Panel Said to Back Outsider for Top UC Post

A University of California Board of Regents committee has decided to recommend the president of Ohio State University to be the next UC president, reaching outside the nine-campus system for the position for the first time in at least three decades, sources said Saturday.

E. Gordon Gee, 51, is the unanimous choice of the eight-member presidential search committee, sources said. Regent Roy T. Brophy, the committee chairman, refused to confirm or deny Gee’s selection, but said he plans to bring a recommendation to the full board for a vote within a few weeks.

If the board affirms Gee’s nomination and he accepts, it will bring to a close a five-month search that yielded 160 nominations from around the nation. UC President Jack W. Peltason, who is 71, steps down Oct. 1 after three years in the job.

On Saturday, national education experts said Gee--a bespectacled legal scholar given to wearing bow ties and suspenders--is supremely qualified to lead UC, which has been hit hard by budget cuts. His last name is pronounced with a hard G, as in geese.

“He’s a home run with the bases loaded in terms of what he’s done at Ohio State,” said C. Peter Magrath, president of the National Assn. of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, who recently completed a glowing evaluation of Gee’s five years in his current job. When Ohio State lost nearly $80 million in state funds, Magrath noted, Gee used it as an opportunity for much-needed restructuring.

“He took the fiscal reductions and used them as a vehicle to try and bring about changes. . . . He’s made buckets of good lemonade out of some lemons,” Magrath said. “I rate Gee as one of the absolutely top university presidents in the United States.”

Robert H. Atwell, chairman of the American Council on Education in Washington, called Gee a “superb academic politician” whose savvy style and warm sense of humor enable him to deal effectively with lawmakers who hold the purse strings for public education.

“This would be his fourth presidency,” Atwell said, noting that Gee has also headed West Virginia University and the University of Colorado. “The man’s been around the track. I can’t think of a better choice.”

In recent weeks, despite efforts to keep the search process confidential, the names of several other possible contenders for the UC job have surfaced. Two academicians with more visible public profiles than Gee--Vartan Gregorian, president of Brown University, and James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan--were said to be among the candidates.

By contrast, the last time Gee made national headlines was in 1986, when he stopped into a Burger King for a snack and was mistaken for “Herb,” the nerd who was the star of the fast-food chain’s ad campaign. A group of teen-agers, eager to claim a $5,000 prize promised to anyone reporting a Herb “sighting,” saw Gee’s horn-rimmed glasses and bow tie and demanded his autograph.

But education experts said Saturday that Gee’s lack of widespread name recognition would not detract from his ability to do the job. California State University Chancellor Barry Munitz, who has consistently denied reports that he himself was a candidate for the UC job, said the appointment of Gee would be a “gift, not just for the UC but for CSU as well.”

“Is he a national scholar in his field? No. Is he nationally known as a Clark Kerr-type spokesman on education? No,” said Munitz, referring to the president emeritus of UC. “But do people in leadership roles in higher education know who Gee is? Absolutely. The key isn’t whether he’s a great scholar. The key is whether he knows how to look after great scholars.”

Tom Ehrlich, the former president of Indiana University, said Gee is a “forceful leader. California is very fortunate if this is true.”

Gee was out of the country Saturday and could not be reached. Malcolm S. Baroway, a spokesman for Ohio State, said, “All of us in Columbus hope that the rumor is not true and, if it is, that he stays at Ohio State.”

Baroway had grounds to be hopeful. During the past 18 months, he said, Gee has been contacted by several other search committees, including those seeking new leaders for the State University of New York system, Johns Hopkins University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Kellogg Foundation.

“He has been wooed tremendously by other systems and has consistently stayed here,” Baroway said. Just last month, an editorial in the Columbus Dispatch newspaper sounded nothing short of protective of Gee.

“May OSU’s administrative chief, a man of keen intellect, practical vision, great goodwill and seemingly inexhaustible energy, continue at the helm for some years more,” the editorial said.

Gee is paid $168,500 a year to head the 60,000-student Ohio State system. Peltason is paid $243,500 annually to run UC, which is nearly three times larger.

Throughout the UC search process, Peltason had lobbied for his successor to be a UC insider, openly backing Provost Walter E. Massey as his first choice.

But from the outset, the regents appeared eager to find an outsider. Regent William T. Bagley said Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the ideal candidate.

Others said they were hoping to select a younger leader to head UC for as long as a decade. Peltason was named UC president at age 68.

Earlier this month, Massey took himself out of the running, accepting the position of president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. And some said other contenders from inside the UC system--notably Chancellors Chang-Lin Tien of Berkeley and Richard Atkinson of San Diego--could be hampered by the perception that they would favor their own campuses.

Gee would appear to have no pre-existing allegiances other than his longstanding commitment to public education. Known at Ohio State as its “perpetual motion president,” he is said to be playful--an administrator who pops into classrooms each spring to deliver apples to winners of OSU’s annual teaching awards.

A strong believer in the power of education to improve the world, he has said that as the fabric of society comes unwoven, “the role of the university is to create weavers.”

And while he takes his job seriously, several friends said Saturday that he can laugh at himself. After the Burger King episode, for example, he joked that he had switched to McDonald’s.

“I have yet to be recognized for Ronald McDonald,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “At least I have that going for me.”

A Mormon who was born in Vernal, Utah, Gee attended the University of Utah and Columbia University School of Law. In addition to his three presidential postings, he has held assorted deanships at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University.

Gee’s first wife, Elizabeth, died of breast cancer in 1991. Last year, he married an Ohio State art historian and former aerobics instructor with whom he shares a passion for physical fitness. He has one college-age daughter.

Brophy said that before the next scheduled regents meeting July 20-21, he plans to call a special board meeting to present the search committee’s nominee. If the process is handled as in years past, the nominee will be present at that meeting.

Gee does not return to the United States until late Thursday, according to Baroway, the Ohio State spokesman.