San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Champion of state’s community colleges
After David Wolf retired from a career in higher education, he climbed into his Honda Civic and left his Santa Rosa home on a mission to visit as many community colleges as he could in a week of driving.
When he returned from this road trip, Wolf began work on his legacy — the Campaign for College Opportunity.
This advocacy group Wolf cofounded in Oakland in 2002 has grown into one of the only statewide nonprofits to focus exclusively on public higher education in the state.
A mechanical engineer by training, Wolf fixed his own cars and did what he could to fix the community college system. He was restoring a 1957 Citroen up until he died April 9 at his home in Santa Rosa. The cause of death was acute myeloid leukemia, said his wife, Ruth Wolf. He was 78.
He left behind a nonprofit with offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento and a $3 million annual budget to lobby for better learning conditions in community colleges, along with the fouryear schools in the Cal State and University of California systems, 142 campuses in all.
“David Wolf is a foundational leader in higher education in California,” said Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California Community College System in Sacramento. “He’s someone the community colleges owe a debt to for his decades of advocacy and service.”
The Campaign for College Opportunity has led to $3 billion in state budget allocations for enrollment drives and financial aid to students in the public university system and a streamlined transfer path from community colleges to fouryear universities, according to the organization.
Martha Kanter, former U.S. undersecretary of education, and now CEO of College Promise, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., called Wolf “one of the keenest minds that I have ever had the pleasure to enjoy because he saw the interconnectedness of students, pathways and barriers that he spent his career eliminating.”
For Wolf, the mission was both professional and philanthropic. Wolf served on the Sonoma County Board of Education from 2002 to 2010. In 2011, he created the Yes We Can Scholarship at Roseland University Prep, a public charter school that serves a mostly lowincome Hispanic population in Santa Rosa. The scholarship provides funding and mentoring for an average of one high school graduate per year. Scholarship winners are supported through their bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and even doctoral programs.
“Ruth and David are amazing,” said Sue Rees, principal at Roseland. “They’ve made it made it possible for students to make choices to go away to schools that they would not have otherwise have been able to afford.”
David Benjamin Wolf was born Aug. 6, 1942, in Dayton, Ohio. His father, Rabbi Alfred Wolf, got a position at the temple on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and the family moved west at the end of World War II. Wolf attended public school, graduating from Fairfax High School in 1960.
“He loved bicycles, cars and motorcycles, and he had red hair, really red hair,” said Wolf ’s wife, Ruth.
The two were classmates. Their relationship began in the seventh grade and continued at UC Berkeley. They were married in 1965, and after Wolf added a master’s in economics they both joined the Peace Corps, serving two years digging wells and planting rice in Malaysia.
Upon their return, Wolf got a job as an economist with Kaiser Aluminum in Oakland but found it unfulfilling. He left after a twoyear stint to pursue his dictorate in organization and education at Stanford University, the first and last private school he was involved with.
In 1975, while still finishing his dissertation, Wolf was hired as dean of the newly opened Los Angeles Mission College. He later became dean of Pierce College in Woodland Hills. Discouraged by all the driving and traffic in the San Fernando Valley, he took an administrative position at Santa Rosa Junior College in 1988, and they moved into a twostory house in the Woodside Hills development.
He eventually moved to the Cal State Maritime Academy in Vallejo, and was later promoted to accrediter for the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, rating schools in California, Hawaii and territories in the Pacific.
“He always, always, always put students first,” said Kanter, who worked with Wolf in her prior position as chancellor of the FoothillDeAnza Community College District. “He was an engineer at heart so he loved taking things apart and putting them back in a streamlined way to make them better.”
At the turn of the 21st century, Wolf foresaw a rush of students coming and a higher education system in California unprepared for them. That’s what motivated him to go back to work the day after he retired.
Joining him on his road trip in the Honda Civic was Steve Weiner, an old friend, who had also worked in public college accreditation. They started the Campaign for College Opportunity together.
“They were Baby Boomers who got to go to college for free,” said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity. “They believed that every Californian should get that same opportunity.”
Though the founders worked as volunteers, they had a paid staff when they opened the group in a Victorian home converted to an office in Preservation Park, Oakland. They recruited critical leaders to their cause: Bill Hauck, president of the California Business Roundtable; Antonia Hernandez, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; and David Viar, president of the California Community College League.
This team of heavyweights was able to secure foundation funding to build a statewide network to raise awareness around the crisis in state funding that was bleeding the higher education system in California.
Weiner died of stomach cancer in 2013 at age 73, but Wolf kept going and remained on the board until his death.
“His entire life he fought to ensure that more students could go to college, and in retirement he didn’t stop,” Siqueiros said. “Hundreds of thousands of students have benefited from directly from his advocacy.”
Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Ruth of Santa Rosa; sons, Ben Wolf of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Eric Wolf of White Plains, N.Y.; and brother, Dan Wolf of Glendale.
Donations in his name can be made to the Friends of Ruth and David Wolf Scholarship Fund c/o Roseland School District, 1691 Burbank Ave., Santa Rosa, CA 95407, and the Campaign for College Opportunity, 1149 S. Hill St., Suite 925, Los Angeles, CA 90015.