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Four Kern County leaders to receive honorary doctorates

Highest honor in CSU system to be conferred during spring commencement

By California State University, Bakersfield

April 25^th, 2025

California State University, Bakersfield will confer the highest honor in the CSU system upon four Kern County leaders who have devoted their lives to creating opportunities for generations of Californians, including students, farmworkers, immigrants and rural residents.

Business executive and philanthropist Morgan E. Clayton, social entrepreneur Paul F. Chavez, rural America advocate and Sikh leader Gurcharan S. Dhillon and attorney and philanthropist H. Dennis Beaver will receive honorary doctoral degrees at the university’s 2025 spring commencement ceremonies in May.

“When I consider the lives of the four extraordinary recipients of this honor, I am reminded of the phrase, ‘Never forget where you came from,’” said President Vernon B. Harper Jr. “Though each of these great men achieved stunning success in their fields, they have remained true to the lessons of their upbringing, sharing their light as far as it would reach. They are true humanitarians, and we are humbled to honor their life’s work.”

Four Kern County leaders to receive honorary doctorates

Morgan E. Clayton

When Clayton got the call from President Harper that the CSU Board of Trustees had voted to confer an honorary degree upon a man who had never had the opportunity to pursue his dream of a college education, he was overwhelmed with gratitude.

“I’ve always shared with youth that if you have a choice to go to the school of hard knocks or get a good education, please go to college," he said. "So when I got that call from Dr. Harper, I was speechless. I was not expecting it. I paused 24 hours to tell my wife. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to call back and say he’d made a mistake!”

Clayton will receive the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters for his decades of service to the community, particularly the nearly 80,000 students who have participated in Leaders in Life, a conference “for teens by teens.” He launched the organization 25 years ago after a conversation with former Secretary of State Colin Powell at a local business conference.

“He said that America’s promise is investing in our youth, and that’s how I came up with Leaders in Life Youth Conference,” Clayton said. “Most organizations for youth are run by adults, but I wanted for this youth conference to be for youth and led by youth to address the concerns they’re facing and allow them to network with their peers and advance through education to careers.”

Clayton was not afforded that opportunity himself. After being separated from both of his parents as a teen and living on his own with one of his brothers as a student at Bakersfield High School, he supported himself with a $1.35-an-hour job at Clark’s Broiler on Fifth Street and Chester Avenue.

“I learned the basics of how to take care of myself there and got free meals, thanks to Don and Orelie Clark," he said. "I met a guy named Al Hass who was the vice president of sales at B&H Alarm Company and one day he said to me, ‘You don’t seem like a kid who should be in a place like this.’ And I said, ‘I can’t afford to be anywhere else.’”

Hass saw a keen intelligence in Clayton and asked if he had any technical aptitude. When Clayton said he did and proved it by taking apart a radio and putting it back together, Hass offered him a job at his company for $10 an hour.

From there, Clayton learned the ropes of the security business and in 1982, he founded Tel-Tec Security Systems, which services more than 20,000 customers in the Central Valley.

Clayton, 69, and his wife, Gloria, sent all three of their children — Kevin, Tasha and Tyson — to college and even contributed to the education funds for their grandchildren, which is why a recent question from his two older grandchildren stopped him in his tracks.

“They said, ‘Grandpa, you were really successful without going to college.’ And I said, ‘Whoa. If you think you can follow my path, think again. Your mom and dad were there to help you. I had me. I had your grandma. You have to understand that you came first in this family,'" he said. "What this award was able to help me show my grandkids is that it took me a lifetime of my own personal hard work and study to get to where I am. They don’t need to struggle that hard. My grandkids and all the young people in this community can do anything they want through the power of education. What this award did for me is it broke the mold to explain that everything is possible.”

Paul Chavez

When your father is Cesar Chavez, initiation into the Chicano civil rights movement occurs at birth. But at every point thereafter, Paul F. Chavez made a conscious choice to use his voice and the skills he learned from one of the most revered social justice leaders of the 20th century to help the abused and under-represented.

And now, Chavez will join his father as a recipient of the CSU’s honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (Cesar Chavez earned the honor in 2023).

“Of course I’m honored,” he said. “My father was given an honorary doctorate at Arizona State University, the state of his birth, but Kern County has been our home. So the fact that the CSU has awarded my father and myself this wonderful honor where we spent our lives trying to make change is so gratifying.”

When Chavez was in kindergarten, his father made the fateful decision to move the family to Delano, where he co-founded the labor movement that became the United Farm Workers. During Chavez’s sophomore year in high school, the family moved to Keene, which became the headquarters of the UFW. Chavez finished high school in Tehachapi and planned to follow his older brother to college to study law until he got some advice from the union’s general counsel.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you go work with your father and learn how organizations are run? You can always hire attorneys like me," Chavez said. "I remember going to my father and telling him I wasn’t going to college and was going to work with him in the movement. I thought I would be sent out on strike or to lead a boycott, and he promptly put me in the print shop.”

Though not the front lines, the print shop provided Chavez with a useful skill and an invaluable education in the movement.

“I applied myself, so I learned about the work of the organization,” he said. “We printed the constitution, and I began to learn about the work we were doing and the hopes and aspirations of the workers.”

From the print shop, Chavez worked in just about every operation of the organization, including his father’s office, collective bargaining, boycotts, lobbying efforts and legislative action. And then in 1991, Cesar Chavez had one last assignment for his son: To give the movement’s nonprofit organization “a reason for existing.” That organization is now the Cesar Chavez Foundation, and Chavez still serves as chairman of the board after retiring as president last year.

“I remember my father saying it would be such a shame if his work ended with his life,” Chavez said. “One of the things I’m proudest of is his work has continued and grown with the Chavez Foundation’s social enterprise supporting working families by inspiring and transforming communities throughout the Southwest and across generations.”

Chavez, 68, remains busy with the movement and as a patriarch to his children Anthony and Lisa Chavez; Fernando Chavez; Daniella and Juan Mendez; and his son Andres, who is about to give his father a new daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Sanchez. But the role of tata to his granddaughter, Penelope, is his favorite of all.

Decades after the movement was born in Delano, Chavez sees the legacy of his father everywhere he looks.

“I recently spoke to a resource group of Latino employees at Bank of America who came from farmworker and immigrant backgrounds. All I could think of is my dad would be so proud," he said. "He built this movement so that the children of farmworkers could do anything, including working in a bank, no matter who their parents were, what language they spoke or what their dreams were.”

Gurcharan S. Dhillon

Growing up on a farm in Punjab, India, is not so different from a life in the fields of the Central Valley, according to Dhillon. As a boy, he would rise with the sun and work all day, and when it was time to enroll in college, he didn’t think twice about what he would study.

“All my life, I have worked in agriculture,” he said.

But there is one major difference between farming in India and his adopted country: the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), where he worked for most of his career and was the first Sikh ever appointed as regional director for the agency.

“In India, they don’t have anything like the USDA,” said the 82-year-old grower. “Families work at the farm and barely make a living. For them to afford to send their children to school is a problem.”

Dhillon never forgot the harsh realities of his rural upbringing, even when he came to the U.S. more than five decades ago to study at the invitation of a professor he met in India. He also took those memories with him to his career in the USDA, where he helped underrepresented growers get their start, brought much-needed money and resources to rural areas of the state, and reportedly approved the nation’s first farm ownership loan for a woman.

“I never, ever hesitated to go to anybody’s house to talk to them and sit down and try to figure out their problems and how we could help,” Dhillon said. “I tried to make a difference in the quality of life of rural people. We helped with housing, drinking water, sewage systems, health care, libraries and other community facilities.”

Dhillon will receive the Doctor of Humane Letters for his service to rural Californians and for his leadership in the local Sikh community,

“This country has given me so much,” he said.

After graduating with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agronomy, Dhillon had intended to remain in his native country. But then he met an American professor on assignment in India during the Green Revolution, when scientists worked to expand crop yields to address world hunger. He decided to accept an invitation to study at UC Riverside, where he met his future wife, Nancy, also a plant scientist, and earned his second master’s degree.

As an agronomist at the university, he helped establish the plant breeding program for jojoba. In 1979, after several years in research and academia, he accepted his first position with the USDA, serving El Centro in the Imperial Valley before reassignment to the Central Valley in 1982.

“When the people in El Centro heard I was being transferred, they had a party at Brawley Park for me with mariachi and food,” he said. “They invited everyone to come see me off. It was very emotional for me that I was making a difference.”

Dhillon also invested his time and leadership into the local Sikh community, having founded the first Gurdwara, or house of worship, in the Delano area at his farm equipment barn more than 40 years ago. In 1992, the Sikh Center of Southern San Joaquin Valley was established in Bakersfield under Dhillon’s leadership, eventually merging with the Guru Nanak Mission of Bakersfield.

“The idea was that the merger of two corporations would be in the best interest of the Sikh community to conserve its limited resources and provide religious, social and cultural services to its constituents efficiently and cost-effectively,” Dhillon said. “The merger was completed in July 2007 under the name of Guru Nanak Mission Sikh Center in south Bakersfield and recently celebrated the completion of its main prayer hall.”

Dhillon retired from the USDA in 2008 but remains active in agriculture, growing 160 acres of almonds and 160 acres of pistachios with his brother. Two years ago, he established an endowment to support rural agricultural students in Punjab and is considering launching a similar program in the United States.

“A human being is a human being. I see need there but I also see need here. This is the country I adopted of my freewill,” he said.

Dennis Beaver

Beaver still recalls being teased by his high school classmates because “he couldn’t speak a word of French” and the beautiful teacher from Switzerland who helped him learn the language.

“’We are not going to read,'” Beaver said, imitating his teacher’s heavy French accent. "‘We are not going to write. We are going to speak French.’ Class met every day. Every day I was hearing French.”

Each student was assigned to give a speech, and when the teacher announced Beaver’s upcoming slot, “Everyone was laughing. ‘Beaver, speak French? Are you kidding?’

“But the night before, I woke up at 2 o’clock in the morning. I had been dreaming in French. So the next day, I got up in front of the class. Everyone was giggling. Who knows what I talked about, but my classmates were all bug-eyed! My teacher said, ‘Mr. Beaver, you sound like a guy from Paris. What happened to you?’”

In that moment, a lifelong love for languages was born. “If I could hear it, I could speak it,” Beaver said. “That’s what happened.”

He has made it his mission to share that passion for language with scores of high school, university and law students, funding travel, primarily to France and Sweden, in cultural enrichment opportunities through the Dennis and Anne Beaver Foundation.

Beaver, an attorney and legal advice columnist for Kiplinger.com and several California newspapers, will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at CSUB’s spring commencement ceremonies.

“I’m very appreciative,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ve done that’s so exceptional. My wife and I are very private people. We do this because it’s the right thing to do.”

After graduating from high school, Beaver attended Los Angeles Valley College, taking every French course available, before transferring to Cal State Northridge, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in speech/communications with a minor in French. After Northridge, he attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

On the strength of his native-level fluency in French, the Central Intelligence Agency attempted to recruit Beaver, but he made a decision that would set the course of his professional life and bring him to Bakersfield. In 1973, he joined the Kern County District Attorney’s Office, where he founded the first consumer protection department.

“It was a great place to work, preparing me well for the day I started my own practice in general litigation, personal injury and divorce,” he said.

Beaver and his wife, Anne, a paralegal in his practice, realized quickly that “especially handling personal injury cases, lawyers are often grossly over-compensated for our social value,” he said. “We knew we had to do something with this money to benefit others.”

In their home, Beaver’s love of language carried over into the raising of their son, Ian.

“I wanted my wife to speak to our son only in Cantonese when they were together, so that he would have the language, culture and a wonderful relationship with his grandparents and other family members in Hong Kong, and she was happy to agree," he said. “There is evidence that speaking a tonal language, such as Chinese, facilitates learning other languages with an ability to mimic accents. Ian can pass for a French native."

Since that fateful day 60 years ago when he got up and nailed his foreign language assignment to the disbelief of his classmates, Beaver has mastered Swedish and conducted public speaking seminars in Sweden, in Swedish. He still has the ability to dream in both French and Swedish on command.

“Language has been a gift, and our foundation is a way of saying thank you to that year in high school, Sylvie Walker, my French teacher and ultimately all French teachers,” Beaver said.