Wilkening Lauds UCI’s Clinic Scandal Response : Interview: After month of near silence, chancellor defends record, denies intent to hide truth from public.

Breaking a month of virtual silence on the fertility clinic crisis, UC Irvine Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening said Monday that she made “extraordinary” efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal and that she never considered hiding the truth from the public.

“The thought that we could protect ourselves from embarrassment over this never occurred to me once I saw the scope of the seriousness of the allegations,” the chancellor said in her first detailed interview about the crisis since it became public. “My determination . . . was to find out what really was going on.”

But the chancellor acknowledged that the scandal had been brewing for some time before she learned about it--even before she took the top job in July, 1993.

Wilkening, 50, said she was not informed until February or March of last year that there were allegations of drug misuse and financial wrongdoing at the Center for Reproductive Health. She did not know until July, she said, about accusations that doctors at the clinic had implanted embryos in women without the consent of the donors.

And she repeated assertions by other UCI administrators that the allegations were not laid out in detail until last September, when she said she immediately ordered an outside investigation by three panels into financial, clinical and management practices at the clinic.

But Wilkening’s admission that she was unaware of the scandal until early last year comes amid evidence that other top officials knew much sooner. A fertility clinic nurse testified earlier this month that he had tried to present evidence to UCI auditors of egg misuse in early 1992.

In addition, documents from the university auditors’ office indicate that a senior administrator recalled discussing a range of issues--including egg misuse--with top officials at UCI Medical Center by early 1993, and that the chancellor’s attorney was informed. And two audits, in 1992 and 1993, had detailed cash handling and other financial problems at the center.

“There was nothing that would put this on my agenda until February of ‘94,” Wilkening insisted Monday. In fact, she said, “I didn’t even know the Center for Reproductive Health existed until February of ’94. I’d only been on campus about seven months and I had a lot to learn.”

Wilkening said she has ordered internal auditors to determine why the reports of egg misuse were not passed along when they first surfaced.

“What was going on in ’92 I don’t think got very far, but we’ll find out,” she said. “What concerns me about ’92 was what was dysfunctional, so that it doesn’t happen again.”

Wilkening said she does not believe her predecessor, Jack Peltason, now president of the UC system, knew anything about problems at the fertility clinic either, until she informed him of the troubles last summer. Peltason became UC president in October, 1992.

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“Everything I’ve seen leads me to believe he knew nothing at all” until last year’s discussion, she said.

The chancellor also said she was unaware of management problems at UCI Medical Center until a management audit this spring. Wilkening fired medical center Executive Director Mary Piccione and her deputy, Herb Spiwak, last Wednesday after the auditors concluded that they retaliated against whistle-blowers in the fertility scandal and engaged in “management by fear.”

Still, Wilkening on Monday credited Piccione and Spiwak with turning around a medical center that was losing $1 million a month. She said she had been aware of some staff and faculty discontent at the medical center before this year but, until the audit, attributed it to the fact that 650 people lost their jobs during the administrators’ rigorous “downsizing.”

Once she learned from the audit that three female employees who had become whistle-blowers had been punished, Wilkening said, she believed the women had to be “made whole.”

The chancellor said she approved separate financial settlements with the trio but that the decisions on amounts to be paid were made in Oakland, by risk managers and attorneys at UC headquarters. The three were paid a total of more than $919,000.

Wilkening said she is not sure whether she was the highest administrator in the UC system to endorse the confidential settlements. She did, however, say that she believes the system for approving such agreements will be changed in the wake of the scandal, so that major settlements are approved by the regents. She said she considers such a change “very appropriate.”

The chancellor vigorously defended confidentiality clauses in the whistle-blower settlements, saying she was disturbed at characterizations of them as “hush money.”

Confidentiality clauses, she said, were necessary to protect patient privacy and to preserve the integrity of the university’s investigations. She added that the highest paid whistle-blower, Debra Krahel, who received $495,000, requested confidentiality.

But some of Wilkening’s critics argued Monday that she did not do as well as she could have by the whistle-blowers.

“I’m not sure if we have made the whistle-blowers whole again,” said Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, a UC regent. “The agreements aren’t so generous as they may seem at first blush.”

Davis last week called for a review of all settlements between whistle-blowers and the UC system over the past 10 years.

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“There seems to be a keep-the-lid mentality,” Davis said. “I believe we should conduct business in full public view.”

One whistle-blower, Marilyn Killane, scoffed at the chancellor’s comment that the settlements were to make the whistle-blowers “whole.”

“Well, tell them I’m still not whole yet; I’m in pieces,” Killane said. “I never wanted a settlement, I wanted a job. I get so angry, I don’t understand why they didn’t do something sooner. . . . If this is called justice, I don’t live on the same planet.”

Neither Krahel nor Killane disputed Wilkening’s statements about when she first learned of possible misconduct at the center. But both questioned why it took the chancellor so long to take action.

Krahel noted that more than six months elapsed between the time she reported egg misuse at the clinic last July and the first interview by a clinical panel investigating the charges.

“I don’t believe that was an immediate or timely response,” she said.

Added Killane: “It felt like five years of my life before anything was done. Something should have been done before this, and she had the capacity to do something.”

Bristling at contentions that she moved too slowly, Wilkening said Monday: “I think we have acted faster in this case than in any other comparable case that I know of. What we did in suing our own faculty and putting faculty members on leave was, I think by university standards, extraordinary.”

UCI sued three of the clinic’s doctors last month, accusing them of clinical, research and financial misconduct as well as blocking the university’s efforts to obtain essential records.

The pace of the university’s inquiries “was basically limited by the physicians’ decision to not cooperate,” Wilkening said. She said UCI officials still lack some of the patient records and egg logs that they need, for example, to investigate the charges of egg misuse.

Wilkening defended her decision to keep her public comments to a minimum until Monday, saying she was limited in what she could say without violating employee or patient privacy. In general, Wilkening said, “I think I’ve handled this very well, and I have the support of my boss,” Peltason.

She dismissed concerns by some faculty that morale on campus has suffered, saying one of her mentors once told her, “Morale in universities is always bad.” She explained that universities tend to have critical work forces.

The chancellor said her vision for UCI, that it become the “research university for the 21st Century,” has not been dashed in the least by the scandal.

“I think people justifiably on the campus have every reason to expect this university to be among the best. We have an excellent faculty, a terrific location. . . . That’s all much to our advantage. Almost every major university that I know of has had to deal with one or the other major scandal. They’ve all survived it and I think we will too.

“You ask, ‘Did I want this to happen now?’ Of course not, but I’m as optimistic about UCI as I ever was.”

Times correspondent Martin Miller contributed to this story.