Second Peace Studies Chair Filled at UCI : International affairs: The scholar and expert in how nations work cooperatively to achieve their goals will assume the Thomas and Elizabeth Tierney endowment.

A renowned expert in international relations and arms control has become the second scholar in less than a week to accept an endowed professorship in peace studies at UC Irvine, boosting the university’s bid to become a leading center for the study of how and why nations go to war.

Patrick Morgan, a professor at Washington State University for 24 years, said Tuesday that he will come to UCI this fall to fill the Thomas and Elizabeth Tierney Chair in Peace Studies. Last week, political economist Martin C. McGuire from the University of Maryland accepted UCI’s Clifford Heinz Chair in the Economics and Public Policy of Peace.

“Together with the McGuire appointment and the existing faculty, Morgan is going to give us the critical mass we need to become a national center for peace and conflict studies,” said Keith Nelson, director of UCI’s 8-year-old Global Peace and Conflict Studies program.

Morgan, author of a seminal text on nuclear-deterrence theory in 1977, said he accepted the offer because of the commitment that UCI and the University of California have made to expand the study of international affairs. Morgan already is collaborating on a Ford Foundation project examining the so-called “new world order” with the director of UC’s Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation in San Diego.

“It’s a wonderful professional opportunity,” said Morgan, 50, who will be paid $72,200, a top salary in the political science area. Besides his research work, which is funded by the endowment, he said he will teach at least four courses a year, about average for a new professor in UCI’s department of politics and society.

McGuire, 57, who will begin at UCI in January, 1992, will receive a university salary of $100,400, which is near the top scale for economics professors. Like Morgan, he also will get help as needed with housing relocation costs, mortgage loans and research start-up funds.

Morgan is the fourth person offered the chair endowed in 1987 with $300,000 from Thomas and Elizabeth Tierney of Santa Ana Heights. One other economist was offered the Heinz chair, which was created in 1988. Although the previous five candidates turned down the UCI posts for personal reasons, it left the fledgling peace studies group with nearly $1 million in three unfilled research positions.

A search is under way to fill UCI’s third peace chair, which was established with a $300,000 endowment in 1989 from the Warmington Family Foundation of Costa Mesa. That post was created to study the ecological aspects of peace and international cooperation.

UCI officials insist that they have not lowered their sights from luminaries such as Marvin L. Goldberger, the 68-year-old former president of Caltech and now director of the Institute for Advanced Physics at Princeton University, who turned down the Tierney chair last year.

“They are the cream in their fields--they are among the best political scientists and economists in the country,” said William H. Parker, associate executive vice chancellor at UCI.

If they are not exactly household names, in many respects, younger scholars such as Morgan and McGuire are a better match for UCI than some of the previous candidates who were older and at the pinnacle of their careers, Nelson said.

“He’s not a burned-out superstar. . . . He’s a star on the rise,” Nelson said of Morgan.

Morgan received his doctorate in political science at Yale University in 1967 after graduating with honors in political science in 1962 from Harpur College, now called State University of New York in Binghamton.

He was immediately hired as an associate professor of political science at Washington State, where he has kept up an active publishing career and traveled to continue his work in international relations.

Morgan is a past fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He also was the recipient of a Fulbright Award in 1985, which allowed him to teach and study in Belgium, and was a visiting scholar at UCLA’s Center for International and Strategic Affairs in 1981.

Under the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency, he has lectured in Belgium and Germany on international relations. While at UCI, Morgan also plans to continue giving summer classes for European diplomats in Belgium, according to James N. Danziger, chairman of UCI’s politics and society department.

On the education front, Morgan served as a consultant to the American Council on Education for its 1981 commission to study issues in higher education. Yet despite his heavy research schedule, he was given Washington State’s highest faculty honor for outstanding teaching in 1987.

Today, Danziger said, Morgan is at the forefront of research in multilateralism, the study of how nations work cooperatively to achieve their goals.

“He was already studying the dynamics of the so-called new world order before politicians had even begun talking about it,” Danziger said. “He’s also approachable and easy to talk to. That’s one of his nice characteristics as a person who (fills) the Tierney Chair. He’ll be able to speak on these issues . . . to politicians and other interested citizens who want to learn more about conflict resolution and the pursuit of peace.”

Morgan and his wife have two daughters and a son, all in college or just finishing their studies. Morgan said he probably will commute during his first year or so at UCI while his wife completes a doctorate program in art history at the University of Washington in Seattle.