San Diego Chief Is Nominated to Head UC System

Richard C. Atkinson, the chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, was nominated Monday by a committee of the UC Board of Regents to become the 17th president of the nine-campus system, sources said.

At a closed meeting in San Francisco, sources said the eight-member presidential search committee opted to go with Atkinson, 67, instead of UC Davis Chancellor Larry N. Vanderhoef, who some regents had proposed as a compromise candidate.

The committee also rejected a proposal to name Atkinson as an interim leader of the 162,000-student system, sources confirmed. Current President Jack W. Peltason will retire Oct. 1.

“We got one interim president,” said one regent, referring to Peltason, who took UC’s top job nearly three years ago with the understanding that he would be temporary. “We didn’t think we ought to have another one.”

Late Monday, Regent Roy T. Brophy, the chairman of the selection committee, announced that the board will hold a special meeting Friday to consider the committee’s recommendation. Until then, he said, he would not name the nominee for the $243,500-a-year job.

“The process of selecting a nominee is a confidential one and therefore I can have no further comment until the Board of Regents has made its selection,” Brophy said in a statement.

If the board affirms Atkinson’s nomination and he accepts, it will bring to a close a seven-month search that has proved difficult and at times embarrassing. In June, the board’s top choice for the job, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee, withdrew his name from the running at the last moment after Brophy had told the board that Gee would accept.

In the wake of Gee’s eleventh-hour withdrawal came the board’s decision last month to eliminate race from the criteria that UC may consider when making decisions related to admissions, hiring and contracting. Several regents, including Brophy, said the decision would make it much more difficult to find a new president and insiders said it ended hopes of finding someone from outside the UC system who would take the job.

Atkinson, an experimental psychologist and an expert on applied mathematics, has been UCSD’s chancellor since 1980. On Monday, some people said he would be a popular choice, particularly among the faculty.

“He enjoys widespread support within the university,” said William B. Baker, UC vice president for external relations, who stressed that he did not know if Atkinson was the choice. “If it is him, that would be something everybody would welcome.”

Atkinson and UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young were the two runners-up for the UC presidency in 1992, when Peltason was selected. Those who know Atkinson say he has long wanted the job and will take it if it is offered.

But Atkinson has one very public flaw. In 1986, he agreed to pay up to $275,000 to a former Harvard University professor who had accused him of impregnating her and tricking her into having an abortion by promising to father another child at a later date. The woman, Lee Perry, at one point asked the court to order Atkinson to fulfill that promise.

In settling the suit, Atkinson, who is married, stressed that he was not admitting any liability. His lawyer said that Atkinson and his wife settled because they were worried about the cost of litigation and were eager to put the matter behind them.

Before he came to UCSD, from 1975 to 1980 Atkinson served as director of the National Science Foundation, having been appointed first by President Gerald Ford and then by President Jimmy Carter.

As director, he had a wide range of responsibilities for science and technology at a national and international level. He was responsible for negotiating and signing the first memorandum of understanding in history between the People’s Republic of China and the United States--an agreement for the exchange of scientists, students and scholars.

Before 1975, Atkinson was on the faculty of Stanford University for 20 years in the fields of psychology, applied mathematics and statistics and engineering, among others.

Atkinson has been awarded honorary degrees by more than a dozen American universities, holds honorary memberships in several foreign societies and academies, and a mountain in Antarctica has been named in his honor.