2 Women, the First, Among 4 New Chancellors for UC

The University of California Board of Regents on Friday approved the appointments of four new chancellors, including the first two women ever to hold these top administrative posts in the UC system.

The regents, meeting at UCLA, announced that Barbara S. Uehling, 54, former chancellor of the University of Missouri, Columbia, will become chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, filling the spot vacated in December by Robert A. Huttenback, who resigned under pressure after a series of financial and administrative controversies.

Rosemary S.J. Schraer, 62, who has been vice chancellor at Riverside since 1985, will become Riverside’s chancellor. She will fill the post that will be vacated in July by Theodore L. Hullar, 52, who was named chancellor of the Davis campus. Hullar will replace James H. Meyer, who is retiring.

At UC Santa Cruz, Robert Bocking Stevens, 53, who has been president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania for the last 10 years, will replace Robert Sinsheimer, who is also retiring.

In announcing the appointments for the regents, Frank Clark, a Los Angeles attorney and chairman of the UC board, said: “This is a memorable day in the history of the University of California. It marks the first time women have been named to head any of our campuses.”

It is also the first time so many administrative changes have been made at one time in UC’s 119-year history, Clark said.

UC President David P. Gardner, who has been sharply criticized for not moving faster to find women and minorities to fill top administrative positions within the nine-campus system, said at a press conference Friday that he was “delighted” with the appointments.

“In every instance, our first choices accepted our invitations,” Gardner said.

When questioned about being one of the first two women chancellors, Uehling said: “I have been the first woman many times. I will be happy when the day comes when I am simply Barbara Uehling and not the first woman.”

Uehling in many respects has the most difficult job of the four new chancellors. The 17,000-student campus has been rocked in recent years by fighting between the faculty and the administration and by allegations that former chancellor Huttenback misspent university funds for personal expenses. Last week, Huttenback and his wife, Freda, were arrested on suspicion of embezzlement, tax evasion and insurance fraud.

Visiting Fellow

Uehling, however, is no stranger to controversy. An experimental psychologist who was trained at Wichita State University in Kansas and Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., she served in administrative posts in Rhode Island and Illinois before becoming the chief executive officer for the 24,000-student campus of the University of Missouri. She left Missouri last year under fire to become a senior visiting fellow at the American Council of Education in Washington.

At Missouri, faced with deep cuts in her state operating budget, Uehling had to make many cuts in programs and personnel that did not always endear her to the faculty. Gardner said Friday, however, that she made the changes with “commitment, courage and toughness” that will enable her to deal comfortably with whatever issues Santa Barbara now faces.

Schraer, Riverside’s new chancellor, is a biochemist trained at Syracuse University who worked for many years at Pennsylvania State University before assuming the No. 2 post at Riverside in 1985.

Only three years from the usual retirement age, Schraer was chosen, in part, Gardner said, to give some stability to the 5,000-student Riverside campus, which was rocked in 1984 by the sudden death of Tomas Rivera, a Latino who was the first and only member of a minority group to serve as a UC chancellor.

Named to Post

Daniel G. Aldrich Jr., the former chancellor of UC Irvine, filled in temporarily as Riverside’s chancellor until Hullar was named to that post in 1985. Aldrich also has been acting chancellor at Santa Barbara since Huttenback’s resignation.

Now, Hullar has been asked to head up the Davis campus, which has an enrollment of nearly 20,000 students. Although perhaps the most stable of the four campuses that face major administrative changes, Davis, like virtually all of the UC campuses, must deal with the problems associated with projected enrollment growth over the next decade.

The rapidly growing minority population in California, the weak preparation of many students and questions about the overall quality of undergraduate education are other issues he will have to contend with.

Hullar, a biochemist trained at the University of Minnesota, moved to Riverside in 1984 when he was selected by Rivera to be executive vice chancellor.

Natural Resources

Before that, he was director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Cornell University and a professor of natural resources. He has served as a deputy commissioner of environmental conservation for the state of New York and has taught medical chemistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also was an associate dean of the graduate school there.

Stevens, Santa Cruz’s newly appointed chancellor, will face particularly sticky issues in regard to enrollment. The second-smallest of the UC campuses with 8,500 students, Santa Cruz is a logical place for growth in the UC system in the years ahead. However, the campus faces strong opposition to expansion from the community.

Santa Cruz has been the most innovative of the UC campuses and, as a result, is expected to address head-on in the years ahead the difficult question of how much emphasis should be placed on undergraduate education versus advanced research and graduate training.

Stevens appears highly qualified to tackle these issues, Gardner said.

A highly regarded legal scholar, Stevens was trained at Oxford University, whose college system has been the model for much of Santa Cruz’s undergraduate programs.

Law Faculty

For the last 10 years, he has been president of Haverford College, a prestigious liberal arts college near Philadelphia. But he has also worked at major research universities. He served on the law faculty at Yale University from 1965 to 1976 and was provost at Tulane University from 1976 to 1978.

The four chancellors will be paid roughly the same, with modest consideration given to the size of the campus. Hullar will be paid $112,000 a year, Uehling $110,000, Stevens $107,000 and Schraer $105,000.