Former UC Irvine Vice Chancellor John Miltner Dies : Educator: During his tenure as the top fund-raising officer at UCI, private donations nearly tripled. He left in 1991 to head a university in Illinois.

Former UC Irvine vice chancellor John R. Miltner, who guided UCI to new records in private fund raising before departing in 1991 to head Illinois’ Millikin University, has died after undergoing cancer treatment, university officials said. He was 46.

Miltner died Sunday evening at the Carle Clinic in Champaign, Ill., where he was receiving therapy for an unspecified form of skin cancer, said officials for Millikin University in Decatur, Ill.

“Millikin University and the Decatur community have lost an outstanding leader,” Burnell D. Kraft, chairman of the Illinois university’s board of trustees, said in a statement issued Tuesday. “In his time at the university . . . Miltner impressed everyone as a visionary whose excitement about the future was contagious. . . . He touched us all.”

Before taking the helm at Millikin, Miltner served for eight years as UCI’s vice chancellor for advancement, the top fund-raising officer for the Irvine campus.

During his tenure at UCI, private donations nearly tripled from $10.1 million in 1982-83 to $27.3 million in 1990, making UCI the largest fund-raising institution in Orange County.

“John did more than just raise money,” said Gary Hunt, a senior vice president for the Irvine Co. who served with Miltner on a variety of university and community foundations and boards. “If John left a legacy for UCI . . . it is that a town-and-gown relationship was created under his leadership.”

Miltner was brought to UCI in 1983 by the university’s founding chancellor, Daniel G. Aldrich Jr., who retired a year later. But he also “clicked” with Aldrich’s successor, Jack W. Peltason. Together, the two men are credited with building bridges to the city of Irvine and the greater Orange County business community, forging ties that helped bring endowments for research and scholarship that will endure into the next century.

But Miltner, who had served as top development officer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and the Boy Scouts of America, had a hankering to do something more than raise money for a university. He wanted to run one.

To gain the required doctoral degree to be a college president, he studied while at UCI and eventually earned a doctor of philosophy degree in philanthropy from the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. At one point, Miltner even discussed becoming a candidate for the presidency of Cal State Fullerton.

It was in 1991 that Millikin trustees tapped Miltner to head the small, private undergraduate university affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.

Friends who stayed in touch with Miltner learned only over the summer that he had been found to have a rare form of skin cancer and was ill. Even then, he and his doctors were optimistic about his prognosis.

“The illness came as a shock to a lot of people,” said Hunt, who spoke regularly by telephone with Miltner in recent weeks. “The fact that he died came as a real shock to us because we were all under the impression that he was on the mend.”

Miltner is survived by his wife, Carol, and their son, Robert, who lived with them in Decatur. He also is survived by his adoptive children from his wife’s previous marriage--William Miltner of San Diego, Bryan Miltner of Newport Beach, Kelli Miltner-Rogers of East Rutherford, N.J., and Tiffany Miltner of Huntington Beach. He is also survived by his mother, Grace Allee of Conneaut, Ohio, and a brother, William, of Novelty, Ohio.

Memorial services were scheduled for 3 p.m. Friday at the Decatur campus’s fine arts center. Arrangements for additional services at UCI and in Ohio were pending.

In lieu of flowers, the family asked that donations be made in Miltner’s name to the American Cancer Society.