Conflict of Visions: The Birthing of a University

This is the story of hope and despair, heartache and triumph, told by an insider who was intimately involved in the quarter-century struggle to establish a state university in Ventura, CA. Imagine an unknown woman with no special credentials, and from another country, rallying local citizens, future students, local politicians, the news media, chambers of commerce, and various people of vision, to rise to the call of the past and the promise of the future, and to band together to establish a public university for the greater good. When she started, Joyce M. Kennedy had no idea it would take a Sisyphean struggle in a lovely California city to try to establish a public university.This is a story that had to be told - a true story of clear-versus-clouded visions, hidden agendas, egos, politics, power struggles, threats of closure, myopia, and the ups and downs of a quarter century struggle. It is a story of heartbreak, but also of ultimate vindication and triumph, the creation of a new university in Camarillo, California—CSU Channel Islands, the fastest growing university in the United States and now a "center of light, liberty and learning" as Disraeli would have described it. Conflict of Visions tells the unvarnished story of its birthing.