NORTHRIDGE : New CSUN Provost Overcame Obstacles

Louanne Kennedy’s new post at Cal State Northridge allows her to provide students with a college experience that mirrors her own.

“The university is not just to help people get jobs. It opens a whole world of ideas,” said Kennedy, who arrived on campus this week as CSUN’s provost and vice president of academic affairs.

“What the university did for me is make me see the world in the broadest way. . . . It’s an incredibly powerful feeling. That is what I want, for every kid to finish with that sense,” she said.

As one of Cal State Northridge’s top three administrators, Kennedy will have the last word on funding for all academic programs at the school.

Kennedy in many ways matched the profile of the typical CSUN student when she returned to college at age 27, which is the average age of CSUN students.

Her father, a coal miner in Pennsylvania, died of black lung disease when she was 11. Her family couldn’t afford to send her to college, so after a brief attempt to get a degree, she married in her early 20s.

When she finally returned to college at New York University to study sociology, she got caught up in the anti-Vietnam War movement and the women’s movement and joined a group of young Marxists.

“It seems silly now,” she said of her Marxist beliefs. “But it was useful. . . . It let me check my experience of the world against a standard that was very unpopular.”

Kennedy, the mother of two children, five stepchildren and one foster child, comes to CSUN from Kean College of New Jersey, where she was academic vice president for three years.

She said the greatest problem she must grapple with at CSUN is lack of funds. Despite that, she said she supports an incremental change in traditional courses that will help teach students how to function in a multicultural world.

“I support an environment in which all ideas might be heard,” she said. “I will not stifle voices. Even if on some level I will have difficulty listening to it.”