His Success Is All Academic : The former president of the University of Maryland is settling in at Occidental College with the expectation of ‘breaking new ground.’

The University of Maryland’s campus at College Park is a state-supported research university on 1,580 acres, with 38,000 students, 2,000 full-time teachers, many graduate programs and big-time--albeit scandal-marred--sports. The annual operating budget is $458 million.

Occidental College in Los Angeles is a private liberal arts college on 120 acres, with 1,650 students, 120 full-time faculty members, a tiny graduate program and athletics on a modest scale. Its budget is $33 million.

So, assuming that bigger may be seen as more prestigious, why would someone resign as chancellor of the University of Maryland to become president of Occidental? Because the assumption is wrong, according to the man who made such a move last month.

“I certainly don’t think size has anything to do with quality. I don’t feel any change in my status in that regard,” said John B. Slaughter, who headed Maryland’s flagship state school for six years, including the 1986 crisis over the cocaine-overdose death of star basketball player Len Bias.

Unusual Background

Slaughter, 54, admits that he has an unusual background to take over Occidental, a 100-year-old school tucked inside the Eagle Rock neighborhood. But according to Donn Miller, the attorney who is chairman of Occidental’s Board of Trustees, Slaughter’s hiring “signifies that the qualifications that enable somebody to serve as president of a liberal arts college aren’t rigid.” Most important, said Miller and officials in Maryland, are Slaughter’s skills as an academic leader and communicator.

An electrical engineer, Slaughter headed the National Science Foundation, the federal government’s research funding arm, from 1980 to 1982, under both the Carter and Reagan administrations; he was an assistant director from 1977 to 1979. Occidental has no engineering department and is not very well known for its science research.

“Even though I am an engineer, I’ve always had a strong appreciation for the liberal arts and always thought it would be a joy to spend more time professionally with them,” Slaughter said in a recent interview in his oak-paneled office at Occidental, where he was still unpacking his books.

At Maryland and at Washington State University, where he earlier had been academic vice president, Slaughter dealt with political pressures of a public institution. Maryland, in fact, just finished a bruising debate on reorganizing its university system and Slaughter’s resignation came as changes were to start, a good time to leave, according to professors there. At Occidental, he will answer to a private board and court mainly private donors.

More Classroom Contact

His Maryland job did not allow him enough time with students and faculty, Slaughter said. Occidental’s smaller size will mean more classroom contact, although fund-raising will require a lot of attention. Occidental’s $120-million endowment is healthy but needs to grow to support more scholarships, he said.

“It’s fair to say that we were all quite surprised that he was making this kind of move,” said speech professor Andrew Wolvin, chairman of the campus senate at College Park. “But as he explained it to us, it made a lot of sense. He wants to get back to the basics of what education is all about.”

Slaughter is the first black president of an independent college in California and one of a few blacks in the nation to head a primarily white institution of higher learning. “This gives me an opportunity to break some new ground,” he said, adding that one of his main goals is to increase the number of minority students at Occidental, something he is credited with doing at Maryland. The Occidental student body is 3% black, 8% Latino, 17% Asian and the rest white.

“One of the things that really attracted me was that I got a strong sense that there is a strong desire for Occidental to become more involved in the life of Los Angeles, to reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of Los Angeles more,” he said. Occidental is often better known outside Los Angeles than it is in its hometown, which, he said, tends to be dominated by UCLA and USC. Slaughter wants to change that.

Lure of California

Another attraction, Slaughter said, was California itself, where he and his wife, Ida, a school guidance counselor and former school principal, lived for 19 years. A native of Kansas, Slaughter earned his bachelor’s at Kansas State University, his master’s at UCLA and his Ph.D. at UC San Diego.

He worked for 15 years at the Naval Electronics Lab in San Diego, where he was president of the local Urban League in the mid-’60s. “We always wanted to return to the West Coast,” he said, although he stressed, and other officials confirmed, that Occidental contacted him about the opening.

Slaughter also said he is relieved at leaving a big-time sports school. “I really love intercollegiate athletics. I enjoy it passionately,” he said. “But I would prefer not to spend so much time and energy on it as I found it necessary to do at a Division I institution.” In the rankings, based mainly on size, Occidental is in Division III sports.

Slaughter denied that the Bias scandal directly led to his departure. Yet Bias’ death two days after the All-American forward was drafted by the Boston Celtics in June, 1986, is clearly painful for him to discuss, as are the ensuing investigations, staff shake-ups and media frenzy.

“I learned an unbelievable amount about myself. I learned an unbelievable amount about my institution. I learned an unbelievable amount about life,” he said, speaking much more slowly than during the rest of the interview. “I learned I can withstand pressure. I learned I can make some of the tough decisions. But I also lost some of my sense of humor and became a little more cynical. . . . I think I’ve since regained some of my sense of humor and lost some of that cynicism.”

According to faculty and officials at Maryland, Slaughter was caught in a cross-fire. Some people criticized him for not firing basketball coach Charles (Lefty) Driesell immediately after the death, especially when it was revealed that other players were using drugs and that Bias, after four years at the school, was 21 credits short of graduation.

On the other hand, some alumni were angered that Driesell and Athletic Director Dick Dull later were forced into resignations, although both were cleared by a grand jury of criminal wrongdoing in the matter. And rival schools protested when Slaughter postponed the start of the next basketball season to ease pressures on the team. “That hurt me,” he said. “They were more concerned with money than the lives of those young men.”

According to history professor Richard Farrell, who will become the University of Maryland’s senate chairman next month, Slaughter handled himself very well through the Bias affair. “He was very straightforward and, by and large, had the support of the faculty,” Farrell said. Subsequent tightening in academic standards for athletes is one of Slaughter’s legacies to the school, he said.

Kristine Morris, an Occidental alumna, was on the college’s committee searching for a successor to Richard Gilman, who was president for 23 years. Morris said the committee was impressed by Slaughter’s variety of experiences, his intellect and “his aura of accessibility to students” and did not consider the Maryland basketball scandal the major issue. Yet she added, “I think his leadership skills were fine-tuned with (the Bias affair).”

Asked whether he would like to see Occidental jump into a higher division of athletic competition, Slaughter smiled and said: “I think Division III is appropriate for Occidental. I want it to be the very best Division III in the country.”

Slaughter said he wants Occidental to build a new student activities center and more science labs, but he does not want enrollment to expand and foresees no change in the school’s emphasis on small classes and the liberal arts for undergraduates.

“I didn’t come here to change the academic profile,” he said. “The focus of the college is precisely in the right direction.”