Stopping Turnover : CSUN Hopes New Dean Will Bring Revolving Door to a Halt

Two years ago, the business school at Cal State Northridge hired Andrew Sikula as dean. Sikula wanted to shake things up, but after six months of ruffling feathers he quit under pressure.

Now, after a 16-month search, CSUN is bringing William Hosek from Omaha to become the next dean of the business school, the college’s biggest division. Hosek, an economics professor and head of the Department of Finance, Banking and Insurance at the University of Nebraska, takes over his new post July 18.

Hosek, 51, said he plans to pursue some of the same changes that Sikula wanted, such as developing closer ties between CSUN and San Fernando Valley businesses.

For example, most of the departments and the overall school should have advisory committees of people from the business community, Hosek said in a telephone interview from his Omaha office.

“The first thing we’re going to do is sit down and put in writing our goals, objectives and plans for the foreseeable future, and create an action plan for achieving those goals,” he said.

But as Sikula can attest, the amount of “action” in Hosek’s plans might well ride on how he gets along with CSUN’s independent faculty.

“The faculty down there is much stronger in terms of shared governance and participation than other campuses I’ve been on,” Sikula said in a phone interview from Cal State Chico, where he teaches management. “They want someone to come in and spend six months or a year listening and not throwing out a whole lot of ideas quickly.”

Faculty Conflict

Sikula, who was dean of Cal State Chico’s business school before coming to CSUN, also said he believed the CSUN faculty wanted the dean to raise money and run the office, but not to interfere in personnel matters. That created a conflict for Sikula, who said “I was used to playing more of an internal role.”

To hear Hosek’s current boss tell it, Hosek has the ability to accomplish his goals by first convincing the faculty and staff to give his ideas a chance. “Bill has the ability to create and maintain those continuous open lines of communication,” said Larry Trussell, dean of the College of Business Administration at the University of Nebraska in Omaha (UNO).

CSUN naturally believes it found a dean with strong academic and administrative credentials. But school officials also hope that Hosek, who will earn about $75,000 a year, will end the revolving door that’s been the dean’s office over the past five years.

After Sikula left, James Manos became acting dean for the second time, his first stint coming in 1985-86 while the school was selecting Sikula. Indeed, in the last 10 years, the business school has had only two permanent deans, including Sikula. The other was James Robertson, who held the job for 11 years until 1983, and then returned for one more year in 1984-85, Manos said.

Manos, who was a candidate for Hosek’s job, said he wants Hosek to bring “stability, so we can make some long-range plans and get those plans implemented.”

The dean of the business school, which has 136 full-time faculty members, is a major post at CSUN. Business is the biggest major at the 30,000-student university, and the masters of business administration (MBA) degree is the most popular master’s degree on campus. Cal State Northridge’s MBA program also is taught only at night, and most students seeking the degree hold daytime jobs.

In the fall of 1987, CSUN had 5,253 students enrolled in its undergraduate and graduate business courses, making it the 20th largest business school in the nation, according to the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business in St. Louis, the agency that accredits business schools.

Other branches of the 19-college California State University system have bigger business-school enrollments than CSUN. San Diego State ranks 4th on the accrediting agency’s list, Cal State Fullerton is 6th and Cal State Long Beach is 10th.

Nonetheless, Cal State Northridge’s business school appears to enjoy a solid reputation among corporate recruiters in the area.

“They’re ready to go to work,” Dione Elmore, a recruiter for First Interstate Bank, said of CSUN’s business graduates. “The students at CSUN have a good work ethic, because a lot of them work and go to school and know how to juggle that kind of thing.”

David Merritt, partner in charge of the Century City office of Peat Marwick Main & Co., formerly was in charge of California recruiting for the big accounting firm. CSUN “didn’t have the name or the huge endowments, but it consistently produced graduates that not only had credentials coming out, but performed well,” said Merritt, himself a CSUN alumnus.

Thomas J. Shannon, chairman of CSUN’s business law department and the man who headed the five-member search committee for a new dean, declined to say how many candidates were in the running for Hosek’s job. But he said Hosek was selected because of his “administrative ability, ability to manage and academic credentials,” and because he can “interface with the business community.”

Business Support

Sorting through the jargon, CSUN hopes Hosek can persuade more local businesses to open their checkbooks to help the school grow. That’s Hosek’s goal as well. Private donations account for less than 5% of the business school’s $9.5 million budget, said Fred Dukes, its administrative program specialist.

Hosek said CSUN to date “really has not tapped the business community to any really great extent,” and that fund-raising efforts will be part of his program of forging closer relationships between the school and local companies.

Hosek, the son of a machinist, grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, then crisscrossed the nation. After moving to California in 1962, he earned a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate in economics at UC Santa Barbara. He taught economics at the University of New Hampshire in Durham until 1978, then went to the University of Nebraska, where he was chairman of the economics department until 1985. He then took over the finance department.

A slender, bespectacled man who carries a 22 handicap to the golf course, Hosek had professional and personal reasons for taking the CSUN job. He wanted the challenge of working in a major city, especially one with an expanding economy. “Since it’s a business school, you want to be in the midst of a constituency that’s growing too,” he said. And Hosek and his wife simply wanted to be closer to her parents, who live in Thousand Oaks, he said.

But the question is: Can Hosek live with CSUN’s faculty, get the changes he wants and manage to keep his job?

Hosek thinks so. “I’m here for the long haul,” he said. “I’ve got absolutely no ambitions beyond the business school.”

He also might remember a retrospective admission by Sikula, who said of his early departure, “I guess I could be guilty of giving out too much advice too early.”