Mr. Mentor : He influenced students and launched the ethnic-studies revolution. Now Joe White wants to stop and take stock.

In his townhouse a few miles from UC Irvine, Joseph White puts on a string quartet CD and begins to sift through mounds of material on a large, square coffee table. Classical music is his choice when he’s studying or getting in the mood for his newfound practice of Zen meditation, but generally he turns to blues--”the gut-bucket, git-down Mississippi blues, the old-time stuff.”

Somewhere amid the mass of manuscripts and journals is a 1958 snapshot of Malcolm X, an acquaintance “before he went nationwide as the Malcolm X.”

Books are everywhere. Near the front door are cards and gifts from the recent party that celebrated White’s decades of teaching at UCI.

White’s countenance--he is of average build, not tall, thinnish hair tending to gray, with alert eyes behind glasses--speaks of patience and geniality. His laugh is irresistible--a tonsil-rattling mix of a croak and a snee-snee-snee. He chuckles as he locates the photo, recalling that although he and his cohorts at Michigan State University considered themselves progressive reformists, “Malcolm told us we were Uncle Toms in training. He used to come in and practice his speeches in my class.”

This week, White, 61, retires from UCI as professor of psychology and comparative culture. During a career that was a potent blend of scholarship and social activism, he crossed paths with Robert F. Kennedy, Eldridge Cleaver and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He also rocked the psychology Establishment.

Along with a handful of other black psychologists, White in 1968 made public demands that more blacks be brought into the discipline. He also charged that traditional psychological theories were bankrupt when used to study black Americans, who have a unique ethos. His theories laid the groundwork for the growth of multicultural studies nationwide.

In the past two decades, however, it has been Joe White the educator who has impressed his students.

The grandson of a traveling Baptist evangelist, White inherited a lecture style that’s “better than theater,” says a former student. “Even in three-hour classes, which can be sleepers, students would arrive 15 minutes early so as not to miss anything.”

To his students, White’s top value was as a mentor--a volunteer faculty counselor, confidant and guide. Dozens of black, white, Asian and Latino former students were among the 250 friends at his surprise retirement party.

Says Halford H. Fairchild, editor of the journal Psych Discourse: “I consider him my personal mentor, even though I never attended an institution where he taught. His reach is very broad. I call him mzee , which means ‘respected elder’ ” in Swahili.

White’s directorships, honors and fellowships fill eight resume pages. He played founding roles in Head Start, the Educational Opportunity Program and various anti-drug and anti-gang programs. A teacher and practicing clinician for all of his 32-year career, he is an affiliate staff psychologist specializing in adolescent behavior at five Southern California hospitals.

Beginning in 1969, White taught psychology and directed the black culture program at UCI. He became director of the African American Studies program in 1991, an academic minor that currently has about 20 students.

“The genius of Joe White was not just that he was champion for the (black psychology) movement, but that he inspired so many students to be critical thinkers,” says Thomas A. Parham, a former student of White’s and now a professor of social science and director of UCI’s counseling center. “He was the first to call into question the Eurocentric paradigm for defining the lives of Afro-American people.”

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From childhood, White was taught the importance of self-esteem. His strong-willed mother, Dorothy, had graduated at the top of her high school class and worked two jobs to support her children.

Born in Lincoln, Neb., in 1932, White at 2 moved with his mother to Minneapolis after his parents separated. He was just 8 when he got a job at a downtown hotel.

“The maitre d’ took a liking to me and gave me work polishing silver and running errands. It was work that I now realize really didn’t need to be done,” he says. “They let me work as a waiter when I was a teen-ager, and I made pretty good money and met all the important people in the Twin Cities.”

About that time, White’s older brother dropped out of high school. “My mother saw what was coming for me, so she yanked me out of that track and got me accepted at the Christian Brothers Catholic school across town. I was one of two blacks out of 800 students. She talked the brother superior into paying my tuition.”

Unbeknown to White, the school’s curriculum was college-prep, so after graduation he had fulfilled all the requirements for admission to the UC and Cal State systems. After working his way West as a waiter on a passenger train, he enrolled at San Francisco State in 1950.

White earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology, served a term in the Army and then looked for work, but without success. Frustrated, he turned to sympathetic counselors at San Francisco State, who told him that a doctorate degree was the only sure way for a black person to get a good job.

The problem, White realized, would be to find a graduate school in psychology that would accept a black. Rather than go through the laborious process and expense of formally applying to colleges, White wrote brief letters to several programs. He asked whether there were openings for a student who had graduated with honors and who also happened to be black.

“Most schools sent me nasty replies, but worded diplomatically, saying things like, ‘Psychology is only for brilliant people. Maybe you should think about being a recreation director or social worker,’ ” White recalls. “But Michigan State accepted me, and so did (the University of) Colorado.”

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It was after he earned his degree from Michigan State in 1962 that one of his career paths started to emerge.

When he arrived in Long Beach to begin his practice as one of only five black Americans with doctorates in clinical psychology, White became embarrassed and exasperated as landlords systematically refused him housing and office space.

Recalling the letter-writing campaign that had helped him start his doctoral program, White used a similar tactic to find housing.

“I ran a classified ad in the Long Beach paper, saying: ‘Black couple with three small children seek large apartment.’ We got a few threatening phone calls. But then a guy called, and here’s what he did: We drove around till we found a house we both liked. Then he bought it and leased it to us. We were the only black family in the Lakewood area at that time. I made a public statement, and somebody came through.”

While a faculty member at Cal State Long Beach from 1962 to ‘68, White was frustrated by its low black enrollment. “Here we were, right on the edge of South-Central L.A., and out of 15,000 students we only had 65 blacks,” White recalls. “It didn’t make any sense.”

His solution: Use the special admissions option, normally used by the college to recruit top athletes who lacked academic standing, to enroll 68 blacks and Latinos. Eventually, with the legislative help of White’s friend, Assemblyman Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), the Educational Opportunity Program was expanded statewide, and White traveled to all 19 state colleges in 1968.

During those years he was active in local housing issues with the Democratic Party in Long Beach, and in the spring of 1968 served as Long Beach campaign director for his “main man,” Robert F. Kennedy, in the presidential primary.

A few months after Kennedy was assassinated, the turmoil continued for White when he found himself in the middle of the student strike at San Francisco State.

“It shut down the campus for 4 1/2 months. I was dean of undergraduate studies, and as the highest-ranking black, I was recruited into it and became a spokesman,” he says. “The black students struck, and some white students and faculty struck with them. The kids wanted a full black studies department as an approved major. The protest to establish the legitimacy of black studies was solid; I endorsed that all the way. They were successful, and from there on came the ethnic studies at all campuses.”

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The late 1960s were years of crisis for White in other ways. In August, 1968, as the American Psychological Assn. was convening in San Francisco, he and 57 other black delegates were demanding reform within the organization.

In his 1984 book, “The Psychology of Blacks,” White described the source of their frustration:

“Graduate schools in psychology were still turning out a combined national total of only three or four black Ph.D.s in psychology a year. . . . The grand total of (blacks) among the more than 10,000 members of the American Psychological Assn., psychology’s most prestigious organization, was less than 1%.”

On the convention’s third day, White and four other black psychologists held a rancorous meeting with the executive council. They demanded that more blacks be admitted to doctoral programs and wanted the association to make a statement against prevailing conclusions in psychology texts that blacks were an inferior race.

“It was a real intense meeting,” White recalls. “Some whites were called racist, and some on the council had been our own teachers. So it was almost a generational battle. Their notion was, why were we rejecting all they had taught us?

“What evolved from this was the APA forming a division of minority affairs, and we formed the Assn. of Black Psychologists. But we think there’s a lot left to be done.”

In district court a few years later, White and other black psychologists successfully challenged the legality of IQ tests that they said had caused a disproportionate percentage of black students to be labeled mentally retarded.

In White’s ground-breaking article, “Toward a Black Psychology,” published in Ebony magazine in 1970, he wrote that traditional psychology theories, which had been developed by white psychologists to explain white people, were inadequate to understand black lifestyles and unfairly led to African Americans being defined as deviant or intellectually inferior to whites.

Nearly a quarter-century later, black psychology is “a little beyond tolerance but not into total acceptability,” White says. “The strongest area of acceptability is in the practitioners. They require multiethnic psychology in the training. Without it, I don’t know how they could do marriage and family counseling or child development in California, which is 49% ethnic minority.”

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For now, White says he’ll use at least the first year of his retirement “to get my head straight” and take stock of his career. He wants to spend more time with his wife, Lois, an elementary schoolteacher, and keep in closer touch with his three adult daughters.

He’ll also continue working on a book exploring the social psychology of black males, and another book on adult life transitions.

For 1995, White is considering a tempting offer: an endowed chair at the University of Nebraska.

Part of the appeal, he admits, is that it would bring him full circle. For he would be returning in triumph not only to the city of his birth, but also to the very university where, during the Depression, his mother scrubbed floors at fraternity houses and his father, Joseph Sr., shined shoes at King’s Barber Shop three blocks away.