LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Jack Peltason : Struggling to Keep California’s Promise of Higher Education

In 1992, when Jack W. Peltason became the 16th president of the University of California, it already seemed like the hardest of times for the nine-campus, 162,000-student system. And it would get worse before it got better.

During Peltason’s tenure, UC has lost about $300 million in state revenues, and student fees have risen by more than one-third. The faculty went without cost-of-living raises for two years and the following year took a 3.5% pay cut. To cut costs, the university offered an early-retirement package that depleted the ranks of its most experienced professors. By January, 1995, when Gov. Pete Wilson proposed a budget that plotted out four years of moderate funding increases for higher education, UC was hurting. But thanks, in part, to Peltason’s conciliatory style, some observers say, it was still very much alive.

In four months, the 71-year-old political scientist will step down, three years to the day after taking the $243,500-a-year job. The former chancellor of UC Irvine jokes this is his third attempt to retire, and this time, he says, “I think I’m going to make it.” He will leave a university that is still recovering. Wilson’s budget proposal fell far short of the 7.9% funding increase UC had asked for, providing just 2% more for UC this year and annual 4% increases for the next three years. UC officials say the governor’s plan will provide financial stability, if not resources for much improvement.

But Peltason says recent budget woes have forever changed UC. In an interview in his Oakland office just weeks before a search committee is expected to announce his successor, Peltason talked at length about the future of the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education, which assigns most of the state’s research, Ph.D. and professional school training to UC. The plan says that the top eighth of the state’s high school students are eligible for UC and the top one-third for California State University, while anyone who can benefit from additional education can attend a community college. The implied promise of the plan, which was drafted in 1960, is a place in public higher education for all.

But Peltason says that promise is in danger of being broken. Particularly during the next decade, when the state’s college-age population is expected to surge, Peltason says UC may need to play a different role in undergraduate education than in years past. The alternative, he says, is mediocrity.

Question: To hear some members of the UC presidential search committee talk, your successor will ideally be a scholar, an inspirational speaker, an ambassador for public education, a fund-raiser, a sports cheerleader and chief executive officer. What qualities are needed to do your job?

Answer: Most search committees list their criteria and then they find out: God--she’s not available. And they have to go find a human being. There are a lot of qualities that are essential. Universities have a lot of business enterprises, so, therefore, you need to be able to manage those. But they are primarily educational institutions and they’re primarily for the purpose of the transmission and application of knowledge.

My own preference, without trying to prescribe, is that universities such as UC select administrators from people who have been on the front line of teaching, research and public service. Just as the military has people come up from the ranks. To preside over an enterprise of faculty and students, you need to be knowledgeable about that enterprise. Your decisions are more likely to be respected than if you have not participated in that process.

Q: Have there been parts of the job that surprised you?

A: None of us, I think, anticipated the depth of the recession. We thought we had a few short years of belt tightening. Also, I’ve never had a job where more people want to be told everything first. I mean, the regents need to be told before the newspapers. The chancellors want to be told before that. The faculty say, “How come you didn’t let us know? “ There’s a lot of base-touching.

Q: Is your job fundamentally political rather than academic?

A: In a way, yes, if you define political in not a pejorative sense. You don’t, as the president of the university, teach a class. You don’t have the time to be a full-time professor. The president of this university, in the course of one day, may talk to some undergraduates, to some legislators, to some faculty, to irate taxpayers, to newspaper people. You’re presiding over a process, finding support for things which get all of these people moving in the same general direction.

Q: When you announced you were going to step down, many people credited you as a consensus-builder who helped UC through a difficult time. But others say you’ve been too passive.

A: Those are people who believe that university presidents should take to the balcony, make pronouncements, make lots of speeches, crack the whip. They may be right. I don’t think that’s the most effective way to provide leadership at an institution of this size, quality, character and diversity. This university cannot be the shadow of any one person. And no one person is wise enough, smart enough, to say: “We’re going to go that way and everybody march.” I think you have to be able to make tough decisions. But I think developing a collective sense of decision-making, especially at a university this size [is important].

The faculty and the administrators and the Board of Regents and the Legislature--each of these constituencies and the public have something to add to the process. Universities are built for the ages. We are, admittedly, conservative institutions. We respond to the climate change, but we don’t respond to the daily weather--and we shouldn’t.

Q: Regent Ward Connerly has suggested that UC needs a “newer kind of president without so much fear about pacifying the faculty to move us ahead.” Do you cater to the faculty more than other constituencies?

A: All constituencies are significant, but the faculty is the one that delivers the education. When you say UC is a great university, it is because of the quality of its faculty. No institution in the world has this conglomerate of brilliant people working for it in all fields. They are a constituency that I plead guilty to being concerned about.

Q: You have so many things to worry about. Deferred maintenance, capital spending, construction of new buildings, affirmative action, enrollment, compensation for faculty. Which of these keep you up at night?

A: That’s the great thing about this job. It’s a perpetual liberal education. There’s no problem that human beings face that doesn’t come across my desk. I’ve often said I go home at night worrying about a different problem than I came to work with because, during the course of the day, somebody came around the door and said, “Have you heard about this?”

But the continuing problems are ones of resources. Getting the resources and being sure they’re properly allocated and used. One thing you’ve got to avoid like the plague is a patronizing attitude. . . . A mentor once said to me--and I think it’s one of the reasons I have a hoarse voice all the time--that a university is held together by talk. You’re always going to this group, talking, going to the next group. It’s fascinating. Sometimes, it’s like I want to [say], “Stop. Rest a minute.”

Did you ever rent a place by the ocean, and you were there during the day, and it was just wonderful? But at 10 o’clock at night you say, “Turn it off!” That’s how I feel at the end of the day: “I’ve had enough problems today. Don’t tell me anymore.”

Q: In the wake of the recession, does UC just need to hunker down and wait for better times, or does it need fundamental change?

A: There’s one school that’s the hunker-down school. Just hunker down, the recession will be over, we’ll go back to the old days, we don’t have to change. They’re wrong. We’re going to have to change. There are going to be millions more people in the state of California. And UC is going to have to learn how to deliver a quality education more effectively, with fewer dollars. Then there’s the other side that says, “Boy, there’s a paradigm shift. Universities of the future are going to be totally different. You’ve got to throw out the whole thing and start all over.” They’re wrong. The answer is somewhere in between.

Q: You rode out the budget cutbacks, in part, by raising fees and by offering professors early retirement. But those solutions won’t necessarily be available to the next president. Your successor is going to have less flexibility.

A: That’s correct. We came through these big cuts in the past few years so well. I think it’s really a magnificent miracle. [But] we can’t do it again in the next four years, because we can’t retire anybody else. That’s why I’ve been to Sacramento, explaining to the governor and the Legislature . . . . UC, when I came on three years ago, had never been in greater shape or in greater peril. We have been hurt by these last cuts. We’re not as good as we were. We haven’t fallen off the cliff. But we have used up the short-term fixes.

Q: I’ve heard you say that the futures of UC and California State University are closely linked. Some might argue that, with the approach of the so-called Tidal Wave II--the boom of high school graduates that is expected to begin in 2005--the state should re-examine each of their roles.

A: They might want to re-examine how many [students] the University of California’s kind of education is appropriate for . . . . That’s always a question that can be legitimately raised. We [at UC] don’t need more students to build a quality university. With nine campuses, we’re not clamoring to build our empire. On the other hand, we don’t believe we can exist in the state of California and say, “Well, we’re sorry kids, we don’t have room for you. Go somewhere else”--without being concerned about where “somewhere else” is.

Q: Of the three major elements that the California Master Plan for Higher Education seeks to preserve--access, affordability and quality--do you see UC’s primary role as maintaining quality?

A: Quality in the sense that we want to maintain our mission as a teaching/research institution. The kind of education that we provide is for those undergraduates who want to come to a place where they meet and interact with a faculty that have a responsibility for not only teaching but for producing knowledge. The university has a job to do in that sense. One of our first priorities is to be sure that undergraduates have a place to get a good education. And UC needs to provide its share of that. But we don’t have the whole responsibility. Nor is that our only responsibility.

Q: The Master Plan says UC will serve the top eighth of high school graduates--or 12.5%. What if, instead of 8% of high school graduates choosing to attend, as is true today, all those people enrolled?

A: I don’t think we can manage that without undermining our quality. I have said the greatest danger I think UC faces is a drift into mediocrity. You could gradually undermine its resources and overwhelm it with students so that it would eventually be a pretty good university rather than a great one.

Q: But theoretically under the Master Plan, you must serve all students in the top 12.5%.

A: Well, yeah. The assumption is that the financing would be there to maintain the quality. Again, that’s where we get back to that other argument. Some people say, “You’ve got to learn how to do it better.” I say, yeah, that’s right. But the state can’t expect us to manage [the university] away. We’ll make our contribution. But the state has to produce-- somebody has to produce the resources.

. . . The Master Plan [contains] . . . an implied social contract with the students that we’ll find a place for everyone. It’s that part of the Master Plan that’s in jeopardy. How are we going to find a place for them? By being better, and by getting the resources so when they get there, they get the kind of education which they’ve been promised.