CSUN University News Clippings

Commentary: University’s anguished president seeks answers

(October 23, 2009)

By Marcos Breton

As president of Sacramento State, Alexander Gonzalez is known as an occasionally combative man with eyebrows that furrow like crossed swords.

On Thursday, the day after one of his students allegedly killed another with a baseball bat, Gonzalez’s eyes glistened with tears.

Questions about the beating death of 23-year-old Scott Hawkins turned Gonzalez’s stern expression into one of pained vulnerability. The father in him grimaced as he considered the anguish of the Hawkins family.

A campus community looks to Gonzalez for answers he doesn’t have. He is deploying grief counselors around campus when he could probably use one himself.

In more than 30 years in academia, “I’ve gone through student deaths before, but nothing as brutal as this,” Gonzalez said.

“I’m a trained psychologist. People want to know why. We don’t have an answer.”

For hours after campus police reported an incident in the gleaming new American River Courtyard complex of student housing, Gonzalez and his administration didn’t know whether the two young men involved were students. At the same time, local media were carrying live images from Sac State and clamoring for information that hadn’t been confirmed.

This is the reality of breaking news in the age of instant information – the facts can trail far behind the tweets and texts and videos.

“What are we going to tell them?” Gonzalez said in response to critics that his campus was too slow in alerting students Wednesday. “There was no threat to (other students). The police had responded and acted. It was about information we didn’t have.”

Because Sacramento State officers fired on the suspect after responding to a 911 call, Sacramento police took the lead in locking down the crime scene, Gonzalez said. It was about 90 minutes before he was informed someone had died.

A few more hours elapsed before he learned the victim and the accused were his students – that they lived together in a dormitory suite where five students have their own rooms but share two bathrooms and a common area for studying and socializing.

The new dorms are part of a vision Gonzalez has for remaking the Sac State campus. They increased the on-campus population and are designed to make a commuter college feel more like a community.

“I feel comfortable we did the best we could under the circumstances,” Gonzalez said. “But as president I take personal responsibility for everything. I feel responsible for the safety of our students.”

So what now? Universities are where problems are supposed to be solved, where information leads to enlightenment.

Gonzalez has advanced degrees and decades in management, but the university president can’t make this right, can’t make it go away. All he can really do is offer support and help a campus grieve.

Publication: Sacramento Bee