Chancellor’s Wife Works Full Time : Sue Young of UCLA Hosts Fund-Raisers, Functions for No Pay

When you take a look at Sue Young, her easy relaxed manner belies the fact that she holds down weighty responsibilities.

Sue Young is the first lady of UCLA, wife of Chancellor Charles Young. Their Westwood campus, virtually a city unto itself, is among the largest in the nation, with 33,000 students (plus an additional 100,000 in part-time Extension courses) and 20,000 employees.

The university is a major enterprise whose costs are about $1 billion a year. But less than 40% of UCLA’s funding comes from the state; most of the money it spends is derived from such varied sources as hospital revenues, federal grants and contracts, student fees, gifts and endowments from alumni and other private donors.

Search for Funds

To keep funds pouring in from all possible sources is a chore that consumes nearly half of Charles Young’s time. To help him in that task, and to represent her husband and UCLA in countless other ways, is a responsibility that requires a full workweek from Sue Young.

She could occupy herself with other activities. The Youngs, both 53, have been married 35 years, have two children and five grandchildren--all girls. Sue Young could spend more time with them, if she put aside her UCLA duties, or she could continue her own formal education--a pursuit she reluctantly has deferred in recent years.

But instead she invests a full workweek at UCLA. She plans, supervises and takes charge, for example, of entertaining at the Youngs’ campus home. The entertaining is not idle or pointless; it is a universal truth of higher education that gifts from private donors, especially the creation of endowed chairs and institutes, are often more important than any other single source in the pursuit of campus excellence.

Potential Donors

Once a week during much of the year there is a major social function to be hosted, for there is a steady parade of potential donors, friends and associates of UCLA, VIPs from Washington and overseas, plus faculty, students and educators from other universities.

“There are breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, garden parties, swimming parties, receptions, teas,” Sue Young said.

“Sometimes we entertain as an adjunct to public ceremonies held on the campus--perhaps to honor a distinguished visitor. Whatever entertaining we do, it is in one way or another connected with UCLA’s needs and goals.”

She has apparently done her job well. A Times sampling of university presidents and chancellors and their wives across the nation indicates that Sue Young widely is regarded as bright, friendly, strong-willed, assertive and well-organized--all attributes that make her a natural leader.

Which brings us to the National Assn. of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. Five years ago the association set up a Council of Presidents/Chancellors Spouses, which annually elects a leader.

Elected to Head Council

Sue Young took office recently as chairwoman and chief executive officer of the Spouses Council. She was elected by a huge majority, but on one issue she is a leader with a minority view. She believes a spouse who works full time on behalf of a university, as she does, is entitled to be paid a salary.

The spouse, she said, represents the institution wherever she goes and whatever she does, even when she would rather be a private person. She makes decisions about entertainment and house expenditures involving thousands of dollars based upon her tastes, her instincts, her needs, her abilities, her sensitivities to the campus and the community.

“In her role as a non-employee,” she said, “she often serves as supervisor, mentor and trainer of paid university employees. She often holds the key to creating the proper environment for major university fund raising in her home. Where there is no spouse, the university hires a salaried person to do the job.”

But only one in five of the association’s spouses agree with her on the subject of salary. The University of Minnesota surveyed 138 association spouses on questions involving roles, responsibilities and rewards, and 80% of the respondents indicated a negative reaction to pay.

Many replied they feared that a salary would create a mandate to perform, and they preferred the volunteer aspect of the work. Others said they accept the work as a marital duty.

Sue Young’s minority view is not based on financial hardship--the UCLA chancellor’s salary is $112,800 annually--but rather on the human need for recognition and self-esteem.

Favors a Choice

“The spouse has professional responsibilities and should at least be offered a salary,” she said, i.e., neither the state university nor any other employer should simply take for granted the full-time services of the spouse.

“I might not personally accept a salary,” she said, “but I sure would like to be offered one because I think it’s important to have a choice. Right now the University of California doesn’t even interview the wife, let alone offer her a salary. I’d like to change all that.”

Sue Daugherty Young has been working toward change all her life. The daughter of a Southern Pacific railroad man, she grew up in Colton, near San Bernardino, with an eager appetite for learning. “Friendships were difficult,” she said of her childhood, “because I was extremely shy, but schoolwork was easy.”

Her competence did not go unnoticed. During her junior and senior years in high school, an English teacher hired Sue, at 35 cents an hour, to grade classmates’ papers. “It was done secretly,” Sue Young said. “I took the papers

home at night, the teacher handed them out next day, and my classmates never knew I was grading their papers.”

With a straight-A record, she was graduated second in her class and offered a scholarship to UCLA. But she could not afford to live in Los Angeles and instead accepted a scholarship to San Bernardino Valley College, which enabled her to live at home. She earned extra money by working in the registrar’s office.

During her freshman year on campus Sue met Charles Young, a tall, husky sophomore and a member of the Air National Guard. Six months later the two 18-year-olds were married.

Two days after the wedding, in 1950, they were jolted by the outbreak of the Korean War. Young’s National Guard unit immediately was called to active duty and he was sent to Japan.

Sue Young went to work for the Southern California Gas Co., and later settled into the full-time role of housewife and mother. “It simply didn’t occur to me,” she said recently, “that I could be a student after I got married.”

But in the 1970s, she decided it was important to continue her formal schooling. She signed up for classes and, at age 45, became a magna cum laude graduate of UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in political science. She followed up with 18 months of graduate work in linguistics, but stopped short of a master’s degree when the demands of her work as chancellor’s spouse allowed insufficient time for study.

Quest for Education

Charles Young had been only an indifferent student before the outbreak of the Korean War, but during military service he developed an urge to learn. “It was kind of a growing-up recognition,” he said, “that one could do a lot better with an education than without one.”

Returning from the Far East after a two-year hitch, he resumed studies at San Bernardino Valley College. After that he earned a bachelor’s degree at UC Riverside, where he became that school’s first student body president. He followed up with a master’s at UCLA and then a Ph.D. in political science. Along the way he worked in the UC president’s office in Berkeley and taught classes at UC Davis.

Young was on a fast track. At 28 he became assistant to then-UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy, and eight years later, when Murphy was named board chairman of Times Mirror, Young was appointed to the chancellor’s job.

Now in his 18th year at UCLA’s top post, Young--like university chancellors and presidents elsewhere--has found that fund raising is a key, critical and time-consuming responsibility.

Fund raising is frequently accomplished by social endeavor. When the Youngs first moved into the chancellor’s residence on campus, Sue Young observed immediately that “There was an awful lot of learning to do, a great many public obligations to be met. The challenge was and is to do everything easily and well, to make people feel very comfortable when they visit the chancellor’s house. No matter how few or how many visitors, and no matter where they come from, my goal is always to keep the occasion friendly, casual and comfortable.”

Recently, for example, the Youngs hosted an international conference of university presidents and their wives, a group of 600. With the help of her secretary (provided by UCLA) and with a committee of volunteers (organized by Sue Young), a week of social events was scheduled in detail, including daytime programs for spouses and evening activities for the entire group.

Sue Young does her job cheerfully and without complaints, but she is keenly aware of the disparity between the responsibilities of the spouse and the lack of recognition by the state or other employers.

The widespread acceptance of the role of an unpaid spouse, she said, “is probably a carry-over from that era when the universities were primarily theological institutions, and the preacher’s wife was always there to lend a hand.”

Role Has Changed

But in modern times, she said, the role has changed from lending a hand to a full-time profession.

“But to me the issue is more than pay versus non-pay. It’s a matter of recognition. In my case I could have spent those years earning a Ph.D. and developing my own career. I love what I chose to do and I have no regrets. But the fact remains that when you give your life totally to the goal of assisting your husband, you have nothing to account for it to the outside world--you’re still just a volunteer.”

Sue Young does not intend to promote or press in any way for spouses’ salaries during her one-year term as chairwoman of the association’s Spouses Council.

“It’s clear (from the survey) that the majority does not want to be paid and because I hope to represent the entire group, I would not challenge the wishes of the majority.

“What I hope to do during my term is encourage networking among the spouses, educating and professionalizing, holding seminars, panels and workshops so that we can all help each other do better jobs.”

She plans no further action on the matter of pay for spouses until such unforeseen future time as the Youngs depart the campus.

“When the time comes for us to leave,” she said, “I would ask to appear before the board of regents. I’d ask them to consider such action--not to take effect during my time, which would be self-serving, but for the future. That would be my legacy to those who follow.”