Candid Style Key to UCI’s New Leader : Education: Laurel Wilkening’s reputation as agent of change will be tested when she takes over as chancellor July 1.

When a panel of top scientists reviewed NASA’s 1989 proposal to fulfill President Bush’s mandate for change in the nation’s space program, most were appalled by what they saw as a lack of vision in the report and at the agency itself.

Feelings ran so high within the advisory group that a statement blasting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seemed imminent.

University of Washington provost and planetary scientist Laurel L. Wilkening, as chair of the panel, chose instead to take their concerns directly to the space agency’s chief.

Viewed now, her actions say much about the style she is expected to bring to UC Irvine, when she takes over as its third chancellor on July 1.

With astronomer Carl Sagan, physicist Edward Teller and other panelists looking on, Wilkening informed then-NASA director Admiral Richard H. Truly that his agency’s report was “a disaster.” NASA, she told him during the tense White House meeting, must become more imaginative and less insular and bureaucratic.

“If it had been left to the other people on the committee, I’m afraid it could have become a real bashing session,” recalled Mark Albrecht, former executive secretary to the National Space Council during the Bush Administration. “Laurel was capable of being frank and candid . . . in a way that wasn’t just critical, but also supportive and constructive.”

Truly ultimately was fired by Bush in early 1992 over continued disagreement about the direction of the nation’s space program. Yet thanks to Wilkening, “this pivotal meeting was really the first step toward positive change in the culture of NASA,” Albrecht said.

At the University of Washington, where Wilkening became the provost in 1988, colleagues say she displayed similar skills as problem-solver, consensus-builder and agent of change.

Critics and admirers alike say the 48-year-old Wilkening’s powerful intellect, directness, tenacity and willingness to listen to all sides are qualities that enable her to lead independent-minded academics, and do it with imagination and sensitivity.

Her initiatives as the No. 2 officer at the University of Washington may also signal the kinds of actions she’ll take here: an insistence on hiring more women and minorities, improving the lot of undergraduates and upgrading research facilities. UW colleagues say she probably will proceed cautiously at UCI, gathering as much information as possible before acting. But when she moves, expect decisiveness, they say.

“She gets work done without being ham-fisted or directive about it,” said John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “And let me tell you, getting university professors, who are the biggest prima donnas in the world, to work together is no mean feat.”

‘I’m a Realist’

Wilkening, one of a small but growing number of women to reach the top rungs of academe, dismissed such praise with self-effacing good humor in a recent interview in her Seattle office.

“I don’t know if I’m good at it,” Wilkening said with a laugh as she sat near a small voodoo doll, one of the myriad signs of her passion for primitive and folk art on display in her campus office and nearby home overlooking Lake Washington. “I’m a realist. . . . It’s hard to make a unique contribution (as a university chancellor). What you can do is create opportunities for others to take ownership of initiatives--so it doesn’t become the whim of one person, but instead a shared goal of the group.”

Her style, she says, comes from her physicist father, who worked on the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear bomb during World War II, then became a professor and dean of graduate studies at a small New Mexico college.

“Being honest, open and direct--I think those are virtues for a person in a position of public trust. I learned that from my father,” Wilkening said. “He was very smart, but he was also very sympathetic to people.”

Such skills may be sorely tested at UCI, say many faculty, staff and students at the still youthful research university of 17,000 students, which opened in the fall of 1964.

UCI, like many UC campuses, is reeling from two years of deep budget cuts, layoffs and soaring fees. There is a growing malaise among many faculty members and administrators, who complain of feeling isolated from top campus decision makers.

Students, too, have grown increasingly frustrated. Several hundred UCI students demonstrated this spring over escalating fees and expected cuts in service, and more than 200 students staged a monthlong hunger strike to force creation of a long-promised Asian-American studies program at a campus where 43% of the students are of Asian descent.

Women faculty complain of salary inequities, the slow pace in recruiting and promoting women and minorities. In particular, many women at UCI’s College of Medicine are demanding change to correct unequal pay and lack of tenured status for women, a problem the school’s dean, Dr. Walter L. Henry, has vowed to remedy.

Other medical school physicians have signed petitions demanding that Henry step down. They complain that he pays too little attention to college affairs while pushing to build a new center for health sciences on campus. But Acting Chancellor L. Dennis Smith said many of Henry’s critics are really unhappy about proposed new rules that would sharply curtail outside earnings of doctors throughout the University of California system.

Wilkening, meanwhile, won’t reveal her plans for UCI, except to say that she has a lot to learn--about the campus and the UC system as a whole. She has asked questions about a range of issues on her few trips to Orange County, and even has made discreet inquiries about the Asian-American Studies controversy.

Her five years as University of Washington provost, the chief officer for academic policy and budget, are thought to have been ideal training for the UCI chancellor’s post because of the strong parallels between the two campuses.

The Seattle campus, which has twice as many students and four times as many faculty as UCI, has strong biomedical and health sciences programs, and a prestigious teaching and research hospital. UCI also has a teaching hospital and a medical school, whose dean has ambitious plans to build a center for health sciences, leading with neurological science. Her familiarity with issues such as patent rights, trends in federal research funding and public-private partnerships are expected to be invaluable for UCI.

At the University of Washington, which snares the most federal research dollars of any public university in the United States, Wilkening perhaps will be most remembered for spotlighting undergraduate education. She diverted money to reduce Gargantuan survey classes and add sorely needed lab sessions for courses such as freshman chemistry and physics. And she backed programs to link freshmen with faculty and upper-class students as a way of building human bridges at the vast campus of more than 34,500 students.

Wilkening also takes pride in what she terms the “steady gains” in hiring highly qualified minority and women faculty, a priority she set for the campus soon after her arrival. On her watch, UW professor Wallace Loh became the first Asian-American dean of a major U.S. law school.

Wilkening also helped persuade the state legislature that funding for new research facilities was key to keeping the university, indeed the state of Washington, at the cutting edge well into the next century.

“She is one of 10, maybe 20, university presidents in this country who understand the new technologies, who understand modern-day competition, information highways . . . and the concept of creating networks of regional libraries,” said Dr. John N. Lein, UW’s director of federal relations. “She’s one of the few who understand the way science is going to have to change . . . and how we can turn these big ships--by that I mean universities--around.”

Women in Science

Wilkening considers herself a product of the student ferment of the 1960s. A staunch feminist, Wilkening’s very presence challenged those who thought women didn’t belong in the arena of science. A visiting chemist at UC San Diego once told her as much.

“He said women, children and dogs belong in the home,” Wilkening recalled as she posed patiently, if reluctantly, for a photographer in the Seattle campus’ bustling Red Square. “I thought he was joking, so I made some smart remark back. But I discovered he was completely serious.”

When she became an assistant professor at the University of Arizona in 1973, she learned that a male colleague hired at the same time with identical credentials was paid $1,000 a year more than she. “I went to the chair of the department about it,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I think you’re right, we’ll change it.’ ”

She won that round, and many more. But Wilkening acknowledges that women in science and other fields “still feel that chilly climate” of sexism on the nation’s university campuses. “A lot of it is subconscious, I think. So you have to raise consciousness. . . . I’d like for young women to become a little more assertive.”

Wilkening arrived at the Seattle campus with impeccable scientific credentials and experience running research programs as dean and vice provost for research at the University of Arizona. She also had served on U.S. space policy committees, including a stint as vice chairman of the National Commission on Space when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986.

So her push for improving undergraduate education caught many at the Seattle campus by surprise. Rather than impose her own ideas on UW, however, she asked the faculty to decide how best to make the changes she was willing to fund.

“I could decree that there should be a freshman physics lab,” Wilkening said. “But I know that unless the faculty has ownership of something, it will never succeed.”

She was more blunt about another priority: increased recruitment and promotion of minorities and women. The Seattle campus’ record was average for ethnic diversity; Wilkening wanted more.

“Our student body population lagged somewhat behind the makeup of the state population, and I thought the major problem was that our faculty wasn’t diversified enough,” she said.

She offered both carrot and stick: Deans and department chairs who actively recruited qualified women and minorities would get money to bring those people aboard as “targets of opportunity” hires. Those who didn’t, she warned, just might lose funds to departments that did.

Some saw her as “beating the drum” on this and other “politically correct” issues.

Milo Gibaldi, dean of UW’s School of Pharmacy, said he tangled with her, protesting that his division already was pushing hard to hire women and minorities.

“Sometimes she gets passionate about things,” Gibaldi said. “She didn’t see the numbers she wanted. . . . But eventually, she found that we were working our tail off in this area.”

Wilkening shrugs at the criticism, and ticks off the recruits she says will diversify and benefit the university over the long term. “This year, we hired the first black woman engineer on this campus. She came to us with a degree from (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). . . . We hired a senior black professor in our College of Education, and we hope he’ll be able to bring in younger people.”

Says Wilkening, “We’re making modest, but steady increases.”

The diversity push was not popular with some faculty. Likewise, her creation of a tenure review committee led some to accuse her of centralizing too much power in the provost’s office, and trying to usurp the traditional role of faculty peers and department heads to decide who deserves lifetime job protection. Wilkening says she only wanted to encourage more uniform standards among the campus’ 16 schools and colleges.

Wilkening also added to the campus bureaucracy with the creation of a new vice provost for research, someone who would grapple with touchy legal issues such as technology transfer--which is expected to be of growing concern at UC Irvine--and matters such as conflicts of interest and scientific misconduct. Previously, those duties were handled by the dean of graduate studies.

“This has caused a lot of upset around the campus,” she admitted. “But some things have to be centralized. You can’t have everybody going off to do their own patenting.”

Earl J. Bell, a professor of urban design and planning at UW and president of the campus chapter of the American Assn. of University Professors, called it another example of how Wilkening has increased her already large staff.

“Bloated administration is a problem in academia generally, but since she arrived, she’s added at least three people to the provost’s office,” he said.

Bell said her controversial attempt to close down some branch campus libraries to make room for more faculty and teaching assistants caused an uproar among some faculty.

After that, he said, it seemed as though she was kept “on a very short leash” by UW President William Gerberding.

Not so, says Gerberding, who made sure longtime friend and UC President Jack W. Peltason knew that Wilkening was an “ideal” choice to be UCI chancellor, the job Peltason held until last Sept. 30.

“I run a very democratic institution, people are encouraged to express ideas and then we argue about them,” said Gerberding, a former executive vice chancellor at UCLA. “I am more conservative institutionally than she is, and she is more imaginative and creative than I am.”

If Wilkening needs more seasoning as an administrator, it is in diplomacy, Gerberding said. “She’s not long on guile, and guile comes in handy for CEOs. . . . Laurel is just so straight--I suppose that as a kid, she was in mortal danger of becoming a nerd.”

Colleagues at UW, NASA and elsewhere cite her openness to all points of view and her belief in working for positive goals as hallmarks of her success.

Even Truly, the fired NASA chief and former space shuttle astronaut, cites her professionalism and constructive approach to problems.

“So many people in today’s society throw stones at people in complicated jobs,” he said from his home in Atlanta. “There’s a difference between carping and being critical and making constructive criticism. I thought Laurel . . . was quite willing to listen to all sides of whatever issue she was dealing with, . . . come to her own conclusion and be fair in doing so.”

Ear for Students

UW student leaders generally praise Wilkening for her open-door policy and her responsiveness.

She also handled a major student protest on campus in a direct way.

Angered over the not-guilty verdicts in the trial of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King in April, 1992, UW students swarmed the administration building, demanding to speak to campus leaders about racism. Someone smashed a window, others bashed the doors with a table. Security guards in riot gear waited inside.

President Gerberding wasn’t on campus to respond, but Wilkening was.

“Laurel just walked out the door into the middle of the crowd,” recalled Fred Campbell, dean of undergraduate education and vice provost at UW. “Nobody could hear her, so she took off her high heels and climbed on top of the table they had been using as a battering ram. You saw her engage this crowd, quiet them down and bring the leaders into the foyer.”

At UCI this year, student demonstrators have been handled differently by Acting Chancellor Smith, who in July will return to his role as executive vice chancellor, the No. 2 official on campus.

When Asian students marched on his office in April and again this month, demanding an audience over the Asian-American studies issue, they were told Smith wasn’t in and couldn’t be reached.

But in fact, Smith was in his office on April 22, according to several campus sources who were present in the chancellor’s suite during that demonstration. Smith, who had ordered his staff to say he was not on campus, only agreed to speak to protesting students later in the day as a way of getting them to leave, the sources said.

When Asian-American students marched on Smith’s suite again on June 10, his staff told students that he was unreachable, even as he was speaking on his car telephone to staff in the office, several campus officials said. Once again, Smith, through his aides, agreed to meet with students later in the day at another building. But had protesters not left the administration building by 5 p.m. that day, Smith had issued orders to have them arrested, officials said.

Asked of his whereabouts for the demonstrations, Smith said in an interview, “I don’t remember whether I was there (in the office) or not.” But he added, “I don’t know if it’s very wise for the chancellor of any institution to meet with demonstrators on demand.”

Beverly Sandeen, a UCI graduate student who served on the chancellor’s selection committee, is banking that Wilkening will pull the campus out of its doldrums and provide a vision of the future.

“If she can get us together and get us through this crisis, then she will really have accomplished something,” Sandeen said. “We’re pinning a lot of hopes on her.”

* FREE SPIRIT: Laurel Wilkening has a wicked sense of humor. A23

* UCI GRADUATION: More than 3,600 degrees awarded at ceremonies. B3

Tale of Two Campuses

Laurel L. Wilkening becomes chancellor of UC Irvine after five years at the University of Washington as provost, the No. 2 administrator. Both schools are strong in biomedical research, have medical schools and run teaching hospitals.

University of UC Irvine Washington Fall enrollment 17,139 34,598 % undergraduate 81 74 Faculty 1,035 4,077 Colleges/schools 9 16 Nobel laureates 0 4 Annual budget* $600 million $1.3 billion Federal research funds* $61.9 million $339 million Private donations* $21.9 million $59.3 million

* 1991-92 academic year

Sources: UC Irvine; University of Washington