CSUN Surely Can Tell Dirk Gates From Bill
The professor was angry. The professor was appalled. The professor was outraged that Jay Leno would visit a California State University, Northridge commencement and quiz grads about the identity of certain esteemed Americans.
Historians typically agree that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the greatest president of the 20th century. But at Cal State Northridge, his portrait was identified by one student as Alfred Hitchcock, by another as The Penguin from TV’s “Batman.”
A cheap shot, the prof thought, so he called Michael Hammerschmidt, the overseer of fund-raising and alumni relations, to complain and commiserate. Who would donate money to a university that now has a national rep for grads who can’t tell FDR from The Penguin?
Penguin, Schmenguin, Hammerschmidt figures. There is, it is sometimes said, no such thing as bad publicity. The view from Hammerschmidt’s office has been pretty good lately, especially donationwise, thanks to a computer wizard named Gates.
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Dirk Gates is not related to the legendary Bill, but his story has certain similarities to the founder of Microsoft. Like Bill, Dirk is a high-tech entrepreneur who achieved success at an early age. Now 35, Dirk Gates was still in his 20s when he and a partner, Kirk Mathews, created a company called Xircom (combining Dirk and Kirk) and developed a little gizmo that connected laptops to computer networks. Xircom, which is based in Thousand Oaks, remains the industry leader in the production of the adapters known as PC cards, with sales totaling almost $200 million last year.
Peanuts compared to Microsoft, but more than enough to inspire Dirk Gates, Xircom’s president, chairman and CEO, to donate $1 million last week to his alma mater, the largest alumni gift in the university’s 39-year history. In the argot of philanthropy, Cal State Northridge--more specifically, its College of Engineering and Computer Science--has been designated as an irrevocable beneficiary of the Dirk I. Gates Charitable Remainder Trust. The donation, now valued at $1 million, will not be collected by the university until Gates’ death. Properly invested, it should be worth much more by then.
Northridge officials are naturally thrilled to claim Dirk Gates as a success story and more thrilled that Gates credits the university for much of his success. When public debate turns to “Whither higher education?”--whether it’s skyrocketing costs or affirmative action--the fuss usually fixates on the prestige institutions, private or public, such as Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley or UCLA. If the marketplace of ideas were a shopping mall, these would be Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom. The humble Cal States would be JCPenney and Sears.
Gates wound up at Cal State Northridge because the price was right. A computer prodigy as a teenager, he was accepted out of Granada Hills High School by both the California Institute of Technology and UCLA, only to find himself in a kind of Catch-22: His family couldn’t afford his first choices, but his father’s income (he’s an aerospace engineer) was considered too high to allow Gates to qualify for financial aid. So he wound up at good ol’ C-Sun.
“It worked out pretty well,” he says.
What impressed him most was the personal attention of his professors. As an undergrad, Gates says, he often compared experiences with friends taking similar classes at UCLA. They’d be covering the same material, using the same textbook, yet Gates would find himself in a classroom with 30 students, while his UCLA friends were in a lecture hall holding 400.
Gates says he doesn’t mean to bash UCLA; he even enrolled at the Westwood campus for one semester of grad school. But his professors there, he says, didn’t seem interested in getting to know their students, “an amazing contrast” to his experience at Cal State Northridge.
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Gates figures he can distinguish FDR from The Penguin. But identifying a portrait of Booker T. Washington, whom a recent grad confused with sportscaster Greg Gumbel, would be tougher, he admits. Cal State Northridge officials only hope “Tonight Show” viewers remember that, from Leno’s point of view, the many students who aced his quiz actually flunked, because only wrong answers are funny. A small price, they say, for national publicity.
Hammerschmidt and others say the university has come far in the three years since it was dubbed Cal State Earthquake. There was more than $300 million in damage; some computer science classes had to be taught without computers. Last year, the media descended to cover a visit from ex-Klan leader David Duke to debate affirmative action (and inspire a mini-riot). “Given my druthers,” Hammerschmidt says, “I’d rather have Jay Leno than David Duke.”
And Dirk Gates, no doubt, is always welcome.
Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.
Northridge officials are naturally thrilled to claim Dirk Gates as a success story and more thrilled that Gates credits the university for much of his success.
