California’s State University: A Leadership Perspective

Abstract

Editor’s Introduction: Dr. Timothy P. White has served as chancellor of the California State University (CSU) system since late 2012. As chancellor, he oversees 23 campuses, over 460,000 students, and 47,000 faculty and staff. The CSU spans the entire state of California and has an an-nual budget of more than $5 billion. It is one of the most diverse and most affordable university systems in the country. In June 2015, members of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Transformative Leadership and Policy Studies (JTLPS) met with Chancellor White in Long Beach, California to engage on issues surrounding leadership, policy and transformational change across the largest four-year system of higher education in the United States. This reflective essay was culled from a transcribed inter-view and themed around six major areas: institutional vision, leadership, future of the California State Univer-sity system, facilitating system level change, the CSU as a state-wide system with local flavors, and legacy fore-sight. The title to this reflective essay came from Chancel-lor’s White interview as he asserted that the official name of the university was California State University and that in a sense the apostrophe “s” as a possessive would ide-ally reflect that the system is California’s state university.