2: Of Death and Life

A hospital dies, a university is born.

After 61 years as a preeminent mental institution, Camarillo State Hospital closed its doors June 30, leaving behind a ghostly silence and a skeleton crew to look after the buildings where 7,000 patients once lived.

But six months after Camarillo State finally gave in to a slow death ordered by Gov. Pete Wilson in a money-saving move, the stately old campus has begun to assume its new role as a hall of higher learning.

Two weeks ago, a band of educators bent on building Ventura County’s first four-year public university moved onto the campus, plugged in their computers and went to work.

Now, if all goes well and Wilson puts the $6.5 million recommended by Cal State University trustees into his budget, this county will finally have the beginnings of a university planned for three decades.

About 1,400 students--currently sequestered at the Cal State Northridge extension in Ventura--may start the commute down to the campus at the edge of the Oxnard Plain by next January.

The new university could become a full-fledged Cal State campus--the system’s 23rd--a few years later. Officials hope for 15,000 students by 2010.

“I think we are inventing a university for the next millennium,” campus President J. Handel Evans said.