22—
The Club of Nine

The chancellors of the nine UC campuses are a diverse and uncommon lot. An exclusive club, all male in my time, they are bonded by their common problems and by a common concern (genuine but not disinterested) for the welfare of the university. Yet they are necessarily separated by their inherent loyalties and obligations to their individual, competing institutions. All able, selected with care, they have diverse talents, personalities, and experiences. With many tasks in common, they also face dissimilar circumstances and opportunities, with varied degrees of success. Collectively, they illuminate the virtues and flaws of the finest system of public higher education in the nation.

The two oldest and largest campuses, Berkeley and Los Angeles, dominate the system. Together, for most of my tenure as chancellor, they comprised roughly half of the UC system and well over half of its resources. Their chancellors tended to dominate our meetings. It soon became evident that, while they could not always obtain what they wanted, nothing could be adopted over their opposition. While, of course, nominally subordinate to the president, the chancellors of Berkeley and Los Angeles had their own constituencies—large alumni bodies, large faculties, major sources of gift funds, direct relations with the many regents in the Bay Area and Los Angeles respectively. The president, while definitely not their captive, would not readily or often pursue actions directly counter to the desires of the Berkeley or Los Angeles chancellors.

When I became chancellor at Santa Cruz, Albert Bowker, a statisti-

cian, was the chancellor at Berkeley. Earlier, he had been dean of graduate studies at Stanford and then chancellor at the City College of New York. A quiet, bulky man, he often sat Buddha-like at chancellors' meetings "playing his cards close to his chest," presenting quietly but firmly his opinion after most of the others had spoken. He defended the Berkeley interests well. Berkeley had for many years been the University of California and it still retains that self-perception.

In 1980, Bowker resigned to become assistant secretary for post-secondary education in the Department of Education in Washington. He was succeeded by Ira Michael Heyman, a law professor who had been provost under Bowker. The search for Bowker's successor had been flawed by failures of confidentiality and it was well known that the leading candidate had withdrawn at the last minute because of "leaks." Michael thus came into office with this slight handicap, but it did not hold him back. A tall, sturdy man of liberal persuasions, Heyman was well acquainted with the problems of Berkeley and set about to remedy them. Perceiving biology as the field in which Berkeley should establish its preeminence in the succeeding decades, as it had in physics in the mid-twentieth century, he undertook a complete campus reorganization of the fractured biology program and diverted resources in that direction.

As the most popular of the UC campuses, Berkeley was overwhelmed with freshman applicants. At the same time, because of attrition in the freshman and sophomore years, it had excess capacity at the junior and senior levels. In the years of underenrollment at Santa Cruz, I made an arrangement, with Heyman that Berkeley would refer a number of freshman applicants, who were eligible for admission but whom Berkeley could not accept, to Santa Cruz with the commitment that if they did well at Santa Cruz for two years they could then transfer to Berkeley with automatic acceptance. For five years, this program sent about two hundred freshmen to Santa Cruz. Interestingly, after the two years at Santa Cruz, about half chose to remain.

Chuck Young, the perennial chancellor at Los Angeles (in his twenty-fifth year at this writing) is also quite tall and vigorous, a former football player at Riverside. Never a real scholar, Chuck is gregarious, a superb fund-raiser with the community and alumni, an enthusiastic promoter of athletics, and a good manager. Wisely, he has appointed able vice-chancellors who have handled most of the academic affairs. Tapping the immense resources of Los Angeles and especially the wealth of adjacent communities such as Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Brentwood, UCLA has

grown mightily under Young's stewardship. Ever resentful of Berkeley's primacy and scholarly eminence in the UC system, UCLA has made little secret of its desire for relative independence from the strictures of the system. If it could somehow be given its state funding unfettered, UCLA would like simply to go its own way—and it could.

By virtue of the stature of their campuses and their own physical stature, Heyman and Young invariably played major roles at the meetings of the council of chancellors.

The other chancellors each had distinctive personalities. Chancellors tend to emphasize one or a few facets of their multifaceted task. Academic leadership and planning, campus management, fund-raising, UC system (and campus) policy determination and politics, community and alumni relations, participation in the national scene within academia or within their professions—all are appropriate and necessary functions. Priorities may vary in relation to the maturity of the campus and the opportunities and importunities of the time, and each chancellor is inclined to favor one or another depending on his or her particular interests and talents.

In one important respect, scientists may not make good chancellors. They can be objective and they have the integrity essential to cope with an unfeeling nature. But as problem solvers they tend naturally to focus on the substance of an issue, to devise and analyze various options for dealing with it, and to decide on the most effective. However, substance is often not the heart of the issue. The issue may be primarily symbolic or, to the participants, procedure may be more important than outcome. Both concepts are foreign to the scientist, who deals with concrete, not symbolic problems, and for whom niceties of procedure are unimportant—"whatever works!" In this realm the skills of the lawyer and the politician are often the most relevant. Scientists can, of course, learn to think in political and symbolic terms; once properly formulated, the skills of problem solving are quite applicable in these domains. But scientists may well find such arenas and tactics uncongenial.

Jim Meyer, the chancellor at Davis, exemplified emphasis on one facet—management. With limited interest in academic questions, he delighted in the details of management structure and function, seeking economy and effectiveness. In an organization as large and bureaucratic as UC, such talents were valuable, but they did not arouse great enthusiasm on his campus.

Francis Sooy and his successor Julius Krevans were the chancellors at UC San Francisco during my tenure. UC San Francisco is a special-

ized campus focusing on medicine and associated fields. Both Sooy and Krevans were distinguished physician-researchers skilled in the politics within the medical profession. Both had high standards and should be given much credit for the development of that campus into a research and teaching institution at the very top level of U.S. medicine.

Bob Huttenback, the chancellor at Santa Barbara, was a longtime colleague. An historian, he also had been a division chairman (of humanities and social science) at Caltech and went to Santa Barbara shortly after I went to Santa Cruz. Huttenback was bright, overconfident, and fond of good food, with a strong personality and a streak of vanity. He had high standards, and at Santa Barbara he had to implement some difficult renewals. A former teachers' college that had earlier been converted into a UC campus, Santa Barbara had had areas of difficulty in its emergence from its less distinguished origins. Bob attacked these problems forcefully, bruising egos in the process. He set about to improve particularly the physical sciences and engineering and boosted these into national stature. However, he also tended toward grandiose projects of marginal academic importance such as a joint ecological project with the city government of Venice, Italy, and a projected Food and Wine Institute on the campus.

The wives of chancellors can play an important if unheralded role in their success or failure. Huttenback's wife, Freda, played a minimal role on campus. At her insistence, the Huttenbacks moved out of the university-provided chancellor's residence on campus to a private house in an elegant part of Santa Barbara. This latter proved to be Huttenback's undoing. Over the years, over two hundred thousand dollars of university funds (above and beyond a housing allowance) were spent to renovate, maintain, and adorn the Huttenbacks' private residence. When this became known, his enemies, who had been awaiting an opportunity, struck. He was obliged to resign, brought to trial for "embezzlement" of public funds, and convicted.

This was a tragedy of folly. I am convinced Huttenback had no criminal intent and had someone pointed out that this use of funds could be construed as "embezzlement," he would have been stunned. Folly, yes; criminality, no. And a sad outcome, for in truth he did many good deeds for UC Santa Barbara and surely improved its status and prestige.

The chancellorship is a very public position I came to realize this early on from casual comments about my personal actions. And the chancellor, as the one who makes the really difficult decisions, is bound to create unhappiness, even enmity. For this reason I consistently

"leaned over backward" to avoid any interpretation of impropriety. The chancellor's role inevitably engenders ambiguities and gray areas of proper allocation, but if a question arose as to whether an expenditure was personal or institutional, I simply accepted the former. To do otherwise would have been pointless folly.

Dan Aldrich at Irvine, an agricultural scientist, was the paragon of a product of the UC system. After service as researcher, professor, and administrator at Riverside, Davis, and Berkeley, he became the founding chancellor at UC Irvine, which he led for twenty-two years. Tall, genial, and politically shrewd, very experienced yet not especially imaginative, he had the simplistic if grand ambition to make Irvine a clone of Berkeley. A physical fitness buff, he competed successfully in senior track and field contests into his seventies.

After his retirement in 1985, he became the UC "designated hitter," serving as acting chancellor for a year at Riverside and then again for a year at Santa Barbara. Both interim terms were successful. His technique for handling student protest in that time was simple and ingenious. "I agree with you and I will recommend so to the next chancellor!" Aldrich was succeeded at Irvine by Jack Peltason, a political scientist and experienced academic administrator, formerly chancellor at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois and then president of the American Council on Education. Peltason particularly and successfully cultivated the wealthy community near Irvine in Orange County and raised large sums for the campus. Subsequently, in 1992, Peltason, experienced and noncontroversial, was selected to succeed David Gardner as president of the university.

Bill McElroy, a large, bluff, hearty, quick-tempered Irishman and skilled biochemist, was chancellor at San Diego. With its emphasis on science and technology, San Diego has frequently had chancellors with scientific backgrounds. Early in my chancellorial tenure, I served on a small committee, appointed by President Saxon, with McElroy as chair. Our mission was to review the "organized research" programs of the UC system and make recommendations for their improvement. This proved to be a lesson in UC politics.

UC is the "research arm" of California and the state provides funding to support various research programs. While the base level of this funding has not been increased in many years, it has been augmented annually to compensate for inflation and currently exceeds one hundred million dollars per year. About half of this sum goes to agricultural research at Davis and Riverside, while the other half goes to a diverse

set of "organized research" projects. Nominally, these projects are established to operate multidisciplinary research programs that extend beyond the appropriate purview of a single department or that involve extensive off-campus facilities or interactions. A marine laboratory, a high-energy physics program, and the multicampus UC astronomy program are viable examples. The state funding is intended to provide stable core support while the bulk of the research is supported by external grants.

Because most of the original funding for such organized research units (ORUs) became available in the 1950s and 1960s, they were concentrated at Berkeley and Los Angeles. Once established, unlike programs supported by external grants, they had no termination dates, no requirements for review, and no pattern of periodic competition for these funds. Our committee found that many of the programs, which had initially flourished, had become stagnant or outdated and of low productivity. We recommended that ORU grants should be for an initial five-year period. After review, they could be renewed for a second five years, but only rarely longer. We recommended that funds made available by termination of an ORU—or alternatively by a small annual decrement in the funding to all ongoing ORUs—be used for a competitive grant program throughout the UC system. We believed that such actions would markedly improve the quality of research supported with these funds.

Of course, the net effect of our proposal could only be to withdraw and redistribute some funding from Berkeley and Los Angeles to other campuses on the basis of competition. As a result, the chancellors of Berkeley and Los Angeles were opposed and the proposal died quietly. It was a lesson learned but never fully accepted.

McElroy's personality clashed repeatedly with that of President Saxon, who was far more cautious and temperate. McElroy's somewhat heavy-handed style created enemies at San Diego even within his own administration, and when he tried to increase direct campus administrative control over the UC San Diego Medical School, its opposition led to a vote of no-confidence. When Saxon did not support him, Bill had no choice but to resign. He was succeeded by Dick Atkinson, a psychologist who had been director of the National Science Foundation. Much more tactful than McElroy, Atkinson has maintained harmony on the campus while continuing to play a national role, serving a term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in the National Academy of Sciences. Good at fund-

raising, he has also been remarkably successful at using the growing population of the San Diego region and the presence of a regent from San Diego to achieve major resource and capital allocations to his campus.

The Riverside campus has long been the least popular in the system. It was initially established in the 1950s as a unique four-year campus within the UC system, grafted onto an agricultural experiment station. Later, it recognized its foreign character within the UC system and opted to become a full-scale university. But, located inland in a region with heavy smog, it was largely shunned by students. Ivan Hinderaker, a political scientist and another longtime UC staff member, was its chancellor until his retirement in 1983. He was succeeded by Tomas Rivera, a literature scholar and poet, who was the first person of ethnic minority ever appointed to a UC chancellorship. As Riverside is in a region of rapidly growing Hispanic population, his choice seemed felicitous. He was just taking hold of the campus when, tragically, a sudden heart attack took his life.

And what of the chancellor at Santa Cruz in this all-male group of mostly experienced administrators? Intellectually, I could easily hold my own, but this was not an arena in which intellect was always the primary asset. I had much to learn, and fast. Unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies and bureaucratic complexity of the UC system, coming from a small, private, specialized institution into this vast public enterprise, I was initially taken aback by its unfamiliarity and, as well, by the depth of the inherited problems at the Santa Cruz campus. As a molecular biologist, I was able to bring a dispassionate objectivity to this task, which became recognized as integrity or "fairness." Trained from childhood to be wary of anger, to suppress it and allow it to drain away, I never learned to use anger as is sometimes appropriate.

I was never fully comfortable with fund-raising, even for fully deserving causes, and did it reluctantly. While recognizing the sometimes overriding importance of political maneuver, I found it uncongenial and engaged in such tactics sparingly. Preferring to make my case with logic, I sometimes failed to achieve all that I might have for my campus.

Perceiving the need, I concerned myself greatly with the academic programs and standards of the campus and there made my major mark. After a life spent in the orderly, single-valued world of basic science, I found the more complex worlds and motivations of the other academic divisions—the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts—both interesting and odd. The several academic divisions had varied perspec-

tives and values, even differing concepts of "truth." The significance of time varied greatly across the campus. The rapid progress of the sciences necessitated frequent changes of course material, curricula, and research emphases. Many of the social scientists similarly needed to at least keep pace with the tempo of societal change. But in the areas of philosophy, political science, and parts of literature, scholars are still grappling with the same basic problems that troubled Plato and Socrates. And artists, too, although sometimes with new media, conjure with ancient issues of form and expression.

As scientist-chancellor, I tried to meet and accept all of these diverse universes on their own terms but often found it hard to abandon my scientist's faith in a single objective truth, capable of withstanding challenge, each nugget of understanding in itself an increment of human knowledge.

The plight of the campus demanded my full energies. I found it impossible to seriously pursue my science. I gradually and reluctantly withdrew from activities on the national scene, which did not seem of much benefit to my campus and, instead, seemed to distract my attention and effort. The campus, so badly fractured, sorely needed a steady and guiding presence. In dark hours, when the target of the perennial revolt of youth against authority or the object of unhappy regard by this or that disappointed segment of the faculty, I wondered at the wisdom of my choice. But my commitment had been given and to withdraw it could only be deeply demoralizing to this already betrayed campus. And I learned early not to take the attacks personally, for most often it was the chancellorship itself, and not the holder of the office, that really was the target.

The chancellors who personally thrive and most enjoy the role, who find it most rewarding on a day-to-day basis, are those who like to persuade, to match wits with and best their adversaries, to manipulate others, to use the adroit assessment of personality and choice of incentives or discouragements to achieve a desired end. In short, they are those with the inclinations, natural or learned, of the salesman or the politician. Those whose minds and energies are seized more by the issues, whether abstract or substantive, find the role often drearily frustrating and eventually wearing.