Karen L. Yelverton, Chief Professional Officer
Office of Governmental Affairs

November 6, 1997

Dear Colleague:

As you may be aware, the California State University has embarked on an ambitious Integrated Technology Strategy (ITS) that is intended to serve current CSU students, prepare for increasing enrollments, and maintain the state’s commitment to the Master Plan for Higher Education. ITS is designed to provide all faculty, students and staff the competitive advantage of a technology-enhanced education by providing a more complete range of technology-related services.

When the CSU initiated the planning process for this technology initiative over four years ago, we consulted extensively with faculty, students and staff. They told us that while the individual initiatives and projects were important, their basic needs for network connectivity, access to hardware, software, training and support, must be addressed first. As such, CSU focused on the building of the technology infrastructure and providing the appropriate hardware, software, training and support as the foundation of our efforts.

CSU continues to face several serious funding gaps, such as faculty and staff salaries, enrollment growth, deferred maintenance and technology investments. The CSU has placed a high priority on pursuing additional state resources to fund these items through the annual budget process. Funding for these items is critical for the CSU to maintain quality and access. Of all the CSU funding gaps, the technology gap is the only one that lends itself well to being addressed through a public/private partnership. Therefore, to the extent that the CSU can address the technology funding gap through the partnership, it can focus its available budget resources on CSU’s remaining critical needs.

We need to prepare for the information age now, not later. We also need to be realistic about the availability of state resources for CSU and all of higher education given current budget restraints and growing needs. It is clear to us that we cannot, and probably should not, rely on the State to fund the total capital and operational costs of building and supporting the baseline infrastructure that is needed to achieve the ITS goals in a timely fashion. Therefore, the CSU is pursuing a new and creative public/private partnership to secure funding outside of traditional state resources. This partnership would also offer the CSU additional expertise in developing and maintaining the technology infrastructure. This infrastructure effort has been guided by all CSU campuses represented by the Systemwide Internal Partnership (SIP).

The SIP has been charged with developing a public/private partnership to fund the university’s technology infrastructure. SIP developed a set of principles which framed the structure of the partnership (please refer to the enclosed documents for a complete accounting of the principles). Two of those principles have received a great amount of attention recently, and for your information, I would like to highlight them:

CSU staff will be retained by the CSU: The first tenet of the principles guiding the public/private partnership is that CSU staff will be retained. Further, there will be no changes made in salaries and benefits outside of the collective bargaining process. We want and need to have CSU’s current, talented personnel as a part of the team. With or without a systemwide partnership, the wide use of technology will ultimately change the nature of overall jobs and assignments. If anything, with the new partnership CSU employees will become more technically skilled to perform in an increasingly technology-driven workplace.

Faculty will continue to control the content of course curriculum and intellectual property rights will be protected: The partnership has and will continue to follow current CSU practices with respect to academic programs and governance structures. Moreover, any new CSU educational products or services created as a result of the partnership will be subject to the same approval processes employed by the individual campuses. Faculty intellectual property rights will be protected by current CSU guidelines on intellectual property. The CSU will not negotiate away any academic freedoms, choices or control of curriculum content.

As the final step in the proposal review process, the SIP representatives assessed detailed proposals from three major corporate teams and evaluated them using the following criteria:

• Cultural fit with the CSU;
• Shared vision of the future of education;
• Level of Executive commitment;
• California presence;
• Operational and financial stability of team;
• Quality of the team assembled by the partner;
• Creativity/innovation of proposed solutions;
• Match of partner capabilities to CSU needs;
• Technologies represented.

After this highly competitive process, the CSU selected one team with which to partner. The team, known as the California Education Technology Initiative (CETI), is comprised of GTE, Fujitsu, Hughes Communications and Microsoft. The team will work with the CSU to develop implementation plans in consultation with key campus constituencies, including students, faculty and staff. The team is expected to complete the frameworks agreement legally initiating the partnership by the end of December or the first of January 1998. Development of implementation plans will continue with campus consultation in the first half of 1998.

Enclosed for your information are materials that further describe the goals and objectives of CETI. If you would like a more detailed description of our initiative to use technology as a means of supporting CSU’s historical commitment to access and quality, please do not hesitate to contact me, or Marlene Garcia, Deputy Director.

Sincerely,

Karen L. Yelverton, Chief Professional Officer
Office of Governmental Affairs

KLY/alp/mlg/csg

cc: Chancellor Barry Munitz
Mr. Richard West
Dr. Thomas West
Ms. Marlene L. Garcia

Encl.:
Fact Sheet
Questions & Answers
Principles
News Articles