Lawyer Framroze Virjee has been appointed as president of California State University at Fullerton, the university’s board of trustees have announced.
Virjee, the son of an Indian father and Swedish mother, has served as campus president under a term appointment since December 2017 and will assume the permanent presidency immediately, the university said in a news release.
As president of CSU, Fullerton, the largest institution in the California State University system, serving more than 40,000 students with an operating budget of almost half a billion dollars Virjee will provide leadership for over 4,000 educators within an inclusive shared governance environment, overseeing all aspects of the University’s operations - from academic and administrative to finance and technology - in close collaboration with faculty, staff, students and alumni.
“I am thrilled at the opportunity to continue working alongside the tremendously talented faculty, staff and administrators to further the great work enabling student achievement and degree completion that we’ve started, and to chart the path forward for CSUF,” he said.
Virjee’s social philosophy was largely molded early on when he spent the first six years of his life traveling around the world on a ship captained by his father.
“My parents read the international papers. As a result of who my parents were, I grew up believing very strongly in social justice, social mobility and civil rights. We knew about the world,” he was quoted as saying in newsreports.
Virjee and his wife, Julie, are co-founders of Yambi Rwanda, a non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of Rwandans through the sustained provision of basic human needs — clean water, adequate nutrition, and healthcare — along with equitable access to quality education and the celebration of Rwanda’s culture and arts. Virjee and Julie have three sons — Braunson, Cameron, and Connor — and recently welcomed their first grandchild into the world.
A first-generation college student, Virjee received his J.D. (cum laude) from the University of California, Hasting College of Law in 1985; and his bachelor of arts degree (summa cum laude) in political science and sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982.
