Among the new faces on campus this semester will be that of Dr. Leslie E. Wong, SF State’s new president. Wong hails from Northern Michigan University, a University much smaller than SF State, where he focused on forging connections with both students and faculty. Golden Gate Xpress Editor-in-chief Kale Williams had the pleasure of sitting down with the incoming University president to discuss adapting to city life, executive compensation and Wong’s vision for the future of SF State in these troubled economic times. SF State spokeswoman Ellen Griffin also sat in on the meeting.

Northern California is pretty different from Northern Michigan. How has the transition to San Francisco gone so far and what are your favorite and least favorite parts of city life so far?

Leslie E. Wong: Good question. It’s been a little easier because it’s coming home for me, even though I was raised on the Oakland side in the East Bay. Certainly getting used to parking, parking, parking, no matter where you go on campus, downtown. But we’ll get used to public transit, etc. The hardest part for me is that I’m a bicyclist and I haven’t used my bike yet because I want to get a mental map figured out, but I was very much into walking and using my bike in Michigan. You only had to worry about hitting deer, moose, porcupines, so getting back to the city has been fun, but it is really different. Luckily my driving skills haven’t gone away, so that’s been an easy adjustment. I am thoroughly excited by the diversity on campus. It’s wonderful to go into Cesar Chavez Center and hear Spanish, Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese, to hear other languages. It’s a good reminder that an education is for the world. It’s not just for you or for your family, although that is important, but it’s about understanding the world and being a part of it. I’ve really enjoyed that part of it.

So what neighborhood did you choose to live in and are you renting or did you buy a house?

LW: We’re renting right now. We wanted to be in the city, so we’re living near campus, which makes walking and biking much easier.

What is a typical day like for you?

LW: Whoa…

That is, if you’ve had a typical day so far. I know the semester hasn’t started yet.

LW: I readily admit that I am not a morning person, so I usually try to get in to campus somewhere between 8 and 8:30 and the meetings start pretty soon thereafter. One of my habits is, I really plan for an hour in the middle of the day just to think through things. Issues that address the student experience and faculty. Sometimes it’s good to get away from the phones and technology and all of that stuff and just say, “Am I thinking straight about certain things?” And then the meetings start again. I’m trying to get around to meet department heads, unit heads. There are certain departments that have wonderful reputations, which is almost every department on campus, and just trying to get close to meeting those folks that do such a great job.

President Corrigan left behind a legacy of campus expansion here at SF State. What do you hope to leave as your legacy?

LW: That’s really a good question. My world begins and ends with the student experience, and if I’m able to leave a legacy of a dynamic curriculum where our students are on every continent, in every state and making a difference in all the local communities, and we have as many students winning humanitarian awards as winning All-American awards, I’ll be a happy guy. For me, the whole student experience is about becoming a great citizen, a good citizen, a great mother or father and knowing that somewhere along the line in our lives, yours, there is going to be a first grader who is going to say, “I want to be like you.” When you’re the editor of a newspaper or off doing important things, some young person is going to say, “That’s the job I want.”

What would you say is at the top of your priority list as you get started here in your first year at SF State?

LW: There is an end to this, a motive — in March we’ll be meeting with our accreditation people, and we’ll be talking about the future and how that finds some reality in the strategic plan. And so, between now and March, I want to talk with everyone about their aspirations. When I met with the provost council, that was my first comment to them that not only do we have to be ready for the accreditation, you have to make sure that I understand the future that you guys see. It has to resonate between all of us. I’ve asked the enrollment management people. I’d like to know who our aspirational peers are because, with accreditation, they typically benchmark you against your traditional peers. For me that’s not good enough. I want to know who we think represents best practices, the best kinds of things, and let’s benchmark ourselves against that group. That’s going to be a pretty involved discussion. Students should also be thinking about, “How can we can contribute to campus life now?” so that the freshman who shows up in 2018 goes, “It got started back in ’12. I’m experiencing a super campus because of the interactions between the students and the president back when he started.” So I’ve had to get that straight. It’s less about me defining the vision, and it really is about me making sure I am a catalyst for a new vision for San Francisco State.

There was quite a bit of criticism of the CSU trustees when they approved a 10 percent raise that you got over President Corrigan. I’m wondering what your response is to that criticism?

Ellen Griffin: Can I just correct that? It was actually 9 percent.

LW: San Francisco State is one of the most prestigious campuses in the country. I have no doubt that it is one of the most prestigious campuses in the Pacific Rim, and when they asked if I would consider applying, I did. I interviewed. They offered me the job and I took it. I don’t do things for money and I just said,”Be fair.” In today’s world executive salaries are competitive. So I’ll just leave it at that. I understand the controversy because students are paying more, my commitment is that we’re going to work really hard to raise money for students. We’re going to make sure that access and affordability remain at the forefront of every decision we make. Whether it’s parking, whether it’s book costs, whether it’s the price of paper — if we’re not sensitive to that, then we’ve missed the boat. So I can understand the controversy, but for me, there is family. There are a lot of different things that represent whether the compensation for a president meets the expectations.

That leads well into my next question: What is your stance on the tax initiatives that will be coming up in November, specifically Proposition 30?

LW: Well, I have to tell you, it’s a pretty complex issue. By way of context, California is going through a budget reduction in two years that, in Michigan, took nearly nine. So the intensity of trying to make that adjustment and correction in such a short amount of time is its own problem. It interferes with how we plan, how we make decisions about the size of the freshman class. There are just so many different things to throw into the bucket. It’s like turning to a student and saying “You know, in the next two weeks we want you to find a spouse, get married, buy a house, find a job, blah, blah, blah.” The intensity is difficult. I think Prop. 30, I hope people are informed about it, I hope students get informed about it. It has a lot of ripples in terms of course availability. It has a lot of ripples about access. I’m going to be really straightforward with you, I don’t tell students what they should or shouldn’t do because one of my tenets is that students ought to own their own mind. You’ll hear this in my first convocation, well it’s not a convocation, but the first faculty meeting next Friday (Sept. 7), that’s one of my premises. I feel very good about what we did in Michigan to make sure that every legislative battle that we supported or not, or every issue that came up in the legislature, in some way enhances the student experience. Sometimes that required students to get out and vote as well. If there is anything, I hope students get informed and I hope they vote. The chips will fall where they ought. It’s one of those things where Prop. 30 needs to be well understood.

So if Prop. 30 doesn’t pass and the trigger cuts go into effect, what is your contingency plan to deal with a further reduction in state funds?

LW: Well, you know, again to be resonant with my value system, I’ve already asked the vice presidents, in that event let’s think through “What do we do if it doesn’t pass?” We protect the curriculum to the best we can. That’s why you all are here. Let’s try to contain costs the best we can. This will sound odd, but how entrepreneurial can we be? To create and support revenue streams that will help us with the first two items, to help students and to keep our costs down. You don’t often hear that from college presidents, but I think the new economy is asking us to be entrepreneurial and to ask our students to be that way as well.

In that same vein, what role do you see private donations playing at SF State as we receive less state funds, and will you be actively seeking out private donations?

LW: Absolutely. I consider that in a world where I’m committed to access and affordability, I think that is going to be a big chunk of my time. That’s one reason that I wanted to make sure that I’m connected to our alums, to our donor base, to you all as students. I’ve told the alumni office, in many ways, we ought to be talking to freshmen as part of our fundraising piece much like the private schools do. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m assuming that if you went to Notre Dame or Duke, that they are probably connecting to students when they are in their first year and perhaps we need to be doing that as well.

EG: I’m going to interject here, he’s being very modest. I’m trying to get him to let me release that him and Mrs. Wong have already set up a scholarship and have donated personally. That’s a scoop you can have. I don’t have a release on that yet, but I believe that it is a five-year pledge.

LW: Phyllis and I have committed a $35,000 pledge to start with. That is something that we did throughout our years in Michigan as well.

That’s great. I’m sure the recipients will thank you. My next question is: Do you see private money funding public education as a good thing, it seems pretty obvious that you do, but I wonder if you think it can have any drawbacks?

LW: You know, there really are some examples that will lead us to think carefully. We’re not going to go out and accept any and every gift that comes to us. We’re not like the super PACs of the world. There are some people who I’ve had to think twice about accepting money from. Firstly, we want donors to understand the mission and vision of San Francisco State. We want them to understand the kind of students and the student environment that we have here. I kind of like the rebellious, outspoken stereotype that I’ve been told characterizes our students. I think that’s the mark of a great university, i.e Berkeley, Duke, NYU. I mean the great schools have student bodies that are willing to be creative and outspoken. So I think donors need to be supportive of that mantra in our mission. And I’ve turned down money in my prior institution where I’ve said “We can’t produce what you want us to do with your donation.”

What is your take on the role of UCorp and the SF State Foundation, in terms of fundraising?

LW: Well it’s a little bit of a different organization than I’m used to, but its very common to have an auxiliary sort of setup like UCorp. Here it is structured differently, but we had a similar thing in Michigan, and so its a way in which the University can in fact be entrepreneurial. General fund dollars are about 23 or 24 percent?

EG: General fund is approximately about 50 percent of our budget, maybe a little less. It looks like (the total budget is) about $307 million, and general funds are between $150 and $160 (million.)

LW: And declining. The point I was getting at is that UCorp is a way to cover all of those additional costs and projects, etc., that the general fund just isn’t there to do. Unfortunately, and fortunately, sometime it means being like a business, it means being entrepreneurial. But it does help us cover those areas where the general fund just doesn’t.

I’m curious what action you would like to see from the trustees and the chancellor, Charlie Reed now and whoever comes in to replace him, that is going to be able to ensure that the CSU can provide a quality education that is accessible to all, especially in light of the in-state graduate student freeze that was recently passed by the trustees?

LW: The trustees have to, and they certainly are, working to find a successor to Chancellor Reed who understands not only the scale and scope of CSU and the 23 campuses, but it really needs to be an individual who is committed to good teaching and learning and scholarship. To me, that goes back to a commitment to student experience at all 23 campuses. The chancellor of today’s large systems are really special people. They have to see the big picture, they have to be an astute politician in Sacramento. They’ve got 23 presidents who they’ll work with and 23 campuses that are really different from one another. I’m only beginning now to understand and appreciate that. As a young person, when it used to be Cal State Hayward and I was a young Chinese Mexican kid on the streets of Oakland, college was a just a big dream and all the universities in many ways were the same. Then I got older and smarter as the years went by and I realized how Cal State East Bay is different from SF State and how we’re different from Chico State and San Luis Obispo and that represents the diversity we have in California. I’m kind of blabbering right now, but you’re touching on what might be the most critical challenge to the system, which is to get leadership in position to face the next economy.

Are there specific qualities that you’re looking for in that kind of leadership?

LW: You know, that’s a question that has no possibility of a good answer for you. The pressure on the new chancellor will be immense — that is where that person will have to have a good sense of teamwork. He’ll have a huge staff, 23 presidents, 400,000 students, a couple thousand faculty, hundreds of thousands of faculty members. But that’s what makes the job such a prestigious one and that’s what attracted me to SF State. The CSU is an emblem of what a state and a higher ed system can do for the citizens. The work done by CSU campuses is unparalleled. I don’t think there is any comparison in the country.

I’ve got one more hardball question, if you’re ready. Is the rumor true that you collect antique measuring devices? And I’m wondering how does one get started in such a seemingly obscure hobby?

LW: It goes along with this kind of thing, I always felt it was pretty egotistical of our species to create measuring tools and then think we’ve mastered whatever it is we’re measuring. Have you ever asked yourself “What is a minute?” or “What is an inch?”

I’m a philosophy minor, so I actually have.

LW: And so, I’ve just been reveling over the notion of the Higgs-Boson discovery a few weeks ago, that they had to build special tools just so that they could measure this thing and be pretty sure about it. Then it dawned on me that, historically, you almost get a sense of the evolution of cultures by the instruments we create to measure things and so when you look at a couple of the things that have found me, at the heart of them are springs. You measure an envelope by how much it compresses a spring. Some of the weights I have are from the gold rush days. I always thought it was one of the great abstractions we’ve created, the measurement of things. My favorite is one of the slide rules, which we literally use those to send people to the moon. So its been that kind of thing, they find me. I don’t go looking for them. My favorite one is the brass piece. I went out to North Dakota because I wanted to see one of the last prairie grass National Parks where the grass still grows eight to 10 feet high. I walked into this place and here this thing was sitting on the counter and I said “Gosh, are you willing to part with that?” And they used that when they thought there was going to be gold in the Dakota prairies. It was just a lucky thing, I walked into this tiny little store to get something to eat and there was this device.

My last question is: Do you have any sort of general statement that you want to pass along to our readers?

LW: I hope that students will see that I’m really about their experience. Whether it is in the research labs, dancing, playing volleyball, throwing a ball, ballet, doing physics. That, for me, I can honor their work by being present. I’ll be at volleyball games, I’ll be at theater presentations. To me, that’s important. This sounds kind of hokey, but when I was young and playing baseball, my father worked his buns off creating opportunity for us, and for him to be dog-tired and to show up to watch me play baseball, that was all I needed. I think in many ways I learned that with students, I would be disrespecting you if I said, “I’m proud that I’ve never read the Xpress.”

Well, let us put out our first issue and you won’t have to say that anymore.

LW: I was chuckling because I thought to myself “I could never wear aviators and skinny jeans” after I read the article from last year about advice for the new president. Maybe I’ll show up at your offices in aviators.

Full disclosure, that was actually written by the editorial staff from last semester. As far as I’m concerned, you can wear whatever you want.

LW: (laughing) It was a great article.