After the graduates say goodbye to the campus and go on to new things, Bernadine Chuck Fong will take one last look through her office window at the Foothill College quad, then walk through the door and begin her new life.
Foothill’s president for the past 12 years loves a challenge. Fong plans to pursue some new ones when she steps down from her post sometime in midsuma date.
She has an impressive list of goals for her final semester at the school but is not at all worried that they won’t get met. “Every year, we set an ambitious agenda,” Fong said last week in her office, where she is surrounded by reminders of her love of horses and riding. “We’ll get it all done – I’ll be even more pushy,” she said with a laugh.
One project on tap is to acquire a command center with live video feed to track the next adventure of the Jason Project, deep-sea exploration off the coast of Greece. At home, Foothill will open its Chinese Heritage Room Feb. 2, the first of what Fong hopes will be many such studio-style classrooms filled with
cultural artifacts. Among the
other projects she wants to complete are the campuswide conversion to wireless Internet access and construction of the lower campus, the campus center, the water feature and the new campus entrance.
The college plans to select an interim president to serve next year while the search for a new president takes place. At the same time, the Foothill-De Anza Community College District will consider a new bond measure to complete construction that $248 million in Measure E funds were insufficient to compass.
What will Fong do when she no longer has responsibility for 18,000 students on 122 acres? She admits to having thought about being a full-time horsewoman, but she adds, “I do want to be involved.”
She plans to participate in Stanford University research projects concerning community colleges and may even start a center for educational leadership. She serves on seven boards and plans to continue on several, including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Peninsula Community Foundation. She will also remain on the advisory board for SunGard, a software company.
Technology is in her blood, or at least occasionally in her digestive system. Her father holds a patent for powdered milk that dissolves without clumping – the kind used in packaged cocoa mix. Technology is the key to one of the accomplishments Fong is proudest of: taking Foothill credit courses online in 1995, before any other community college in the state did so. The small school in Los Altos Hills is serving 90,000 students from 50 other colleges this year.
One of Fong’s favorite spots on campus is the Krause Center for Innovation, a regional technology training resource center for K-12 teachers that opened in September 2002.
“I like the building itself because it’s unique, in the round. The structure generates a sense of innovation,” she said.
Fong glowed as she told of hiring 80 percent of the full-time faculty now teaching at Foothill. “They’re absolutely inspirational,” she said. “I hired them for enthusiasm, creativity and innovation.”
With this fired-up faculty goes a new way of operating a college. “We have a very, very strong work ethic for collaboration and cooperation – and relatively little territoriality,” she said.
The college allocates resources according to how well a project aligns with the school’s mission of “educational opportunity for all with innovation and distinction.”
“I can’t tell you how much easier mission-based governance makes decisions on this campus,” she said.
The small, elegant woman rose through the ranks. She taught psychology and child development for seven years and served 17 years as a dean and as vice president before her inauguration as Foothill’s first female president in 1994.
Fong chose the end of this academic year for her departure because she wanted to “go out on a high note,” she said. Foothill has been rated No. 1 for four consecutive years among all California community colleges in the number of students successfully completing transfer and basic skills courses.
Fong was the only California community college president invited to attend the Secretaries’ U.S. University Presidents Summit on International Education. There, she discussed the government’s plan to double the number of foreign students studying in this country from 500,000 to 1 million.
Fong and Foothill have been doing their bit. In 1987, Fong founded the Campus Abroad Program, which now has campuses in Vietnam, Costa Rica, France, Spain, Italy, England and beginning this summer, China. Perhaps more important, Fong introduced a cultural diversity requirement into Foothill’s on-campus curriculum in 1989.
