Critic Takes No Prisoners in War on UC Policies : Education: Former professor Charlie Schwartz is a fractious force at regents meetings. Demanding reforms and targeting budgets, he badgers and baffles system officials.

Charlie Schwartz is the University of California’s one-man jeering section.

When he rises to speak at public meetings, regents sit stone-faced or take potty breaks. Even those who sympathize the most with what he has to say--the students--keep their political distance.

Yet this doesn’t faze him. The wiry, high-strung former Berkeley physics professor says he will not be deterred from his quest to expose fiscal high jinks and arrogance by those running UC’s nine campuses, three national laboratories and five medical centers.

“I really think the university is in a mess and what you have is a corrupt administrative system,” declared Schwartz, who has emerged as the UC system’s chief critic since retiring two years ago. “I can’t prove that anyone has committed any criminal act or violated any moral code, but the contradictions keep piling up. . . .”

Harsh charges, which university officials vigorously deny.

But what especially chafes their sensibilities is the bomb-throwing way Schwartz chooses to take on a bureaucracy that each year educates 163,000 students, employs 150,000 people and spends more than $10 billion--more than the gross national product of 30 countries.

In a personal magazine, or zine, that he mails to more than 200 subscribers, Schwartz has accused UC officials of hypocrisy, disinformation, “egregious” lies and the lack of “moral legitimacy.” During regents meetings, he often presses his points by waving his newsletter and speaking in rapid-fire Brooklynese to squeeze the most out of his three allotted minutes.

He’s been hauled away for shouting from the audience. Last year, he blew a whistle when the regents shut off his microphone. And in November, he yelled “No, you’re out of order!” to a regent who angrily gaveled him down.

In his private comments, he is no more charitable. Musing on the regents’ apparent disinterest in his campaign, he said: “Are these people just being hoodwinked or are they part of a corrupt political movement to steal the university from the public? I have no conclusion. The fight is ongoing.”

And so, say some regents, is their headache.

“He’s a one-man jeering crowd,” said UC Regent Roy Brophy, a Sacramento developer who has walked out during Schwartz speeches. “Right now, he’s just something we have to put up with.

“We don’t know his rationale for the way he’s doing things,” he said. “What is he trying to get out of it? Does he want to straighten out the University of California? Does he want the attention? Is he trying to get known?”

Yes. Yes. Yes--and more.

Schwartz says he wants to bring democracy to an “aristocratic” system run by a secretive bureaucracy. He wants open debate in a public institution where decisions appear carefully scripted and the public, in the role of observer, is kept behind ropes at regents meetings.

The results have been mixed, said one former student leader. Although Schwartz has succeeded in raising legitimate questions and clashing with the university’s button-down style, some of his budget proposals seem to “come out of nowhere.”

“He forces (the regents) to acknowledge that they are undemocratic and arrogant, sitting on their thrones, looking down on everyone else,” said Tobin Freid, former UC Students Assn. president and now a White House fellow. “But as far as having him at the negotiating table with us, I wouldn’t do that.”

Still, there have been incremental victories. Earlier this year, Schwartz met with UC Provost Walter E. Massey to pitch an “alternative budget.” A Sacramento Bee columnist suggested his proposals deserved exploration and a San Francisco radio station recently invited him to an on-air discussion about the recent flap over UC President Jack Peltason’s comments during a secretly taped staff meeting.

Not bad for a radical with a portfolio. A New York native who began his teaching career at Berkeley in 1959, Schwartz began locking horns with authority soon after his brother’s 1966 death. The tragedy, he said, caused him to rethink his life as an unquestioning teacher of mathematical physics.

He veered off into the free-speech movements convulsing Berkeley at the time, began teaching with an anti-war bent and launched a sustained effort outside the classroom to get UC labs out of nuclear weapons research. He’s been arrested an estimated half-dozen times, once at a 1982 demonstration at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

After a hiatus during the Reagan years, Schwartz began pushing UC reform, calling for the direct election of nine of the 26 regents, the majority of whom are political appointees. He sponsored an unsuccessful ballot initiative to that effect.

But it was the 1992 scandal in which regents secretly voted a $737,000 golden handshake for departing President David Pierpont Gardner that riveted Schwartz’s attention to the university’s budget, 25 years’ worth of which he has studied.

Now a professor emeritus, living on Social Security and a $55,000-a-year retirement check, Schwartz uses his Berkeley office and $650 in yearly research money to fire off anti-administration newsletters and study how best to trip up UC officials with their own numbers.

After combing through public testimony and budget documents, Schwartz has concluded that Peltason is lying when he says that 20% has been trimmed from administrative costs over the past four years. Or that fee hikes are justified in part because students are paying only about 30% of the cost of their education.

Schwartz says his own research has unearthed major contradictions: UC’s spending on attorneys has been increasing twice as fast as spending on instruction; Peltason has trimmed administration by only 2.8% and there’s at least $260 million of “excess fat” left; next year, the $4,347 charged undergraduates will be 87% of their true educational costs.

Thus, Schwartz contends, Peltason has been engaged in an elaborate budgetary shell game to pay administrators huge salaries while gouging students and depressing faculty salaries.

“Charlie has a fixation and part of his motivation is to embarrass the administration,” said UC Budget Director Lawrence Hershman, who has met with Schwartz as well.

Schwartz counters that he will not be “marginalized” in his crusade to “save this university, which I love and admire,” although he admits to an “aura of circus” around how he is doing it.

“I don’t think everyone should behave like me,” he admits, “but there’s very much of a need for some people like me, who do make noise, who are irritating, who are provocative--but truthful.”