A Battered UCI Looks to a Man With Ethics

Four months after he took the helm at UC Irvine, Chancellor Michael V. Drake stood before an auditorium packed with doctors and nurses. He was addressing the UCI Medical Center staff for the first time since front-page headlines had revealed serious problems there, problems bigger than most university leaders face in their entire careers.

Drake was angry. He got right to the point.

“I haven’t liked any of this these past few days,” he said. “I didn’t like it one bit.”

He made it clear that he wanted answers, not excuses, and that he was establishing a task force to investigate. But he was not there just to chastise. He told them how much he appreciated their hard work, something he has done at almost every opportunity. He conveyed the same sentiments when he spoke to the rest of the faculty.

These were defining moments for a rookie chancellor, a campus outsider and an ophthalmologist rather than the usual PhD, a man whose appointment was met with skepticism from faculty.

“He was amazingly composed that day, almost inspirational,” said chemistry professor Kenneth C. Janda, chairman of the Academic Senate. “He just said that we’ve got a job to do, and let’s roll up the sleeves and get it done.”

Drake was busy getting to know the community and the campus and laying out his plans when The Times reported in November that more than 30 patients on the university hospital’s liver transplant waiting list died in 2004 and 2005, even as the Orange hospital turned down scores of organs that might have saved some of them. For more than a year, UCI Medical Center did not have a full-time transplant surgeon but misled regulators and the public into believing that it did.

“We were having a wonderful time all summer and fall,” Drake said. “Then the job changed.”

The hospital came under intense scrutiny by federal regulators and media. More problems came to light, including shortcomings in the hospital’s bone marrow and kidney transplant programs. Anesthesiologists complained of patient safety issues. Cardiologists raised concerns about the credentials of the division’s chief and associate chief. It all added up to another strike against a hospital that has faced its share of scandal in the last decade -- including fertility doctors who stole eggs and embryos and a Willed Body Program that sold and lost donated body parts.

The campus desperately needed a problem-solver and a motivator, perhaps even a savior. Overnight, being an outsider became an advantage. And being a physician worked in his favor.

In those first few days of crisis, Drake so thoroughly won over the faculty and community that expectations soared. The responsibility of fixing the university’s problems sits squarely on his shoulders. How he handles these scandals will shape his legacy as UC Irvine’s fifth chancellor in its 40-year history. He can emerge as a hero -- or as a leader who missed the opportunity to finally clean up things.

Those who know Drake, 55, say no one is better qualified to lead UC Irvine right now.

“Michael’s handled every job that wasn’t easy,” said Dr. James O’Donnell, Drake’s mentor and a professor emeritus of ophthalmology at UC San Francisco. “He’s a do-the-right-thing guy. You can’t fake it. It’s just straight-out real.”

When Drake reviews his life, he points to what he calls “bonding subconscious experiences” that have shaped who he is.

His 92-year-old father, who recently retired as a physician, taught him to respect medicine and to love healing.

As a child, Drake suffered from severe asthma. He would wake up gasping for air in the middle of the night and stand outside his parents’ room, sometimes for half an hour, praying that the asthma would fade.

Drake hated to awaken his father. “But as much as I was reluctant to disturb him, he was always happy to get up, happy to help.”

They would go to the kitchen where his father would inject him with epinephrine. In minutes, Drake could breathe again. It was an early lesson in the power of medicine. That same lesson was reinforced every day in his living room, where his father operated a neighborhood clinic.

Drake followed his father and brother to medical school. He started at community college, then went to Stanford and finally to UC San Francisco for his medical degree. He did this in the backdrop of the civil rights movement, growing up in Englewood, N.J., where he attended a segregated elementary school before his family moved to Sacramento. Although he was one of a handful of blacks at his high school, he was elected student body president.

His former colleagues and bosses say he is a natural leader.

O’Donnell called him “smart, in fact brilliant.” Others described him as thoughtful, articulate, decisive, honest and forceful -- qualities that elevated him, almost immediately upon completing his residency, into administrative positions at UC San Francisco.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if this guy was named governor,” said Dr. Creig Hoyt, a retired chairman of the UC San Francisco ophthalmology department. “His skills as an administrator are simply extraordinary.”

At UC San Francisco, he rose through the ranks until he was appointed senior associate dean for admissions. When the University of California’s Board of Regents abolished affirmative action, prompting wholesale changes in admission criteria, Drake saw the big picture, said Dr. Haile T. Debas, a former dean and interim chancellor at UC San Francisco.

“What amazed me was how he was able to see beyond the immediate issue, which was race and ethnicity,” said Debas, whom Drake appointed to the liver transplant task force. “He saw that’s not what we should be fighting about. We should be fighting for opportunity. Just changing the issue made an incredible change.”

Debas credited Drake with not only increasing the diversity of medical students in the UC system, but with pushing those students to help fill California’s pressing medical needs -- serving Latinos, blacks and the poor.

After being appointed the UC system’s vice president for health affairs in 2000, Drake helped pioneer a UC Irvine program to improve Latino health care. The program recruits Spanish-speaking students committed to assisting Latinos. Three of the eight students in the model program are not Latino. Three other state universities are developing similar programs for other underserved groups. He also oversaw the overhaul of UCLA’s troubled Willed Body Program and encouraged systemwide reform.

“He was able to take a complex situation and parse it down into manageable pieces,” said UC President Robert C. Dynes, who encouraged Drake to consider the top job at UC Irvine. “He could think through complex things and get to the heart of issues and, boy, that’s what a chancellor has to do every day.”

Beyond the skillful administrator is a man with a deep sense of right and wrong. “Ethics guide that guy’s life,” O’Donnell said.

At UC Irvine’s undergraduate convocation in September, he impressed faculty members by talking about the university’s ideals. “He expresses values that we all wish we could live by,” said Janda. “We like hearing that kind of talk -- that it’s not just a business. Our job is to serve society.”

As a member of a task force trying to resolve problems at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, he demonstrated his leadership skills again, said Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, former chief administrator of Los Angeles County Health Services, who recruited Drake for the panel.

“He’s willing to be relatively blunt and direct,” Garthwaite said. “He doesn’t seem to layer on excuses. Just says, ‘Let’s get the facts. Let’s define the right thing to do. And then let’s get on with doing that.’ ”

Drake is the same way behind the scenes, said his wife of 30 years, Brenda, a lawyer whom he met when they were undergraduates at Stanford. “He is a person who is remarkably calm under severe pressure,” she said. “I think that comes from his training as a surgeon.”

Dr. Shan Lin, an ophthalmologist at UC San Francisco who has performed surgery with Drake, agreed: “He always maintains his cool. You never see him sweating, getting too anxious.”

Through it all, friends and colleagues say, Drake has managed to keep his life balanced.

An avid bicyclist, he frequently commuted to the UC San Francisco campus on two wheels. These days, he occasionally finds time to bike with UC Irvine’s cycling team and state Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana). Drake rides an Italian-made bike with a lightweight carbon frame that he jokes helps to balance “my age and weakness.”

Drake always came home in time to eat dinner with “the boys,” now 21 and 24, even if it meant going back to work later. He frequently took his sons on trips to such places as the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to Washington, D.C., and to sporting events, his wife said. He always made it a point to go to his son’s high school track meets, home and away.

“I envy his personal life,” Lin said. “He has led by example in terms of how he raised his children -- a wonderful balance of being a great doctor and administrator and also a great family man.”

Even after he became a high-level administrator, Drake continued to see patients at UC San Francisco, sometimes on Saturdays. His job as chancellor makes that unrealistic, but Drake said he planned to teach soon at UC Irvine’s medical school.

“They told me I should take a year off to get my bearings,” he chuckled. “Little did they know.”