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Official History of Cal Poly
1849, a cold rainy December day, gold-rush fever running high,
a young West Point drop-out gets off a ship in San Francisco and
looks for a job. His last cent was spent getting there. All night
he sloggs through muddy streets. But the next morning a man hails
him:
"Say, boy, do you want a job?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Get up on that building and nail on those shingles. I'll give
you $8 a day."
The young man pauses.
"Mister, I never drove a nail in my life."
Someone else got the job.
The young man was Myron Angel. By the 1890s he had become a prominent
San Luis Obispo resident and chronicler of the county's history,
but he hadn't forgotten that hard lesson learned on a cold morning
in a strange city.
"I could have told the man a great deal I had learned in books,"
Angel recalled, "but nothing about building a house."
Angel was a leader in the campaign that at first aimed to establish
a state "normal" school (a teachers' training school) at San Luis
Obispo. But when that prospect dimmed, he shifted his support
to the idea of a polytechnic institute, an idea suggested by the
district's state senator, Sylvester C. Smith of Bakersfield.
Looking back to his arrival in San Francisco, Angel made an eloquent
case for a technical school, and in the same stroke articulated
the institution's future. He envisioned a school that would "teach
the hand as well as the head, so that no young man or young woman
will be sent off in the world to earn their living as poorly equipped
for the task as I when I landed in San Francisco in 1849."
In 1901 San Luis Obispo was a farm and rail community of just
over 3,000 people. What's now the Cal Poly campus was farmland
some distance north of town. The Southern Pacific Railroad had
just completed the last link in its coastal route and supported
the proposal to build a technical school as one way of increasing
business for the new line. March 8, 1990 saw the legislation founding
the California Polytechnic School signed into law after six years
of debate.
The mandate was clear: "To furnish to young people of both sexes
mental and manual training in the arts and sciences, including
agriculture, mechanics, engineering, business methods, domestic
economy, and such other branches as will fit the student for non-professional
walks of life."
Much has changed in the ensuing years, including the definition
of "professional," as Cal Poly has grown from a vocational high
school into a major university. But the essence of that original
charge is still part of state law, and Cal Poly has never lost
sight of the purpose for which it was created.
Cal Poly's style was clear from the beginning as the first day
of class demonstrated. When 15 young men and women showed up on
October 1, 1993, the main building wasn't finished. Construction
debris still littered the dormitory. But Director Leroy Anderson,
Mrs. Anderson and the students moved in, set to work and set the
example that others are still following.
As the school's director until 1908, Anderson emphasized learning
by doing and earning while learning and established once and for
all Cal Poly's hands-on approach to its polytechnic subject matter.
During its first three decades, Cal Poly evolved into the equivalent
of a junior college, and governance was transferred from a local
board of trustees to the state Board of Education. Then the Depression
hit, and hit hard. The Legislature considered abolishing the institution.
But in 1933 Cal Poly got a new start. Julian A. McPhee, chief
of the California Bureau of Agricultural Education, agreed to
become the school's president. McPhee assumed leadership of what
had been reorganized as a two-year technical college offering
instruction in agriculture and industrial fields. Enrollment had
been limited to men as of 1929.
During the next 33 years, until his retirement in 1966, McPhee
guided Cal Poly's transformation. A third year of instruction
was added in 1936, a fourth in 1940. Cal Poly's first baccalaureate
exercises were held in May 28, 1942.
During World War II, the campus was the site of a Naval Flight
Preparatory School. After the war, a wave of practical-minded
veterans using the GI Bill helped inject fresh vigor into the
college's programs. The curriculum, facilities, and enrollment
expanded rapidly.
Cal Poly's name caught up with reality in 1947, as California
State Polytechnic School became California State Polytechnic College.
In those postwar years the first graduate-level programs were
added to the curriculum, and in 1956, coeds returned to the campus.
It was in 1961 that the college became part of the newly formed
California State Colleges system (now the California State University).
The last years of McPhee's presidency also witnessed new initiatives
in acceleration of international programs. Steadily rising enrollments
reached 7,740 in 1966, McPhee's last year at the helm.
It was also in 1966 that Cal Poly's campus at Pomona, founded
in 1938 as a branch of the San Luis Obispo school, was made a
separate state college by the Legislature.
 Rapid
development continued under the 12-presidency of McPhee's successor,
Robert E. Kennedy. The college's popularity and reputation grew
as it built solid programs on the solid philosophy of its founders.
Then the Legislature recognized what the institution had become
and matched the institution's name with its reality. In 1972 California
State Polytechnic College was renamed California Polytechnic State
University.
When Cal Poly's current president, Warren J. Baker, succeeded
Kennedy in 1979, the student body had reached 16,000. The challenges
facing the university had become the challenges of broadening
and refining programs and facilities to meet the need for an ever-more-sophisticated
education in today's rapidly changing and interdependent world.
They're the kinds of challenges Cal Poly has always anticipated
and met.
Built upon earlier university strategic initiatives, the far-reaching
Cal Poly Plan developed in 1996 links new funding partnership,
enhances academic quality, and improves student and institutional
productivity in order to bring about an even more complete realization
of Cal Poly's commitment to excellence. The CSU Board of Trustees
has hailed the Cal Poly Plan, containing the university's promise
to hold itself fully accountable to students, their parents, and
taxpayers, as a model for higher education in the 21st Century.
As Cal Poly nears the end of its first century, it remains clear
in its purpose and proud of its achievements, but never satisfied
that it can't be better. It remains a continually evolving institution,
but also true to the original vision of a school to "teach the
hand as well as the head…"
And as Cal Poly rises among the ranks of major American universities,
time continues to test and prove the worth of a Cal Poly education.
Cal Poly graduates possess the knowledge and skills not just to
nail on some shingles as Myron Angel couldn't, but to step right
into careers of planning, designing, building, operating and improving
whole structures and entire communities, of managing farms and
businesses, of developing minds and expanding knowledge, of helping
to build a better life in our nation and the world.
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