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...