analysis of these matters is offered in this Introduction, further discussion of the institution’s responsive actions in the next chapter, and detailed assessment in the thematic chapters cited (V — VIII).

The heart of our self-study is the change that has come to Cal Poly Pomona during the past decade. Though much of this change is exogenous in its origin and beyond our direct control, some of it is the result of individual and small-group initiative. The viability or desuetude of such changes is ultimately decided by the community; group process is the vector of social change. Therefore, it is important for us to understand the nature of our community. The university has seen substantial change in the three critical issues broached by WASC. The transformation related to leadership led to strategic planning, decentralization, and shared governance. The diversity issue was tackled through multicultural programs, increased funding, greater coordination, and recruitment initiatives. The Campus Climate Surveys of 2000 were implemented by the Self-Study Steering Committee and other offices in an effort to evaluate our progress on these and related issues and establish benchmarks for the future. General education has been the subject of debate throughout the decade, resulting in a new program proposal bearing some compromise, some innovation.

We find that the two great sources of social, cultural, and pedagogical evolution at the university have been and are economic and demographic in nature. By economic we mean any material issue affecting the human and physical resources and behavior of the institution. The way the university conducts its business and the way people derive their livelihoods from it or pay for education here have all been affected by external events and sources of support and by internal budgetary decisions throughout our history. The resultant economic situation has a variety of ramifications for the community. The demographic source of change has also a long history on the campus, having to do with its early gender and racial exclusivity, the former de jure, the latter de facto, then its admission of women in 1961, and the appearance of increasing ethnic diversity in the 1970s. The demographic discussion refers not only to the population map of ethnic and cultural groupings, gender, class, age, religions, sexualities, languages, national origins, abilities, but to their inter-relations and their distribution within the social ranks of the institution. Both economic and demographic shifts have caused explosive change at Cal Poly Pomona in the 1990s.

The most important issue facing us is our coherence or integrity as an educational community. The changes of the nineties have riven us so deeply that many would say the word ‘community’ is not an apt epithet for us, that we are a collection of groups that happen to have one factor in common. The majority of students on this commuter campus arrive just in time for class, attend classes they have tried to sequence tightly, and leave for work or home (Campus Life Survey 1995, Time Traveler Study 1998, Self-Study Focus Groups Annexes A3 and A4). Every year about forty percent of our new students transfer from another institution. Many have little sense of connection to other students or to the institution, little school spirit. They complain about this lack of community engagement, but seem to have not much freedom or ability to do anything about it. Some of the staff and faculty long nostalgically for the community of the past that they experienced or imagine. Some yearn for a greater belonging and unity, though not that of traditional, monocultural times. Their yearning bespeaks the general sense of loss of community prevalent in the southern California of bedroom suburbs, polluted nature, congestion, road rage, hate crimes, and border strife. With abject poverty just a freeway cruise from uncaring luxury, it is hard to imagine a unified educational program for everyone’s children. We ask ourselves how, with our community torn or merely vacant, we teach and learn within an even more shattered environment. And yet the passion so many people bring to work or class with them indicates that we are more than an institution with certain stock characteristics.

The classic dividing lines of intellectual life are intersected by new ones on our campus, as in other places. Snow’s "two cultures" (science and humanities), while still at odds at times, unite in opposition to the applied, technical disciplines. The discourse on general education displays this tension. The attempt to synthesize it is played out down to the level of courses (where we find technical, pre-professional courses ‘generalizing’ themselves) and programs (where we find fundamental research disciplines ‘applying’ or ‘technicalizing’ themselves), both in order to increase enrollment, hence resources, and to participate in the polytechnic mission, (which is also to democratize their appeal and enhance their clout). Each camp in the battle seems to regard itself as the elite and the raison d’etre of the university, though they also take turns posing as the oppressed underclass.

Two other cultures on campus are the corporate-style, education-is-a-business managers and the knowledge-is-sacred, traditional-approach educators (to use an inadequate, over-stated capsule reference). Further, campus factions do not reflect popular political affiliation outside. For instance, a successful affirmative action policy was implemented in the nineties leading to ethnic diversification of the administration. This, however, did not result in progressive politics in general, which created all sorts of confusion about who was on what side, and what sides there were to be on.

The systemic divide between staff and faculty has not promoted much fraternity among members of the community. The apparent disdain for faculty exhibited recently by the Chancellor of the California State University system and his cohort during negotiations with the California Faculty Association did not promote mutual respect (Reed 1999). Staff who believed that faculty "working at home" were actually "doing nothing" formerly kept this opinion to themselves. Now a few spoke it openly. The context for these remarks is the on-going contract dispute between faculty and the CSU, which is the tip of a vast iceberg of perceived assaults on teacher autonomy, flexibility, credibility, rewards, and work requirements.

The recent controversy surrounding the amount of time faculty spend on campus becomes more serious when considered from the point of view of temporal/spatial expression of status. Pay is not a reliable indicator of position. Office quality is not. The new idea that faculty should be in their offices ("on task") more hours per week than they had been accustomed to was greeted with such fury that we suspected a deeper issue had been exposed. Office hours and workload are matters of serious contention in the current labor-management disputes between the CFA and CSU.

These differences and divisions interact with the multicultural dimensions of the demographic picture. Here, again, the fractures do not fault along the same lines. The ethnic and other affinity groupings are internally split into all of the above factions.

But our fragmental nature is not only a source of problems. Sometimes it is a source of strength. The learning tradition associated with the polytechnic university has been deepened and enhanced by the test of continuing debate among constituent philosophies. This tradition clearly offers us an edge in making a smooth transition to educational effectiveness models prevalent today (cf., e.g., Ewell 1997). Our very differences display the intercourse between academic and societal worlds. Applied research and learning-by-doing are not new to us, including those in the standard liberal arts fields, because of our common polytechnic ground, even if it has been a battle ground. The shock of the coming of participatory democracy to the feudal fiefdoms and professional satrapies of most universities was not as great at Cal Poly Pomona, where there has been so little consensus on anything that the grappling of the lords and the serfs did not take us by surprise. The influx of diverse students and scholars and multicultural, post-colonial, interdisciplinary scholarship to the campus beginning in the late 1980s would perhaps have been even more unsettling to the old guard of agricultural and engineering personnel had they not been locked in transformative curriculum struggles of their own in search of modernization and internationalization. Our historic embeddedness in local concerns and the regional job market prepared us for the collaboration with industry now demanded by new management. Though perhaps an intellectual backwater in its early life, the tide of social change has swept Cal Poly Pomona since its inception. The welcome mat put out by some universities for the children of the working class in the seventies and eighties had already been well-traveled here.

These debates and divides were all invoked by the act of conducting this self-study. The special issues we chose to explore (campus climate, diversity, technology, learning outcomes, general education, remediation, resource allocation, planning, internationalization, outreach … ) through our four themes (institutional culture, teaching and learning, management and enhancement of resources, new directions) and six strategic planning goals became at times incendiary. Even the methodology of assessment, the merits of assessment per se and the design of the campus climate surveys we carried out, were subjects of heated discussion implicating the sub-text of our disagreements. Doing an experimental self-study required complex political work and communicative effort.

There are many wonderful people who study and work at Cal Poly Pomona, many unusual and high-caliber programs, cutting-edge equipment, good facilities, and a tranquil pastoral campus that is an oasis in an urban desert. From the financial standpoint, students get far more than their money’s worth, and nearly half of them are not spending their own money, since we provide or facilitate more subsidies than most universities. For these reasons, and in the spirit of constructive engagement, we do not intend our self-study report to be overwhelmingly critical or negative. However, it is not possible to grow without conducting a searching inventory of our weaknesses or difficulties. No one person is to blame for any of these, though individuals may be credited with particular achievements. The accomplishments of the institution and its leadership are not less because we choose to focus on the challenges that face us. The accomplishments are not things we need to correct; the problems are. Hence, we approach them fearlessly, openly, and passionately. We set forth our achievements here as models or "best practices" to be learned from, not merely in an effort to garner praise.