HISTORY OF SBCC
(FOR NEW TEACHERS)
by Henry Bagish
You're history!
No, not in the current vernacular sense, of being
finished, done, outta here - just the opposite, in fact. I mean
that, whether you know it or not, you're a part of history -
you're going to be making history.
People just starting a new job seldom think of
themselves as making history - but from a long-term perspective,
they are. I know that when I started teaching at what was then
known as Santa Barbara Junior College, half a century ago, I
just thought of getting the job done - of teaching my classes,
working on committees, doing the things that needed to be done
in that small, fledgling college. But now, fifty years later,
I realize that we were making history, building a tiny college
into the vast enterprise that it is today.
But that's my point. SBCC may be vast today, but
it's still growing, still changing - and you, in your everyday
actions, are going to be helping to shape the college that SBCC
will become in the future.
Since you're going to become part of the ongoing
history of SBCC, I think it would be useful for you to know
something about its past history, to have some sense of when
and where and why it began, and the many changes along the way
on its path to what it's become today.
- Santa Barbara Junior College was founded in
1908 - the second oldest in the state (after Fresno Junior
College). It consisted of academic courses at the13th and
14th grade level added to the Santa Barbara High School program.
-
In 1921 this extended High School program
was transferred to the Santa Barbara State Teachers' College.
Enrollment was just under 100 students, increasing to 150
students by 1926.
-
In 1926-27, the Teachers' College was reorganized
into upper and lower divisions, and that ended the junior
college as a separate entity.
- But in 1946 the Santa Barbara Junior
College was re-established by the Santa Barbara City Schools
Board of Education. It consisted of two clusters of old wooden
buildings in downtown Santa Barbara, on Santa Barbara St.,
near the recently reconstructed historic Presidio. One cluster,
which included the administrative office, a few classrooms,
and, in the rear, the Alhecama Theater, was at 914 Santa Barbara
St. The other, consisting of three classrooms, was one block
down, at 814 Santa Barbara St., presently the home of Anacapa
School, a small private school. That was it. Except for a
small lawn in front of the Alhecama Theater (the "Quad"),
there were no spacious grounds, no parking structures - in
fact, no parking facilities at all. Students had to park out
on the nearby streets. Indeed, our nickname at the time was
the "Sidewalk College".
Of course, parking wasn't that great a problem
anyway, since, even by the time of my arrival in 1951, we had
only 162 students in our daytime credit program - 58 males and
104 females. Today I have more than that in just one of my own
classes! Faculty? Before my arrival, all classes were taught
(and very well, I might add) by an assortment of part-time instructors,
recruited from UCSB and elsewhere in the community.
Why was that, you might well ask? It seems odd
to have a college of so few students with just a few part-time
instructors, housed in such cramped quarters. But there was
a reason. The junior college was part of the much larger Santa
Barbara City Schools (elementary, junior high, and high school)
- and the governing Board of Education was allowed by law to
increase its property tax rate if it also offered a junior college
education. That it did; but because they didn't spend much money
on the junior college, it then had a large amount of surplus
tax revenue to spend elsewhere in the District. For example,
the Santa Barbara High School gymnasium was constructed largely
with junior college tax money.
But I was extremely fortunate to come along at
a time when the Superintendent of Schools and the Board of Education
had finally decided to give their fledgling college a chance
to grow into a collegiate institution in its own right. To that
end, they decided in 1951 to hire two full-time instructors,
who would serve as a nucleus for the growing faculty in the
years to come. I was one of the lucky two, teaching primarily
in the Social Sciences. The other was John Miles Flynn, who
taught Business courses. We still had a number of part-time
instructors. I have an old photo of the entire faculty, including
administrators, taken on the Quad at the conclusion of the 1951/1952
school year - ten of us in all! (I had a lot more hair back
then!)
Even back then the College was associated with
a thriving Adult Education program, headed by Selmer (Sam) Wake,
a powerhouse of a man who built that program into one of the
very finest in the country, and to whom the entire College owes
a huge debt of thanks for all he's done over these many years.
The Junior College, Adult Education, and University Extension
were the three components of what was called the Community Institute
- all three "coordinated in a unified program" under
the City Schools.
With a faculty that small, we couldn't afford
the luxury of specialization. Back then, we were expected to
be "jacks of all trades", able to teach virtually
any subject within a very broad spectrum. I was hired to teach
Social Sciences and English. I ended up that first semester
teaching Philosophy 6A, Sociology 1A, English 1A, English 50A
(Subject A, or "bonehead" English"), and History
17A - all MWF classes (we didn't offer TTh classes) - five classes,
back to back, with only a 35-minute break for a quick brown-bagged
lunch (since there was no cafeteria). I worked frantically to
learn enough to keep just ahead of the students. In my first
few years I taught Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, Economics,
American History, Anthropology, "Courtship and Marriage",
and, yes, more English, creating from scratch a course entitled
"Study and Reading Improvement". It was only as the
College began to grow in enrollment, and we began to hire instructors
who were specialists in each of these areas, that I was able
to cut many of these courses from my repertoire, and narrow
my offerings down to the two related fields of sociology and
anthropology.
The College was so small back then that we didn't
have any of the other specialized services that today we take
for granted. There was no Campus Bookstore; students had to
buy their books from Copeland's Bookstore, a private bookstore
on State St. There was no Library; I had a collection of books
in my office, most of them mine, that I would lend out to students.
Until the arrival of Bud Revis in 1952, there was no formal
P.E. program. We managed to scrounge a volleyball and net from
somewhere, set the net up in a narrow space just outside my
classroom, and we played frantic volleyball in the seven minutes
between classes (we were on the high school time schedule, with
bells that rang to signal the end of each class). When it was
time for class to resume, I had to confiscate the ball, because
the noisy game would distract the students in the classroom;
this did not enhance my popularity! Registration? Admissions?
- no such thing in the beginning. We instructors had to invent
a way to get students signed up for classes. Bob Profant and
I built a wooden set of pigeonholes for gathering and organizing
the "class tickets" that we designed and had printed
up for students to fill out in triplicate. All that remains
of that primitive system in this modern computerized age is
the term "class ticket number".
Student government? - Well, that's something that
was created early on, with elections of student body officers.
I know, because the job of student body adviser was one that
I also had to take on, in addition to my regular full-time teaching
duties - and, no, there was no extra financial compensation!
One thing that hasn't changed over the years has
been the diversity of our student body. I'm looking at a photo
of the student body officers in one of those early years: there's
a WASP, an Hispanic, a Jew and a black (Neill Wright, who went
on to become a beloved teacher locally, now retired).
While students back then dressed and looked pretty
much like the students of today, that was not true of the faculty.
In the 1950's male faculty members were expected to wear jackets,
long pants, and ties, while women faculty members were expected
to wear dresses, stockings, and high heels. Shoes, needless
to say, were considered necessary. Oh, how times have changed!
My first year the head of the College held the
title of Principal. Frank Fowler, who taught our highly successful
Theater Arts program, loved to address him as "Principal".
In 1952 that principal was replaced by the Vice-Principal at
Santa Barbara High School - and he was given the somewhat more
prestigious title of Director of the College. He was devoutly
religious, and insisted upon the strict dress code mentioned
above, plus no smoking on or off campus, and certainly no drinking
- although it did occur sub rosa anyway. We had "proms"
and "formals" at least once a year, held at local
country clubs and the Coral Casino, complete with a student-body-elected
Queen of the Ball; faculty were expected to attend as chaperones.
Growth was rapid those first few years, and we
quickly outgrew our limited facilities. In 1955 we moved to
the Riviera campus, which provided much more room, as well as
more charming surroundings. We now even had a cafeteria, and
a small faculty dining room. But the buildings were small and
decrepit. Ebbets Hall had a leaky roof; when it rained the last
rows of my long narrow classroom were obscured by a curtain
of water pouring through the ceiling. In the faculty dining
room the plaster was peeling; during damp weather the plaster
would drizzle down onto our food. It was quite dreary, so when
it wasn't raining, we preferred to bring our own brown-bag lunches
with us to school, and sit on the sloping front lawn to eat
together. We did more than eat; we sat and discussed and exchanged
views on everything from politics to college matters. It became
a true forum, a morale builder, and a college tradition. I would
say that it really was the genesis for what later became the
Instructors' Association, and in turn the Academic Senate.
Before I relate some of the problems we had with
the Director of the College, I do want to commend him, and the
entire City Schools administration, for their steadfast support
of academic freedom in the classroom. Never once was I, or anyone
else, told what we could or could not say, even at the height
of the McCarthy era, and despite pressures from a highly vocal
John Birch Society. For instance, in 1956 the Director, the
Superintendent of Schools, and the President of the Board of
Education all received copies of an anonymous letter attacking
me for, among other things, my "anti-anti-communist views".
It was true that I had publicly expressed disapproval of Senator
Joseph McCarthy and his activities, but I was pleased that the
Director and the rest of the administration supported me completely,
and nothing more was ever heard about it.
A number of us chafed, however, under the Director's
strict, authoritarian rule; for instance, he insisted on censoring
the student newspaper. But something very good eventually came
of this conflict, something that established an important precedent
and direction for the College. This Director would frequently
cancel all classes at a particular hour on very short notice,
arbitrarily and unilaterally, in order to have all students
and faculty present at a pep rally for an athletic event or
some other college-wide event. The straw that finally broke
the camel's back was his once again cancelling all classes so
that everyone could view, in the Alhecama Theater, an "uplifting"
film with a religious theme that he had obtained from the Moody
Bible Institute. That was just going too far for many of us
on the faculty. Individual protests had so far been to no avail.
We realized that somehow we had to organize as a faculty to
be able to speak with a unified voice. How did we do it? We
formed a new, non-administratively-approved "Liaison Committee",
to give voice to faculty concerns and communicate them to the
Administration. It worked! The Director now had to listen our
concerns. Even so, we still chafed under what was a top-down
style of administration (actually very common in the 1950's),
a style that we regarded as paternalistic, authoritarian, and
finally unacceptable. We wanted to share in the governance of
the College - and we soon realized the potential strength that
comes from organization plus determination. We who served on
the Liaison Committee decided to send our chairperson on a secret
mission to the Superintendent of Schools, to tell him that our
Director no longer had our confidence as the leader of the College.
Not long after that, we read in the local paper that he had
requested reassignment "downtown" - and we would soon
start a nationwide search for a new President of the College
- a search that involved faculty in the search and interview
and selection process! The person we selected was Joe Cosand
(who died last year), a democratic leader who was as different
from his predecessor as night and day, a man who was more beloved
by his thrilled faculty that you can probably imagine. Joe led,
not by telling us what to do, but by inviting us to come up
with creative solutions to the problems that we faced. I don't
think I need to point out that this was one of the most important
turning points in the history of the College. Ever since then,
this faculty has known its strength, and has insisted in full
participation in the running of the College. (Incidentally,
that Liaison Committee led to the creation of our Instructors
Association, and a few years later to our Academic Senate).
Once again we outgrew our facilities there on
the Riviera, and we moved in 1959 to our present Mesa campus,
where continuing growth brought expansion to the West Campus,
and where the College continues to struggle to try to keep ahead
of still-burgeoning growth. Sam Wake, in his history of SBCC,
has pointed out the recurring theme of failing to provide sufficiently
for growth. It's certainly not for lack of trying; our recent
bond-issue defeat demonstrates that we tried, but were failed
by the voters. We're not giving up, of course - and our efforts
in the area of Web-based instruction are an innovative approach
to trying to solve the same basic problem.
I want to conclude by reaffirming
what is probably the most outstanding characteristic of this
College: its commitment to the highest standards of education.
This was true even when the faculty consisted only of part-time
teachers, long before I was hired. One example: Laura Boutilier
(now Hackett), who taught English here both before and after
my arrival, held up the highest standards for her students (and
her colleagues). Through the decades, from the middle of the
20th century to the onset of the new millennium, this commitment
to excellence in the education we faculty members offer our
students has been a shining hallmark of this institution. Many
years ago someone from outside asked me what we were trying
to do here - were we trying to be the Harvard of the West Coast?
No, I told him, he had that backward: Harvard was trying to
be the Santa Barbara Junior College of the East Coast! That's
how high our aspirations have always been - and I hope, dear
colleagues of the future, as we enter the new millennium, that
you will carry on this same worthy tradition into the 21st century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bagish, Henry H., Memories of Early Years at Santa
Barbara Junior College, 1995. (Faculty Archives - 378.1543 B145m)
Bagish, Henry H., "How Can You Know Where
You're Going If You Don't Know Where You've Been?", Faculty
Voice, Special Millenial Issue, 2000.
Cornfield, Jerry, "Learning Curves: the Rise
of SBCC from Junior College to Class Act", The Independent,
August 31, 1995.
Wake, Selmer O., A History of the Santa Barbara
Community College District: Personal Experiences and Observations,
1992. (378.1543 W147)
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