 Rising
to the Challenge
Paul J. Zingg reflects on his life
and career and looks forward to new opportunities at CSU, Chico
By marion harmon
Paul Zingg loves a challenge. Growing up in a racially diverse
neighborhood in New Jersey, he experienced firsthand the effects
of racial tensions on the streets and learned how, through sports
and education, he could help break down cultural barriers. In high
school, he excelled in academics as well as sports even while working
to help support his family.
Then, while on a basketball scholarship as an undergraduate, Zingg
severely broke his ankle, ending his dream of having a stellar collegiate
career. After years of training and intense focus on reaching this
goal, he suddenly found himself at a crossroads, needing to reevaluate
the direction his dreams would take. Rather than focusing on his
disappointment, he concentrated on discovering what he could accomplish,
which led him to careers as a college professor and, eventually,
top-level administrator.
Now, at 57, Zingg relishes the challenges that he faces in taking
on a university presidency. His optimism and enthusiasm for all
aspects of his new job have not waned in the eight months that he’s
been on campus. He has worked at public, private, and Ivy League
schools, most recently as provost of California Polytechnic, San
Luis Obispo. Not content to rest on his administrative laurels,
he has had a long teaching career alongside his administrative work,
and has published eight books and 100 articles on topics ranging
from American higher education to sports history.
Zingg’s latest challenge is guiding CSU, Chico through some
of the leanest budget years in its history. One thing that helps,
he says, is the attitude of the faculty and staff.
“I’m impressed by the goodwill that I feel is a genuine
characteristic of the university,” he says. “And there’s
an incredible commitment on the part of the faculty and the staff
to the students.”
A winding road
The road that Zingg traveled to get to CSU, Chico began on the
other side of the country. He was born and raised in Orange, New
Jersey, outside of Newark. He describes his childhood as challenging
in many respects, with him and his two brothers raised mostly by
his working mother. His family moved frequently, so his teachers
and friends, particularly in the sports arena, played an important
supporting role in his youth.
“My major influences were teachers and coaches and older friends,
primarily teammates who became like big brothers to me,” he
recalls. “They were all very supportive, really challenging
me to work hard. I enjoyed the challenge of being the youngest guy
on the team and yet being able to compete at a decent level with
these folks.”
Zingg attended Seton Hall Prep School, New Jersey’s oldest
Catholic college preparatory school, where he was active in academics
and athletics, and was the sports editor of their award-winning
newspaper. Mike Russo, who’s known Zingg since they were high
school freshmen, was the feature editor.
“Paul contributed much to that newspaper, and we won several
Columbia Press Association awards,” recalls Russo. “The
priest who was our moderator would always attribute the number of
merits that we got toward making a distinguished high school newspaper
in large part to Paul’s outstanding work on his section. This
made all the rest of us work harder.”
Russo, a professor of communication at Saint Mary’s College
in Moraga, California, and a Roman Catholic priest, worked with
Zingg while he was a dean at Saint Mary’s. He says that Zingg
is very much like he was in high school, gregarious and well spoken.
“During the time of the great Kennedy-Nixon debates, Paul
became the freshman class representative to the entire school in
a mock debate,” recalls Russo. “In a high school with
900 students, he was one of the four finalists. He was always a
person of outstanding speech and debate and rhetorical ability.”
After graduating from high school, Zingg was recruited to play basketball
at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. He also played baseball
and varsity golf at the college. Early in his first season there,
a badly broken ankle cut short his hopes of achieving great things
on a basketball court.
“That was a really important event because I realized that
there was more to life than sports,” says Zingg. “I’ve
come to realize that the essence of education is self-discovery.
I appreciated very early that sport was another agent of self-discovery—what
you discover about yourself under the kinds of pressure that sports
participation involves. I also learned to appreciate the different
roles and responsibilities of the members of the team. Sports helped
shape a lot of my values, helped me learn how to handle pressure
and to recognize that I loved challenge.”
Like many of his generation, Zingg was also shaped by the turbulent
atmosphere of the late 1960s. Among the most significant political
events in Zingg’s lifetime, he counts three that happened
by the time he reached his early 20s: the assassinations of John
F. and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. “I deeply
admired all three of those men,” he says. “I felt a
personal loss of heroes and terribly confused, trying to make sense
of senseless acts.”
These events spurred Zingg to become actively involved in the Civil
Rights Movement during the several years he lived in North Carolina,
Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama.
Journey through academia
Zingg says he’d always been interested in teaching, even
in high school. His college years served to solidify that interest
into a career goal. “I was inspired by faculty at every college
I attended and focused on a college teaching position fairly early,
during my undergrad years at Belmont Abbey,” he says.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in history, Zingg went
to the University of Richmond, Virginia for a master’s degree
in history and on to the University of Georgia, Athens for a doctorate
in history. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, then a professor
of international law at the University of Georgia, was one of the
co-directors of his dissertation on U.S. diplomatic relations with
several African countries.
“I was inclined initially to dislike him because of his association
with the Vietnam war, but I grew to admire him and to appreciate
the dilemmas that he faced in dealing with his own values and making
difficult choices, and the consequences of those choices,”
says Zingg.
The war in Vietnam, which prompted his graduate and scholarly work
on American diplomatic history and foreign policy, motivated him
to probe beneath the headlines.
“Vietnam, without a doubt, certainly shaped my ability to
question authority, to be skeptical about official versions of just
about anything,” he explains. “I’m not cynical,
but I am skeptical—I think those are different sides of the
same coin. Cynicism is a very negative characteristic, but I think
skepticism can be healthy, as you are constantly asking questions.
It requires a certain degree of courage, not just sitting there
on your hands accepting everything.”
After receiving his doctorate, he was invited to join the faculty
at the University of Georgia, after which he taught at a college
in Alabama for a couple of years. He says his career really began
to take shape when he was hired at the University of Pennsylvania
in 1978 as an assistant dean for admissions and advising and also
as an assistant professor in American Civilization. “That
was a great experience, not only moving up the faculty ranks, but
moving into deeper levels of administration,” notes Zingg.
Stephen P. Steinberg, who still works at Penn as deputy for academic
affairs and strategic priorities, met Zingg when they started at
Penn as assistant deans. Steinberg says they quickly became friends.
“He and I were both in positions that demanded a certain amount
of administrative ability and activity, as well as academic or scholarly
involvements, and I think part of the reason we hit it off is that
we both thrived on that mix of the practical and the more intellectual,”
says Steinberg. “That’s been one of his enduring characteristics—while
he is a scholar and historian in his own right, and has remained
very active in that over the last 25 years, he also enjoys making
institutions work better. He always thrived on the direct contact
with students, faculty, alumni, and other administrators.”
Expanding horizons
In the mid-1980s, Zingg received an internship from the American
Council on Education, described by Sheldon Hackney, Penn’s
president at the time, as “a very competitive program meant
to encourage and prepare promising academic administrators.”
Hackney served as Zingg’s mentor in the program.
“He spent the next year as assistant to the president at Penn,
a job title that disguises a thousand chores both routine and delicately
important,” says Hackney. “I got to know him very well
that year, and I came to respect his judgment and his ability to
work with people of all ages and inclinations. As my liaison to
individual faculty members and to groups of faculty of one kind
or another, he was enormously successful. He was so pleasant and
low key that one did not notice that he understood the policy issues
and the campus politics with unerring accuracy.”
At the end of the year’s internship, Hackney hired Zingg as
his assistant, a position he filled along with being an associate
professor for several years, until he moved to California. Zingg
moved because his wife, Candace Slater, whom he had met at an orientation
meeting for new faculty at Penn, had an opportunity to take a faculty
position at UC Berkeley. Zingg was then offered the position of
dean of the School of Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s College.
Tom Brown, a higher education consultant who was a dean at St. Mary’s
when Zingg joined the college, worked on several projects with him,
including academic advising and student support programs. The president
of the college also asked them to co-chair a task force on diversity.
“To Paul’s credit, he took a very strong stand, with
support of the faculty, with regard to that plan, which was initially
tabled,” says Brown. “It was because of Paul that, when
the new academic vice president came in, he and Paul worked to bring
it off the table. It led to the college securing a significant grant
from the Irvine Foundation that continues to this day.”
The resulting report made more than 60 major recommendations, nearly
all of which were eventually implemented. It was praised by the
Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation team and
by American Council on Education Fellow Roberto Haro as a blueprint
for private colleges and universities in the area of diversity,
says Brown.
Zingg’s background and interest in the history of sports led
him to study race relations. “He’s one of the very few
academics who’s actually traced how basketball and football,
and most sports, have enhanced the contact between minorities and
the white population,” notes Russo. “We grew up at a
very difficult time; in 1967 there were race riots in Newark, ones
that came very close to our homes. It marked us in a very deep way.
Whether we liked it or not, because we lived in that area of New
Jersey, we were in the Civil Rights Movement.”
After being at St. Mary’s for seven years, Zingg was offered
the position of dean of liberal arts at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo,
and two years later became provost and vice president for academic
affairs, a position he held for nine years. He continued to teach
as he had at St. Mary’s, and he hopes to teach at CSU, Chico
in the near future.
“I think both teaching and continuing to do my own scholarly
research are vitally important to staying connected with what matters—teaching
and learning,” says Zingg. “In some respects everything
I do hearkens back to that foundation, because even as an administrator,
a lot of what I do is some form of teaching, some form of learning.
Whether I’m working with other administrators or faculty or
students or staff, it’s about the interaction between people
and ideas that occurs.”
Russo says that one of Zingg’s strengths is his commitment
to making meaningful progress in a realistic amount of time. “He’ll
take a place like Chico and value it for what it is, and know that
he can, with the cooperation of others and a lot of good intentions,
bring it to the next level,” says Russo. “He’s
done that at every institution he’s been at, including St.
Mary’s College, where hands down, he was the best dean we
ever had.”
Extracurricular activities
While Zingg has a busy professional life and has many good friends
around the world, he also enjoys some downtime, often spent walking
his yellow Labradors Watson and Annie, playing golf, and writing.
“I like quiet times,” notes Zingg. “I think that’s
one of the reasons why I like golf so much, because it is basically
an individual activity. I’m able to put distance between what
goes on in the office and what’s taking place on the 16th
green at Bidwell Park Golf Course.”
Zingg’s practice of sports continues to this day. His love
of golf has taken him as far as Scotland and Ireland, and has inspired
him to write the books A Good Round and In Search of
the Golf Gods: An Irish Journey. A Good Round chronicles a
journey in the 1990s that took him to the Esalen retreat in California,
the great courses of Scotland, and back home to Pennsylvania’s
Merion Golf Club. The trip challenged him physically, intellectually,
and spiritually.
“I’m always looking to expand my own space through the
ability to connect various experiences,” says Zingg. “It’s
another way of being engaged with both golf as well as the places
where the game is played.”
Among other books he’s written that combine his passion for
sports and history is the co-authored Runs, Hits, and an Era:
The Pacific Coast League, 1903–58, which tells the story
of the old Pacific Coast League and focuses on the contributions
of baseball to local and regional identity and pride. In Harry
Hooper: An American Baseball Life, a biography of Baseball
Hall of Fame member Harry Hooper, Zingg explains how professional
baseball became a legitimate career choice for players and a popular
form of entertainment in the early 20th century.
A new path
Zingg and Slater, who’ve been married 24 years, have relocated
to Chico. Slater, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and director
of the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, commutes
to the Bay Area during the week. They say they are enjoying Chico
and appreciate its historical and geographical richness.
Among the areas Zingg will be devoting particular attention to at
CSU, Chico is bringing more resources to the university, strengthening
its regional identity and service, and improving the quality of
teaching and learning. He also will focus on creating a more diverse
campus community and finding distinction for the university regarding
environmental issues.
Having enjoyed a long and distinguished career and many scholarly
achievements, Zingg says he greatly appreciates the opportunities
that he’s had and feels a keen responsibility to his mentors.
When asked what is most important to him, Zingg replies: “Doing
good and being kind. What I enjoy doing the most is enabling something
good to happen to other people. That’s fundamentally what
a teacher does. And doing so not only from knowing my discipline,
but having qualities like compassion and kindness and enthusiasm
that help one lead by example."
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