Robert Corrigan: The City's university president
By: Tiffany Maleshefski
Special to The Examiner
October 18, 2008
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| At 20 years, Robert Corrigan’s tenure is the longest of any of San Francisco State’s presidents since 1924. (Mike Koozmin/Special to The Examiner) |
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco State University has long asserted itself, officially, as “The City’s university,” stamping the motto onto its letterhead and working the phrase into its various publications for more than three decades.
When Robert Corrigan took over as the university’s president in 1988, that assertion, to him, rang somewhat false.
“The president of the Chamber of Commerce, John Jacobs, had set me up with 32 meetings in my first year with major CEOs in San Francisco. ... I couldn’t find many people in the business community who thought we were The City’s university,” Corrigan said. “I wanted to break us out of that. Everything I have tried to do with my administration is to really honor that phrase ... that we are The City’s university.”
Throughout his 20-year tenure at San Francisco State, Corrigan, the school’s longest-serving president, has tirelessly worked to overcome geographical obstacles by creating a satellite campus in downtown San Francisco and a research facility across the Golden Gate in Tiburon.
Meanwhile, deep budget cuts and the shadow of UC Berkeley and Stanford University pushed the school’s 12th president to dig deep into the business community and create long-lasting, fruitful partnerships that have helped recruit top-notch lecturers from some of San Francisco’s most prestigious companies and firms.
Those partnerships have also helped Corrigan increase the school’s level of private funding, which has gone from less than $1 million per year to $18 million during his administration. Despite being under the state’s budget ax, Corrigan raised the school’s annual federal research grants from $4 million to $50 million and increased the school’s endowment to $50 million. He has built a first-rate institution that, among other things, touts one of the country’s highest-ranked film programs and a masters-level institution that proudly reflects the face of The City.
Corrigan has the distinction of not only being the only educator to serve as president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, but also having served for two consecutive terms. Corrigan’s business ties have garnered paid and nonpaid internships for S.F. State students, secured precious private funding and recruited some of the region’s best talent to be lecturers and professors at the school. For example, Nancy Hayes, the dean of the school of business, was an executive at IBM for 20 years.
“San Francisco State is an institution that is in touch with the real world, not just the world of textbooks, and that trickles down from the top,” said Steven Falk, president and CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.
And with a student population that has climbed to 30,000 students, Corrigan has had to strike a tricky balance between promoting student expression and mandating a culture of tolerance.
Tensions between the university’s Arab-American and Jewish students have been seething for a decade. The situation eventually exploded shortly after the school’s chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students proposed a mural two years ago honoring Edward Said, the late Palestinian scholar renowned for his work for social justice.
In a situation reminiscent of the disastrous Malcolm X mural unveiled 14 years prior, an attempt to have some imagery within the mural that some interpreted as anti-Semitic exploded into conflict leading to heated protests and an incident on Aug. 30, 2007, that erupted into an altercation requiring assistance from the San Francisco Police Department.
Unlike the Malcolm X mural incident, which ended with Corrigan directing a team of police in riot gear to sandblast the mural off the wall of the student union, the conflict over the Said mural was resolved peacefully with dialogue.
“There we succeeded because the nature of the student population and their willingness to be less confrontational in the positions they took,” Corrigan said. “They sat down. It took us a year, but they sat down and they hammered out a compromise on that mural. I consider that to be higher education working at its best. That was an important watershed for us.”
But Corrigan’s ability to let students freely express themselves, while knowing when to step in and set boundaries, or in some cases, to exact discipline, has won him the respect of his colleagues, locally and nationally.
“I think there’s no doubt that San Francisco State would be a far less respectful place if it weren’t for Bob Corrigan,” said Jonathan
Bernstein, San Francisco’s regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Ramping up community-service-based learning has been another tenet of Corrigan’s administration — something that ties into both his personal and professional ethos. Former President Bill Clinton handpicked Corrigan to head committees pertaining to the federal programs America Reads and America Counts. And Corrigan, in turn, created a college curriculum that tied students to these two volunteer-based programs.
In a way, Corrigan has pushed beyond building “The City’s university,” graduating tens of thousands of well-rounded, community-minded students who will hopefully work toward the greater whole of humanity.
“The notion is that a San Francisco State education is one that promotes the sense of citizenship and concern for justice and concern for equity,” Corrigan said. “Everybody says now, that’s one of the things we are known for nationally, and it’s really sort of blossomed in the 20 years that I’ve been here.”
Robert Corrigan
Resident: San Francisco; he is the first S.F. State president since 1967 to live in the city proper.
Tenure: At 20 years, Corrigan’s tenure is the longest of any of San Francisco State’s presidents since 1924.
Education: B.A., American civilization, Brown University; M.A. and Ph.D, American civilization, University of Pennsylvania
Accomplishment: Corrigan is credited with founding one of the first black-studies programs in the country, at the University of Iowa, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Résumé: San Francisco State University president and professor of English and humanities (1988-present); University of Massachusetts-Boston, chancellor and English professor (1979-88); University of Maryland, provost for arts and humanities and professor of English and American studies (1974-79); University of Missouri-Kansas City, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of English (1973-74)
