When Dianne Van Hook officially became chancellor of College of the Canyons on July 1, 1988, she became just the fourth leader of the college and the first woman to hold that role.
At the time, the Santa Clarita Valley’s higher educational institute was colloquially known by a different name.
“We were called College of the Crayons,” said Joe Gerda, a longtime faculty member and administrator at the college.
Gerda had been at the college for about a year and a half before Van Hook came along. He said when she started, she “immediately said, ‘We have a vision.’”
“Now, the faculty and staff didn’t really completely understand that vision, because we didn’t have that vision,” Gerda said.
Van Hook spent the next 36 years of her life making that vision a reality, building up COC into what some have called the crown jewel of the California Community College system. But more than that, Gerda said, she helped break down barriers for students in the SCV and across the state of California.
Serving the SCV
In a phone interview on Thursday, Van Hook said she was hired in 1988 to get more funding for buildings, to develop partnerships with corporations and nonprofits across the SCV and to build a team to help the college thrive.
“That’s why I applied for the job, because those are the things that I like to do and those are the things that I, at that time, had experience and some success at,” Van Hook said. “And those are the things that I’ve worked to do for the last 36 years.”
One of the things Van Hook said she is most proud of is getting the funding for the University Center that bears her name. She said it took eight years, but after awarding roughly 4,300 degrees to students through partnerships with other institutions, it was worth it all.
“That’s 4,300 people that might not have had a chance to get a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree or a teaching credential if they had had to leave the valley to do that,” Van Hook said. “And I think that the University Center, bringing access to higher education beyond an AA degree to the Santa Clarita Valley was something that I wanted and started to talk about doing when I first came to the Santa Clarita Valley.”
Along with the University Center, Van Hook has also overseen further expansion of the college’s Valencia campus and the addition of a Canyon Country campus, giving COC nearly a million square feet of space in the SCV.
She said she was drawn to the area from the first time she applied for the position of COC president — it took three tries for her to finally get hired — but that it was good timing in 1988 with the city of Santa Clarita incorporating the year before.
In talking with the leaders of the city and the business and nonprofit leaders across the SCV, Van Hook said it was clear that people were excited about what could lie ahead.
“They wanted to be part of creating something that would unleash possibilities, and that’s really exciting,” Van Hook said. “I mean, if you look at how we put the Culinary Institute together, that was another example of that, or how we work with the (William S. Hart Union High School District) to get funding for Academy of the Canyons, that was a part of that.”
According to Mike Berger, a longtime member of the COC Foundation board and a 13-year member of the Santa Clarita Community College District board of trustees, which oversees COC, Van Hook’s main focus was on student success.
“This was all driven by her strategic plan on an annual basis,” Berger said.
Part of that strategic plan was adding new programs as the world evolved. Trade programs to help local businesses became one of her focuses in the latter years of her tenure, Berger said.
“We’ve seen the enrollments at colleges throughout the United States decline,” Berger said. “But what we see here is Dianne saw, again, the vision and the future is going to be trade jobs and work. So she developed this workforce development program that has customized training for all these corporations up here in Santa Clarita Valley. In my last year in 2022, the (program) served 1,791 employers serving over 4,300 employees, teaching them, educating them, training them to move on.”
Van Hook said she’s proud of everything she’s done for the college, but that it was inspiring others to get things done that she will remember the most.
“Most people don’t see in themselves the potential that really lies within,” Van Hook said, “and so if that potential can be ignited or unleashed by another human being or by things that end up being in place, then, isn’t that a cool thing? Now, you’re not just making a difference in that one person’s life, but when you touch the life of someone else, you touch the lives that they touch.”
Serving the state
Beyond helping the people of the SCV, Gerda said Van Hook helped to reform the California Community College system to make it easier for students to get the education they wanted, not just what the state was mandating at the time.
Gerda used Assembly Bill 705 as an example of Van Hook lobbying the state to break down barriers for students. That bill, authored by Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, and signed into law in 2017, requires community colleges to consider high school data as the predictor for college-level coursework for all students.
“We were putting students in elementary algebra or intermediate algebra — that path killed students,” Gerda said.
Instead, Gerda said, students could go straight into statistics or some other higher-level course that would benefit them more than relearning what they should have learned in high school. That led to a more data-driven approach to help students move on from COC and other community colleges as those students could then take the courses they actually needed.
“Dianne was way ahead of the curve on that,” Gerda said.
Berger mentioned how Van Hook would lead task forces that the state chancellor would create.
“And so many times, her influence on the other colleges and her advocacy with the people that she knows so well up in Sacramento made differences in a lot of new policy,” Berger said.
The COVID-19 pandemic affected educational institutions across the country, but Van Hook didn’t want it to affect any students wanting to move on, Gerda said. That included those in the nursing program who weren’t allowed to do their practical work due to hospitals closing their doors to anyone not directly affiliated with the hospital.
To combat that, Van Hook lobbied for the threshold of virtual work to be raised from 25% to 50%, Gerda said, thereby allowing for students in the nursing program to get their certificates without any delay.
Gerda said the Board of Registered Nurses denied that twice, but once Van Hook was on board, it got approved.
“Before we know it, the governor has called the Board of Registered Nurses and they changed the rule,” Gerda said. “That’s what longevity does and knowing the players.”
Serving people
Van Hook said she doesn’t know what her future will hold, only that it will have something to do with people.
“I like being around people. I like ideas,” Van Hook said. “I like up coming up with solutions. I like coming up with dreams and going forward and building them.”
After 52 years of being in public education, Van Hook now has the time do more of the things that she enjoyed doing when away from COC, such as hiking and photography.
And while she isn’t in charge of a college or anyone in particular, she said she believes that people should work toward doing things in life that makes them happy, as she did serving the people of the SCV and COC for 36 years.
“You have the ability to choose — every decision that you make, every choice that you make, makes you,” Van Hook said. “I really believe that people need to choose and get ready and pursue those things that they’re passionate about. And if they do that, and if they are able to work around good people, then they will have full lives.”
