Talk:California State University/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Challenging removal of over 20% of the article on 19 and 29 May 2023

I have been too busy with trial work to look at Wikipedia lately. It looks like a lot of the article is missing due to a series of edits by User:Dr Vulpes on 19 and 29 May 2023. The effect was to reduce the article from a length of 100,659 bytes on 17 May 2023 to 79,986 bytes on 28 May 2023, or a reduction of 20.5%.

Those edits removed numerous true historical facts about Cal State which were neutrally framed and fully supported by citations to neutral and reliable sources. They have been in this article for a long time. A great deal of the information removed is essential to understanding the unique nature of Cal State. The article in its current state is difficult to understand because many remaining passages assume familiarity with the information that is now missing.

For example, Glenn Dumke's crucial decision to agree to Clark Kerr's "sweetener" in December 1959 makes zero sense, unless one is also aware that Dumke was wary of the Legislature forcing the state colleges to merge with UC, the dark fate that they had already fought off in 1935. That decision in turn made possible the enactment of the Master Plan for Higher Education, and the Master Plan has largely controlled Cal State's destiny ever since. The previous version of the article on 17 May 2023 clearly explained all that. All that information is gone.

Under Wikipedia policy, the burden is always on the editor who disrupts the longstanding consensus form of an article to justify their edits. Any objections before I restore that content? Coolcaesar (talk) 15:12, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

I concur with a proviso. The editor has made some good additions, so it would be well to avoid a wholesale revert. On the other hand, he's also made some errors in punctuation (Ph.D has no period behind the D; incorrectly formatted dashes, for example) that should be corrected. Let me know if I can help with copyedits. --Dr.Margi ✉ 19:15, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Good point. Unfortunately, there have been several beneficial edits to the article since 19 May 2023. And I will concede that a few of User:Dr Vulpes's edits were acceptable (as either deletions or additions). So the restoration would have to be done piece by piece rather than as a wholesale revert. It will have to be next weekend because I'm too busy right now. --Coolcaesar (talk) 23:11, 25 June 2023 (UTC)

Hey @Coolcaesar: sorry for not seeing this it was buried in my watchlist and I wasn't pinged. I'm willing to work with you to help rebuild the article. FUll disclosure this was a month ago so I may have forgotten why I made every edit but I'll give a few that I can remember off the top of my head. My big substance concern was that a lot of the history between UC and CSU was tied up in a small handful of sources and weren't balanced. I know there is still tension now years after the master plan was put into effect. Having so much of the history tied into not being allowed to award PhDs seemed to really sidetrack from the more important and interesting aspects of the system as a whole. I did attempt to find some sources that could help give context and balance things out but I wasn't able to find things that were available online. I was able to find some secondary citations for material that could work but they're at libraries across California and not digitized. If I recall correctly there were a few things at Fresno State. I live just outside of Fresno and wouldn't mind heading down to their library and reviewing the material. Some of the other changes were mostly updating sources and removing material that was not tied to a source or that I couldn't find support for. Example would be the statistic that UCLA has a larger operating budget than the entire CSU. I couldn't find anything to back it up and it was an apples to oranges comparison at best. You can't really compare one campus with a law school, medical school, and hospital system which also gets a large chunk of funding from indirect cost recovery on grants and state funding of the CSU system. Anyways, if you want to work on this together and improve the article I'm more than willing to put in the work with you on this. I know we don't see eye to eye on everything here but I'm willing to be open minded and professional about this. Dr vulpes ^{(💬 • 📝)} 19:33, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I appreciate that you're willing to engage in this discussion in good faith, but my concern is that your edits generally seemed to fall into the pattern of take out most of the bad stuff and leave most of the good stuff. I don't have the time to type out all my objections in detail right now, and I'll have to circle back to that later, but the main point I need to make is that Wikipedia is not censored (WP:NOT). I've noticed over the past decade that such tacit boosterism is a major problem with Wikipedia articles. In contrast, I have always taken great care to balance my edits with both the good and the bad, to conform to WP:NPOV. For example, I inserted negative information on the history of my own law school, UCLA School of Law, whose first dean, L. Dale Coffman, was one of the worst bigots to ever serve as a faculty member in the UC system. --Coolcaesar (talk) 16:26, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

To follow up on the above: Here is the relevant diff between 17 May 2023 and the present. Here are the major points which I feel strongly about and whose deletions I am contesting:

• J. Paul Leonard was so proud of the autonomy of the state colleges from the Department of Education that he boasted of it to Clark Kerr, making it supremely ironic that he ultimately fled SFSU because the state colleges were subject to the state government's stringent financial and personnel controls. Omitting this critical point removes a critical reason for why Dumke would agree to the messy compromise that was the Master Plan.
• The Suzzallo Report was named after the president of the Carnegie Foundation. Otherwise the name makes no sense.
• The transition of the normal schools into state colleges. This point needed to be expanded and I was planning to do so this summer. The article needed to make it clearer that normal schools as originally established were glorified vocational schools in which young women enrolled in lieu of going to high school, meaning the transition to state teachers colleges was not easy at all. Taking this out increases the chance of people mistaking normal schools for being teachers colleges from the start, which they were not.
• The state teachers colleges fought to remain independent from the Regents in 1935 and then secured a state constitutional amendment in 1946 preventing additional transfers of state colleges into UC. Without this information, it makes no sense why they wanted to remain independent under the Master Plan, rather than following the example of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara and becoming UC campuses. I was planning to expand on this point with how Kerr explains in his memoirs that he had opened negotiations by proposing the "Santa Barbara route" and the state college presidents immediately shot that down because they had witnessed the shabby treatment of Santa Barbara under UC management.
• The state college presidents' struggle for more autonomy in the 1950s and the pork barrel politics which they battled in the Legislature, resulting in the creation of a state college in Turlock. With all that background information gone (to help show what was motivating the state colleges in the negotiations that resulted in the Master Plan), the current text implies that the state government was reorganizing the state colleges for no reason at all.
• Why Clark Kerr squashed the state colleges' aspirations to become research universities. The only part left was his observation about how California already had too many research universities, which makes him look petty and cruel. The parts deleted provided the full context to show that Kerr was pragmatically attempting to prevent the kind of intrastate cannibalization of limited resources that condemned the vast majority of state universities around the nation to permanent mediocrity.
• Why Dumke agreed to Kerr's "sweetener," to avoid the unpalatable superboard alternative. Again, without this point, which highlights the worst-case scenario Dumke was trying to avoid, the article does not make sense. (Kerr did not make this point clear in his memoirs and it wasn't until I read Douglass's book, for which I cited as the basis of this information, that I finally understood what Dumke was doing.)
• The deep disappointment of the state college faculties with the Master Plan and their subsequent resistance, and how that affected the development of the California State Colleges under Chairman Heilbron and Chancellor Dumke. That constant tension is the dominant theme of the first three decades of Cal State history under Gallagher, Dumke, and Reynolds, resulting in Cal State's unique identity as a "teaching university." Again, Wikipedia is not censored and all those paragraphs should not have been deleted.
• The resemblance of the California state colleges to California state prisons and the fact that Cal Poly was briefly considered for prison conversion. The resemblance is obvious to any casual visitor, and it was notable enough to be expressly mentioned in Louis Heilbron's obituary in the Los Angeles Times (which I specifically cited for this point). I have visited at least 12 Cal State campuses in person, four on foot and eight by motor vehicle, plus I've driven past the chancellor's office in Long Beach (that's my 2007 photo).
• Reynolds's unsuccessful battle to obtain the unrestricted right to award the doctorate. We have had many edit wars on Wikipedia over the years in other articles because many intellectuals outside the United States strongly associate the word "university" with the doctorate. They consider a university that doesn't award doctorates to be a university in name only. Which is precisely why it's notable that Reynolds fought so hard to get the doctorate for Cal State -- to turn Cal State into a true university in the eyes of the world -- and Dumke deliberately sabotaged her effort by refusing to renege on the bargain he had made with Kerr in 1960.
• The difference between CSU and UC. First, as a threshold matter, the deletions were not done with care, and the result is that all the remaining assertions are cited to obviously incorrect sources (that do not stand for what they are now cited for, because they were intended to support sentences which are now missing). Second, the difference between CSU and UC was neutrally stated, is common knowledge in American higher education, and is directly supported by each of the four sources cited. Again, Wikipedia is not censored.
• The relocation of the chancellor's office in 1976 to Long Beach and in 1998 to across the street. Right now, the article does not state when that happened, leaving the reader to guess that Cal State later jumped from Los Angeles to Long Beach at some point.

All right. Any objections before I reinsert the deleted passages raising the points summarized above? --Coolcaesar (talk) 09:41, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Just thought of another key point. I disagree with Dr Vulpes' position that the contested edits were not "balanced" in the sense that they were cited to a small number of sources. What matters is not the number of sources but whether they are reliable sources. The two sources which I relied upon the most were clearly reliable sources under WP:RS. First, Clark Kerr was the leading architect of the Master Plan and more responsible than anyone else for Cal State's sui generis role under the Master Plan. After Governor Reagan got Kerr fired from his job as UC President, Kerr had plenty of time to observe the implementation of the Master Plan and to work on his memoirs and he in fact did so. Second, Donald Gerth served as president of Sacramento and Dominguez Hills and was also on the faculty at Chico and San Francisco. As those 2021 obituaries make abundantly clear, Gerth was more qualified than anyone else to document Cal State's history, having served as president of two Cal State campuses and as a faculty member at two others. He first joined SFSC in 1958, meaning that he was involved with Cal State during the development and implementation of the Master Plan for Higher Education. --Coolcaesar (talk) 11:31, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Okay, it's been two weeks and there has been no response. If I don't see one soon, I'm reinserting those passages. Right now the article in its mangled state with all those deletions makes no sense. As I explained above, too many motives and causes of events are currently missing. --Coolcaesar (talk) 12:46, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Also, a new point I am planning to add is the scathing Cozen O'Connor report which was just released and has received widespread news coverage. One of the most important points raised is that CSU's legal department is shockingly underresourced for a university system of its size, which helps explain why CSU's Title IX compliance is a disaster. The Cozen report (on page 129) found that across CSU, "a common perception is one of institutional bias, that individual campus administrators act to protect the interests of the institution instead of protecting individuals experiencing harm." --Coolcaesar (talk) 17:32, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Update: It is clear that after I patiently waited for three weeks, User:Dr vulpes has not attempted to defend the deletions challenged above. In any event, it should never have been my problem to explain why those deletions were improper in the first place. Under WP policy, the burden is on the editor making major changes to an article to justify those changes.

However, this exercise has piqued my curiosity about CSU's relationship with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. I plan to expand the coverage of CSU's relationship with prisons in California, such as Cal State LA's "first of its kind" October 2021 commencement ceremony inside a state prison. --Coolcaesar (talk) 15:28, 21 July 2023 (UTC)