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One other major thing that we did that was kind of unique is set up three foundations.
Some of the state colleges under the State Board of Education had developed desires for
independent fund expenditure for some things so they had set up the student bodies as foundations.
And they ran the bookstore and the cafeteria and some of the extracurricular activities.
We have had, at the advice of a rather distinguished person in the development field-- it was Dean
Malott, the President of Cornell, came out and suggested we set up three foundations:
one to set up the bookstore and the cafeterias, another to accept money for scholarships and
for projects that some of the faculty might develop and which should come in through a
foundation. But he said you are so carefully controlled by the department of finance, very
restrictive, that you really ought to have a third foundation, which we set up-- the
best name I could think of for it is the Cal State Associates. Neil Zeckland(?) the executive
vice-president of Kaiser Industries, and Chet Soda, the Phillips family from the uh Castro
Valley area and a number of other people helped set this up. It was an off campus foundation
where they did invite people from the college to participate but as non-voting people so
it was really not subject to review from the Department of Finance. Well, this was very
beneficial. We were able to raise some money there and also collaborate with the auxiliary
foundation for the bookstore and cafeteria and Mr. Garin, who owned the Garin Ranch which
was immediately south of the institution, was very supportive. He had some very valuable
property right next to us, 35 acres right south of Harder Road and he agreed to sell
that to us at no interest for $35000, $1000 an acre, basically out of philanthropy. This
was supposed to be used because it had a running stream that ran all year around as a biological
and botanical resource. Since it's been used, of course, it's become a residential resource
and now has residential buildings on it for student residents, but that was not its original
purpose. And I hope the stream is still running and that the science lab is still in operation.
It would be-- it probably is because there was a small building that we were able to
get some money for to do that. I'll mention another thing that that Cal State Associates
group was very beneficial in. Congressman Miller who was chairman on the Committee of
Astronautics of the Congress, was very interested in our college, his daughter married one of
our faculty. And they had some surplus computers available from the Federal Government for
sale for, I think a little over $100,000. It was what was called an IBM 1620 system
and at the time the rules of the Board of Trustees were that only San Jose State and
Los Angeles State would be allowed to purchase computers and this was for administrative
data processing for the system and everybody was supposed to be part of that data system.
We wanted computers for instructional purposes. Congressman Miller thought this was a very
good idea. He communicated with the people who had them available and he suggested that
they think very seriously about our college and our Cal State Associates foundation, which
they did. The Department of Finance, when they found out we could get this for a very
small sum and that the matching sum could be the-- a little bit of the equipment that
was provided as a part of the Science building when we were building it, allowed us to put
that up as the compensating cost to the Feds and we ended up with the first instructional
computer system where you could teach computing to the students and use it as an aid for the
faculty who wanted to use it to improve or expand on their teaching. I was always kind
of proud of this, because these two things in particular: the Garin Ranch 35 acres and
the computing equipment both came as a result of having that outside foundation.