Cal State Head Facing Moves to Remove Her

Serious opposition to California State University Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds has developed among the university’s trustees, with some members of the board actively seeking her ouster, The Times has learned.

According to her opponents on the board, Reynolds spends too much time out of the state, is a poor administrator and frequently berates subordinates in public, among other failings.

“She can’t run the system,” said a veteran board member who asked not to be identified. “She can’t handle the trustees, she can’t handle her staff. She won’t last a year.”

Reynolds, one of the most prominent women in American higher education, has headed the 19-campus, 340,000-student Cal State system--the largest university system in the nation--since September, 1982. Her salary is just under $120,000 a year.

Has Supporters

Although the chancellor still has some strong supporters on the 24-member board, momentum seems to be building against her. Some trustees predict that an attempt will be made to oust her when the board meets at the system’s Long Beach headquarters May 12 and 13.

“We think there are some problems, but we don’t yet know the extent of them,” Dale B. Ride, chairman of the Board of Trustees, said in an interview.

Ride said he hopes that an evaluation of Reynolds’ performance now being conducted by the management consulting firm of Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co. will help the board determine the seriousness of the problems.

In a series of interviews with past and present trustees and university officials, many of whom asked not to be quoted by name, one frequently mentioned complaint was that Reynolds spends too much time away from her Long Beach office.

As one of few women of high rank in the higher education world, Reynolds is asked to serve on many national commissions and study groups. She is also a member of the board of directors of Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories and Ohio-based American Electric Power Co.

The chancellor’s travels are “a concern of some trustees and some (campus) presidents,” Ride said. “You need to have contact with the chief executive officer.”

The problem has been aggravated, several sources said, by the inability of Reynolds’ chief lieutenant, Provost William E. Vandament, to fill in during her absences.

Vandament, it is said, is a good long-range academic planner who has been poor at managing the crises that occur constantly in a 19-campus system. Vandament plans to leave his job by June 30 to become a professor at California State University, Fullerton.

Reynolds, however, denied that she spends too much time out of state.

“It is not possible to be chancellor of the California State University system and sit in your office all the time,” she said in a telephone interview from Atlanta. “I would love not to travel so much, but California is a very large state and I must get around to the campuses. I also spend a lot of time in Sacramento,” lobbying on CSU’s behalf with the governor and the Legislature. Reynolds said she is out of the state only one or two days a month.

Sees Achievement

Trustee Claudia H. Hampton said Reynolds has achieved a great deal in her 4 1/2 years as chancellor.

“Our admissions standards have been raised, our teacher training programs have been strengthened, our affirmative action and minority outreach efforts have been improved,” Hampton said. “I don’t see how all that could have been accomplished if she and Vandament are such terrible administrators.”

Several trustees and others said Reynolds is a very intelligent, hard-working administrator with a somewhat arrogant approach. They said she does not seek advice on many issues and does not take advice that is offered.

“At Ohio State (where Reynolds was provost before taking the Cal State job), she was known as ‘Queen Ann,’ ” one trustee said. “That turns out to have been pretty accurate.”

A former CSU official said Reynolds is “harsh on her staff, sometimes brutal. . . . She’ll rake ‘em up and down, sometimes in public settings.”

‘Temper Tantrums’

A current staff member said many employees at CSU headquarters in Long Beach fear Reynolds’ “temper tantrums.”

But another staff member, who has worked closely with the chancellor, said: “It’s true she has a short fuse, but she’s almost always in control--and when she blows up at somebody it usually turns out she was right.”

Trustee Hampton said many people resent Reynolds’ displays of temper because they come from a woman.

“If she were a man, this behavior would be regarded as good leadership and assertiveness,” Hampton said. “But because she is a woman, it is called ‘temper tantrum’ or ‘shooting from the hip.’ ”

A former staff member disagreed.

“She takes unfair advantage of her position as a senior officer,” this person said. “If a man did these things, the complaints would be the same.”

Board Chairman Ride, who is assistant to the president of Santa Monica College and the father of astronaut Sally Ride, said that “once or twice” he had seen Chancellor Reynolds “bawl out” a subordinate in public and said he had heard many “rumors” of similar incidents but did not know if they were true.

Admits Impatience

Reynolds said, “To the charge of being impatient, I plead guilty,” but she insisted that she does not berate subordinates in public.

“I’m hard on myself,” she added. “Sometimes, in wanting to get a great deal done, you become--I guess passionate is the word.”

Ride said he did not know if Reynolds’ administrative problems were caused by “lack of management skills or lack of a good organization. . . . We’ll know better after we receive the Peat Marwick report.”

Many of the complaints about Reynolds have found a focus in the events surrounding the Feb. 18 death of Richard Butwell, president of California State University, Dominguez Hills, shortly after Reynolds apparently told him to look for another job.

On several occasions in recent months, Reynolds and the trustees’ Personnel Committee had discussed the problems of the Dominguez Hills campus--declining enrollment, a consequent budget deficit and poor relations between Butwell and his faculty, among others.

Instructions in Dispute

At the last of these meetings Reynolds was given some instructions by the committee, but the nature of these instructions is in dispute.

According to Ride, who attended the meeting, “What I thought we told her to do was to discuss the problems with the president . . . and try to work out a solution to the problems. . . . The solution might be worked out in several ways, including the possibility that he might want to seek a situation where he would be more successful.”

But one of the three members of the Personnel Committee said the instructions were much more explicit.

“She was instructed to take a very strong position with President Butwell, not to dillydally,” this trustee said. “In effect, she had two choices--she could either persuade him to quit or she could bring the matter to the board and the guy would have been wiped out.”

The committee member continued: “I think she did it with compassion, I think she did it well, but unfortunately the guy died.”

Fatal Heart Attack

Less than a week after his Feb. 12 meeting with the chancellor, Butwell, 57, suffered a fatal heart attack.

Reynolds said: “I was asked by the Personnel Committee to talk with President Butwell about other career options, in view of the tremendous problems at Dominguez Hills that had come to light in the fall of 1986.” The chancellor said Butwell was “quite calm and rational” during the discussion and agreed to consider taking a professorship at another CSU campus.

But when Butwell later met with Ride, the board chairman said, “the story he told” suggested that Reynolds had gone beyond the committee’s instructions.

Asked who was right, Butwell or Reynolds, Ride replied: “It depends on the perception of the individual. . . . I guess you pay your money and take your choice.”

Ride said a small committee of trustees, headed by Theodore A. Bruinsma, has been appointed “to look into the situation, to see what, if anything, should be done.” But he acknowledged that the committee will have difficulty determining precisely what happened, because one of the principals in the dispute has died.

Critics Vociferous

In the aftermath of Butwell’s death, many of Reynolds’ critics have grown more vociferous.

In a letter to Ride, two campus presidents accused the chancellor of “abusing” and “threatening” Butwell, according to a trustee who asked not to be identified.

Other critics have charged that the handling of the Butwell affair shows Reynolds’ approach to Cal State affairs to be callous and insensitive.

Within the Board of Trustees, Reynolds’ opponents are trying to round up enough votes to replace her but are encountering stiff opposition from Hampton and other Reynolds loyalists. Everyone is counting votes, and it is not clear where the majority lies.

It is not even clear whether the issue will be decided at the May meeting, when the trustees will have in hand both the Peat Marwick evaluation of Reynolds’ performance and the results of the Bruinsma committee inquiry into the Butwell affair. But many trustees and others close to the situation expect a “vote of confidence” to take place then.

Said one trustee not friendly to Reynolds: “The ship is heading out to sea but there are some anchors (Reynolds supporters) trying to hold it back. . . . I don’t think they’ll be successful.”