4 presidents have led Cal Poly over past century. Here’s how they helped university grow
Former Cal Poly President Warren Baker recently passed away at age 84.
The San Luis Obispo university has grown over the decades due to the vision and commitment of staff and leaders like Baker, who led the campus for more than three decades.
California Polytechnic School was established as a vocational high school in 1901.
By 1933, the school was struggling, with just over 400 students enrolled.
The Great Depression had sapped the state budget, and the isolated rural school had few friends in Sacramento.
The California State Legislature cut funding for female students at Cal Poly, beginning in 1930.
Even though it repealed the law in 1937, the school would not again admit women until 1956.
Ben Crandall, who served as Cal Poly’s president from 1924 to 1933, said in the 1933 El Rodeo yearbook message that the school was being reorganized.
High school and junior college programs were being eliminated as the Cal Poly became as a two-year technical and vocational school with a focus on agriculture.
“Naturally it is with regret that the vision of a great technical institute on the Pacific coast must be abandoned,” Crandall wrote.
My grandfather Lionel was a student at Cal Poly and a member of the football team at the time.
Lionel had grown up in Colusa, farming grain and getting up before dawn to hitch teams of mules up to harvesting equipment.
My grandmother Betty said she fell in love with Lionel when she saw him leaning against a shovel at a project.
They married and started a family but their return to Colusa was not successful, in part due to a series of bad weather setbacks.
They moved to San Luis Obispo County and Lionel got a job with Cal Poly on the farming staff.
Occasionally I would meet a student who recalled happy memories of working with my grandfather at the farm shop.
Lionel was also part of a crew of volunteers who helped out with Agriculture Department tri-tip barbecues in the Cal Poly grove next to the railroad tracks.
Lionel retired after 33 years working on campus, for many years as the head of farming operations. His retirement was announced Jan 13, 1976, in Cal Poly Report, a the typewritten newsletter.
When Lionel arrived at Cal Poly as a student, he had 400 classmates. When he retired, the student population was 15,000 students.
Lionel worked under Cal Poly’s longest serving president, Julian McPhee, who was in charge for 33 years. My father attended the school during his tenure.
McPhee managed Cal Poly through the Great Depression, World War II and a major expansion to become a four-year college.
The college opened the branch operations that would become Cal Poly Pomona after receiving its first $1 million donation. (There’s now a third Cal Poly, located in Humboldt.)
However, frugality was a habit.
Many of the buildings on Cal Poly’s San Luis Obispo campus from the McPhee era are austere and no frills.
Perhaps because the school fought back from being almost zeroed out of the state budget, the staff had something to prove.
McPhee’s successor was one of his chief administrators, Robert E. Kennedy.
Kennedy oversaw Cal Poly during the Vietnam War, when anti-war protests rocked the campus, and shepherded the school through the process of becoming a state university.
His tenure included the establishment of a college of architecture, and more modern, multi-story buildings start to appear on campus.
Kennedy retired in 1979. His replacement was Warren Baker, who was the youngest California University president in history at age 40.
Baker was also a bit of a puzzle for the old timers. He didn’t stop and chit chat when he power-walked, head down deep in thought, up from his house to the administration building.
Some people would complain that they didn’t see the new president much.
During Baker’s tenure, dilapidated buildings were demolished and replaced.
According to the Cal Poly Library’s university history timeline, almost every year or two of Baker’s tenure as president was marked with a new building or major donation.
The scale and variety of projects the university tackled under Baker’s leadership were without parallel. They included about $1 billion in new facilities and renovations and the acquisitions of the Cal Poly Pier near Avila Beach and the Swanton Pacific Ranch near Davenport.
Baker’s tenure included the formation of the the partnership between Cal Poly, the city of San Luis Obispo and the foundation that created the Performing Arts Center on the edge of the university’s campus.
Alhough he was busy, Baker was seen taking time to be with one of his kids at basketball camp or playing catch before a Babe Ruth game.
Cal Poly attained a more national profile as it began to show up on best of lists beginning in 1993 with U.S. News and World Report.
In addition to an increase in financial outreach, the university moved to Division I college athletics and added a doctorate program in education and a wine and viticulture program.
Without a doubt, the Baker presidency left a lasting legacy.
When I arrived on campus in 1979, the same year Baker started, agriculture was more specialized than it was when my grandfather and father got their degrees. I couldn’t see a path for me in that school.
I thought I was good at science but quickly discovered that I was at best a C student in that field.
Fortunately, there was a journalism program at Cal Poly fostered by Kennedy. There, at the student newspaper, I found my people.
The robust university that began as a vocational high school more than a century ago still helps students prepare for their futures, wherever they land in the world.
However, the big issues that faced Crandall and his successors were largely different from ones faced by current Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong, who was already leading the university when my son Scott attended there. And Cal Poly is a very different place.
Universities have to find ways to keep the classic lessons alive and relevant; prune branch areas of study that are no longer productive and grow and adapt to the times.
But Cal Poly’s core philosophy — “Learn by doing” — endures.
