L.A. Times - Section "B" - July 2, 2000

A Familiar Challenge

By SOLOMON MOORE, Times Staff Writer

EL PASO--Bounded by Mexico to the southwest
and New Mexico on the north, this part of Texas
sprawls eastward onto dirt roads lined with ramshackle
houses, many without plumbing or electricity. Recent
arrivals have built their homes on sandy plots with their
own hands from husks of abandoned trailers, discarded
car hoods and corrugated aluminum panels.
Adriana Barrera remembers driving along the
highway past one of the largest colonias, or border
settlements, six years ago and thinking, "We should
have a campus here."
Now, El Paso Community College's Mission Del
Paso campus serves nearly 3,000 students, many
among Texas' most-disadvantaged new immigrants.
The project is one reason why the soft-spoken, polite
Barrera was selected to serve as the next president of
Mission College in Sylmar.
Like El Paso Community College, Mission College
has more demand than space and serves mostly
low-income, Latino students. Most agree that the
7,000-student Mission College must expand, but
unsuccessful efforts led to the resignation one year ago
of Barrera's predecessor, William E. Norlund.
The job, which she starts this week, will be
Barrera's first outside of Texas, where she was born
and raised. Her love of education came early, as a child
in Benavides, Texas, a community 150 miles west of
Corpus Christi, where the public school system and the
Catholic Church are the only institutions of note.
Benavides is slowly dying. It was never large--the
population was about 2,500 when Barrera was young
and has 1,978 people now. Residents say they have
always prized education, perhaps because it was all
they had.
Addresses, street names and paved roads have
come to Benavides in just the last few years. On a
railroad that runs through the center of town, tomatoes,
Volkswagens and other goods are shuttled to and from
Mexico, but no train has stopped in Benavides since the
oil boom.
Before most of the wells dried up in the 1950s, they
provided Benavides' families with a good standard of
living. So did the uranium ore mines and ranches and
farms. There were two movie theaters and a lively little
downtown with a handsome bank building, a general
store and a depot station. There are still a couple of
little shops left, a Mexican restaurant made out of
plywood, a barbershop. But most of the old buildings
are in ruins.
Except for the schools. One elementary, one middle
and one high school are still the thriving places of
Barrera's childhood. Many of Benavides' sons and
daughters are surgeons, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists,
engineers and college and university presidents.
"All of my teachers were Hispanics," she says. "We
never felt inferior. We were not people of means, but
we were hard-working. My parents taught us that we
had to speak English and had to go to school. And in a
small town, everybody knew if you skipped class."
By all accounts, Barrera excelled as a student. She
was involved in student government and became a
drum majorette, a big deal in a town that recently
named a street in honor of one of their champion baton
twirlers.
Barrera's parents never finished elementary school,
but they encouraged their children to go to college. All
but one of their six children did.
"They were humble and poor," said family friend
Gilberto Uresti, 65, a former Benavides judge. "But
they believed in getting an education and working hard."

Barrera's mother, Juanita, was a homemaker. Her
father, Polo, hauled lumber and equipment for oil
companies in the 1950s. It was grueling work, says
Barrera's brother, Arturo de la Cruz.
"He was on call 24 hours a day," he says.
De la Cruz, 58, still lives in Benavides, only a block
away from where Barrera was born. Their father
carried lumber from cleared oil fields and hauled steel
and equipment for the massive oil drills that dotted the
landscape. After many years, De la Cruz says, the long
hours took their toll.
"He tipped his truck three times in one year," he
says. "He was costing the company money."
The family bought a Mobil gas station for $300 and
ascended into Benavides' middle class. De la Cruz said
his sister was a girl of "hyperactive" energy who usually
had her face in a book and always ended up "the first-
or second-best student in school."
The decision by Barrera's oldest brother, Albino, to
go away to college affected her profoundly, she says.
"He influenced my thinking in terms of going to
college," she says. "He's why I really believe very
strongly in having role models in the community. Kids
need to see that they can succeed."
When she was a high school junior, Barrera moved
from Texas to Ogden, Utah, to live with her brother
and finish school. Ogden was a big city compared to
Benavides, and for the first time Barrera felt out of
place in her nearly all-white Mormon high school. In
most of her college preparatory classes, Barrera also
found that she was the only girl.
"That was extreme culture shock," she recalls. "I
was scared stiff. I was an outsider. In my junior year I
hardly had any friends. I was a Catholic too. It was
religion, it was ethnicity, it was gender.
"Initially, I didn't know if I could be as smart as the
other kids."
Eventually, she discovered she could compete,
earning straight A's and the respect of her classmates.
"But at the same time, I wasn't invited to their socials
or [to be] part of any clique or group," she says.
Barrera returned to her home state to attend Texas
A&M University and Texas Technical University. It
was there that a college professor inspired her to
pursue a career in academia.
"He said, 'You're a good student, why not go for the
doctorate?' " she recalls. "I hadn't thought about that. I
didn't have the self-confidence, but he did have that
confidence in me and stayed with me every step of the
way.
"It was that personal touch that made me think I
could do this. I could help others and particularly other
Latinos, because at the time there were very few in
grad school."
She was inspired a second time as a doctoral
student in 1982, when she began working part time at
Austin Community College. It was her first contact with
a junior college.
"The students I was working with saw the
community college as a lifeline," she says. "And I
became engrossed in that atmosphere."
After completing her PhD in education, Barrera
stayed with Austin Community College for 10 years,
organizing adult education and English as a second
language courses and writing grant proposals.
In 1992, she became executive assistant to the
president of El Paso Community College, then a
predominately Latino, four-campus system with about
16,000 students.
When the president left amid accusations of
mismanagement, Barrera became interim president in
1994. At the time, the Southern Assn. of Colleges and
Schools had threatened to strip El Paso Community
College of its accreditation, citing an autocratic
administrative structure and an absence of master plans
for campus expansion and curriculum development.
Under Barrera's interim presidency, the
accreditation agency removed El Paso's "warning"
status, and the board of trustees hired her as permanent
president. She is credited with creating a more
democratic decision-making process, bringing a
swelling budget under control and helping faculty
members win grants.
Biology professor Maria Alvarez said El Paso has
one of the best community college research laboratories
in the region thanks to a federal grant and matching
funds provided by Barrera's administration.
Although Barrera created standard hiring policies,
critics of El Paso Community College board members
said she was pressured to hire cronies and to leave
unproductive but well-connected staff and faculty
members in place.
"The employment process was short-circuited" by
the board, said Robert Starke, a counselor who has
worked at the college for 29 years. "She had faculty
support."
But she did not have board support. After several
months of rumors and quiet power plays, Barrera's
contract came up for renewal in 1998, and the board
voted 3 to 2 to dismiss her.
"It took every ounce of toughness in me not to fight
back," Barrera says. "I tried to go about doing my job.
During board elections, there was a lot of mudslinging
and I became a target of that, but I refused to give any
credit to the people making accusations about me. I
went about my business."
Trustee Innocente Quintanilla said the tactic may
have done Barrera more harm than good.
"She didn't lobby the community," he said. "She was
very professional. That could be viewed as a
shortcoming--that she did not fight for the position."
The episode hindered her attempts to land positions
at other colleges and nearly destroyed her career.
When she applied for the Mission College job, she was
working from home as a freelance administrative
consultant.
Barrera arrived in Los Angeles last week and has
been getting acquainted with her team at Mission
college. Monday is her official starting date.
Barrera has said that campus expansion, a job she
has some experience with, is among her first priorities.
She also will review the campus master plan, which has
been under development for several months.

CSU's Rising Star

By SOLOMON MOORE, Times Staff Writer

SACRAMENTO--The story of how Jolene
Koester, daughter of Plato, Minn., (pop. 250) became
president of Cal State Northridge (pop. 27,000) is a
lesson about the distance a little intellectual curiosity can
carry a person.
Koester, 52, will replace CSUN's last permanent
president, Blenda J. Wilson, on Monday after four
years as vice president and provost of Cal State
Sacramento, where Koester spent her entire
administrative career. She is a graduate of the
University of Minnesota and the University of
Wisconsin.
The oldest of three daughters and a son born to a
car mechanic and a homemaker, Koester wanted to
learn about other cultures, so she left the Minnesota
countryside and entered the academic community.
Neither of Koester's parents finished high school,
though her father passed his equivalency exam while
serving in the U.S. military.
Koester's parents, German-speaking immigrants,
had lived in or around Plato all their lives, but she pined
for something different. She read books at the library in
nearby Glencoe (pop. 3,500) and participated in
whatever musicals, clubs and other extracurricular
pursuits she could find. But not until she was 17, on
only her second trip outside Minnesota, did Koester get
a real taste of the world beyond.
"For the first time in my life, I met people who had
different values, religions, political beliefs, different
points of view," says Koester. "It was the first time I
came in contact with other races. I was excited and
interested."
Her reaction foreshadowed the academic career to
come.
Ernest Bormann, University of Minnesota professor
emeritus of speech communication, met Koester at one
of her debate competitions in a small town west of
Minneapolis. The other team outlined its position
aggressively, Bormann said.
"Then I looked up and saw this young woman rather
demolish the debaters, all with a big smile on her face,"
he says.
When Koester attended the University of Minnesota
a few months later, she enrolled in his class. Eventually,
Bormann would chair Koester's dissertation committee.
He said he always found her to be calm and confident,
and he wasn't surprised when the Cal State University
Board of Trustees hired her.
"Very early on it was clear to me that this person
had the kind of skills that would make her a useful and
good administrator for some college or university,"
Bormann said.
She studied speech communication as an
undergraduate and volunteered for the university's
Student Project for International Responsibility, a
leadership program for foreign students. Through her
work with the organization, Koester made friends with
students from Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Her interest in other cultures helped her win a Fulbright
Exchange Scholarship to Hyderabad, India, to study
during her junior year.
"That was a life-transforming experience," she says.
"It taught me who I was as a person, and that I had a
measure of personal resourcefulness that I didn't know
I had. It taught me respect for different ways of doing
things. It taught me that stereotypes I had of India were
false and didn't capture the reality of that place.
"I would wake up and be halfway across the world
and I felt normal, not strange or exotic."
She returned to the United States to graduate and
earn a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin in
Madison and a doctorate in speech communication at
the University of Minnesota.
Koester says she had hoped to direct an
international study program but the more involved she
became in her discipline, the more interested she
became in intercultural communication. Among the
central questions driving her research: "How does
culture influence meaning?"
Koester taught speech and intercultural
communication at the University of Missouri and in
1985 at Cal State Sacramento. She also published
several articles and books on speech communication.
Koester's leadership abilities were noticed early on
by Sacramento State President David Gerth, one of the
longest-serving presidents in the Cal State system. The
two became acquainted when they worked together on
the faculty senate executive committee. Koester
became chairman of the Department of Communication
Studies in 1986 and assistant vice president for
academic affairs in 1989. She continued to move up the
ranks until 1993, when she became vice president of
academic affairs and provost, the No. 2 spot at the
university.
Gerth gave Koester a variety of responsibilities,
including many of the day-to-day operations of the
university.
Gerth also helped Koester raise her profile
throughout the system, encouraging and advocating her
leadership on CSU-wide committees, such as the
Accountability Task Force, the CSU Leadership
Institute and Chancellor Charles Reed's Cornerstones
Task Force on Institutional Integrity, Performance and
Accountability. As a result, Koester is one of the
university system's best-known administrators.
Gerth said he expects Koester to go even further
than her present position.
"She will emerge as a leader in the entire Cal State
University system," he says. "She is that kind of
person."
At Sacramento State, Koester spearheaded a
restructuring of the university's largest school, the
College of Arts and Sciences, which included half the
academic resources on campus.
"She reorganized the schools at Sacramento State
into five schools and five colleges," Gerth says. "There
was a lot of concern about it at first. She worked very
carefully step by step with faculty and students and
came out with a resolution that most agreed with.
"She moved people beyond territorialism, and it was
a good experience for the university and an important
one."
Even Koester's critics say she is usually willing to
listen to all perspectives and is an extremely good
communicator by virtue of her academic discipline. Her
approach is often described as consultative and
collaborative.
"She's quite open," says Bob Buckley, a computer
science professor and chairman of Sacramento State's
faculty senate.
Another of Koester's pet projects is the Council for
University Planning, which is a committee of faculty,
staff, students, administrators and community
representatives who discuss university plans, how
money should be allocated in accordance with those
plans and how the success of those plans should be
evaluated.
The collaborative structure of the council was
advocated by Koester. But after she has listened to all
points, Koester is known for being decisive and
strong-willed.
"She has the ability to see through the superficial
issues to what the core issue is," says Thomas S.
Krabacher, former faculty senate president. "And
usually when she just makes a decision on her own, it's
usually because the faculty didn't take advantage of the
opportunity to speak."
That tendency to listen and quickly decide and
execute was praised by many at Sacramento State and
criticized by a few.
"She's a strong manager, verging on
micromanagement," says Harry Chambers, a history
professor who has taught at Sacramento for 30 years.
Chambers took issue with her decision not to hire more
faculty members in the history department in advance of
an expected rush of retirements.
Koester, who is engaged to a San Diego State
professor and has no children, has been shuttling
between Sacramento and Northridge since the Board
of Trustees selected her six months ago.
With 23,600 students, Cal State Sacramento is
heavily focused on the liberal arts. It is ethnically diverse
but less so than CSUN, which is one of the nation's
most diverse college campuses. Cal State Northridge
has 27,000 students, many of whom are older and
poorer than students at Sacramento State.
Koester says she will focus on filling vice presidency
positions for university advancement and student affairs.
She says she also wants to enhance CSUN's
fund-raising efforts and to strengthen relations between
the campus and the people of the San Fernando Valley.