Top Choice to Lead UC System Declines Post : Education: 11th-hour decision by Ohio State head stuns regents and sparks criticism that process was botched.

One day before the University of California Board of Regents was expected to name him to head the UC system, the president of Ohio State University announced Thursday that he has withdrawn from the running.

While calling the UC job a “truly remarkable and unique professional opportunity,” E. Gordon Gee said in a statement that he has decided not to leave Ohio because of “extraordinary support” from trustees, students and politicians--including Gov. George Voinovich--who asked him to stay.

Gee’s surprising decision, made Wednesday night, just hours before he was to board a plane to meet with UC regents in San Francisco, steps up pressure on the university’s search committee to find a successor to UC President Jack W. Peltason, who retires Oct. 1.

The committee will resume its search under a cloud, with critics complaining that it mishandled Gee’s nomination by allowing his name to become public prematurely and others questioning whether the university can find a top-flight candidate willing to take the job.

“This makes it tougher. . . . Anybody else is going to have to be willing to be looked upon as the second choice,” said Clark Kerr, president emeritus of UC and an expert on university leadership. “That makes the job somewhat less attractive.”

Last week, UC Regent Roy T. Brophy’s announcement that the presidential search committee had unanimously chosen a nominee but would not release the name fueled intense media interest. And once Gee’s name surfaced, he became the focus of scrutiny.

Two San Francisco newspapers reported Wednesday that Gee had secretly approved unauthorized bonuses for his aides while he was president of the University of Colorado in the late 1980s.

Those reports prompted some state legislators to warn the regents that Gee’s situation bore a “striking and troubling resemblance” to the controversy surrounding UC President David Gardner’s departure in 1992. Among other things, Gardner was found to have promised a $181,000 “administrative leave” package to his closest aide.

Several regents said Thursday they believe that negative press accounts and the legislators’ queries played a role in Gee’s last-minute rejection of a job he had shown interest in accepting. They described the situation as tragic.

“I’m furious,” said Daniel Simmons, a faculty representative to the board who helped advise the search committee on Gee. Gee’s appointment, he said, “was as close to ‘done’ as it could have been pending approval [of the full board]. We lost somebody who would have been very good.”

Simmons said the search committee had investigated the controversies in Colorado and concluded that “they may have been a mistake at the time, but they weren’t that big a deal and certainly didn’t disqualify Gee.”

Regent Meredith Khachigian, a member of the search committee, said the charges were “very old and taken completely out of context” in press reports.

“I regret when both legislators and media have to make our jobs so much harder,” said Khachigian, who said Gee’s decision came as a shock. “It’s very disappointing.”

But others said that committee members deserve the blame for the derailing of Gee’s appointment.

“The whole thing was just botched,” said one source who is knowledgeable about the search process. By announcing that the committee had a nominee, Brophy “unleashed a cadre of investigators” that could have been avoided if he had kept silent, the source said. Then, when the predictable publicity appeared, the source added, the committee should have done more to limit the damage.

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“When things began to come unraveled, the way to deal with it was to quickly pull the regents together. If that had been the case, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

Brophy did not return repeated telephone calls Thursday seeking comment. In a statement released by UC, he expressed regret at Gee’s withdrawal but said the search committee still has a “fine pool of highly qualified candidates” on its short list.

“We are confident we will be able to present to the full board an exceptional nominee for its consideration,” Brophy said in the statement.

Gee, who had been scheduled to fly from Hong Kong to San Francisco on Thursday morning, remained out of the country on a brief vacation with his family, according to a statement released by Ohio State.

Ever since his name came to light last week, Gee, a career administrator who was trained as a lawyer, had been the focus of a hard-core lobbying campaign from those in Ohio who were determined to keep him.

On Wednesday, an editorial in the Columbus Dispatch urged the trustees of Ohio State to address the disparity between Gee’s salary of $168,500 and the $243,500 salary enjoyed by the current UC president.

“Hang on to him,” the editorial urged.

On Thursday, an article in the same newspaper broke the news that Gee had decided to stay in Ohio. Gee was quoted as saying he had spent several “agonizing” days considering the UC job.

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In the wake of Gee’s decision, some national higher education leaders said his rejection of the UC job sends a troubling message, particularly to other public universities.

“When the most prestigious public university system in the world doesn’t get its first choice, that’s--how shall I say it?--embarrassing,” said Robert H. Atwell, chairman of the American Council on Education in Washington. “This is very unfortunate for the University of California.”

Kerr, the UC president emeritus, said he worried that the loss of Gee would “poison the atmosphere” of the search committee.

“There’s going to be a lot of suspicion--who leaked the information--and a certain amount of finger-pointing,” he said.

Several people, including Kerr, speculated that the regents--who had broken with more than three decades of tradition by picking someone with no connections to UC--might now be more likely to choose a candidate from within the UC system.

“There might be an inclination to say, ‘Well, maybe it’s safer to work with people we already know well already . . . somebody who already has a commitment to UC,” Kerr said. “People could be a little more shy of going outside.”

Khachigian acknowledged that the search committee had begun with a “high interest” in finding an outside candidate, but would not confirm that the feeling had changed.

“We have excellent people we can promote from inside who would be excellent presidents,” she said.

The loss of Gee prompted some to call for a more open search process.

“This whole fiasco could have been avoided had the process been more open,” said Jess Bravin, a member of the student advisory committee on presidential selection and a law student at UC Berkeley.

“If more people had been involved in this process, these kinds of questions would have arisen much earlier. . . . Maybe it’s time for them to reconsider the way they do business.”