UC Panel Changed Its Mind on Candidate, Sources Say : Education: Nominee for top job is said to have been rejected earlier.

A few weeks before a committee of the University of California Board of Regents nominated Richard C. Atkinson to become the next UC president, it voted 7 to 1 against him, sources said Tuesday.

That earlier rejection of Atkinson, the 66-year-old chancellor of UC San Diego, came after he performed poorly in his interview with the eight-member presidential search committee, several regents said Tuesday. He was ill at ease in the interview, said one regent who described him as non-responsive to some questions.

“I asked him what was his greatest weakness. He said, ‘I don’t think I really have any,’ ” said Student Regent Ed Gomez, who described Atkinson as making a generally “horrible” impression. Though there were divided opinions about whether Atkinson came off as arrogant, several regents agreed he had failed to shine.

But by Monday, Atkinson was the winner: The committee recommended him by a 6-to-2 vote. The change of heart reflects the tumultuous internal politics of the 26-member board as much as it does Atkinson’s impressive but controversial stature, several regents agreed.

For, according to Gomez and other regents familiar with the process, the search committee chose Atkinson over a candidate it liked much more, all in an attempt to make sure its recommendation would prevail.

Several sources confirmed Tuesday that the search committee was more impressed by Larry N. Vanderhoef, chancellor of UC Davis, who gave an excellent interview. But he was perceived to lack the international reputation enjoyed by Atkinson, a well-respected experimental psychologist who once served as director of the National Science Foundation.

When it was learned that a group of regents who are not on the search committee was mobilizing in support of a third candidate, UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, sources said some members of the search committee began to fear that they would be overruled if they nominated Vanderhoef.

The full board meets Friday to consider Atkinson’s nomination to replace retiring UC President Jack W. Peltason, and sources said search committee members worried they would be embarrassed if the pro-Tien faction forced a split vote.

“The search committee then said, ‘Who has the support? Who could woo people to switch over?’ ” said one regent, commenting that Atkinson was seen as better able to lure Tien supporters into his corner.

Meanwhile, Gov. Pete Wilson, who is a voting member of the board, is said to be privately opposed to Tien, who clashed with the governor over the issue of affirmative action at last month’s regents’ meeting.

Said Gomez, who serves as a consulting member on the presidential search committee: “It’s politics. . . . They don’t want to look bad.” In the meantime, he added, Vanderhoef was sacrificed. “The best qualified person we had considered up to that point is not even going to be considered now,” he complained.

Atkinson, meanwhile, appeared to dispute Gomez’s description of him.

“I am bound not to discuss what is said in private meetings with the search committee,” he said in a statement Tuesday. “But I assure you that I and the regents are well aware of my weaknesses and my strengths. I’m certainly not the kind of person who thinks of himself in such arrogant terms.”

One regent who was present at Atkinson’s interview supported Atkinson. This regent could not recall exactly how Atkinson responded to Gomez, but said the chancellor did not come off as haughty.

“If he said it, it was said as a joke,” that regent said.

Regent Roy T. Brophy, the chairman of the presidential search committee, declined to discuss the committee’s choice, but said he is confident that it will be affirmed on Friday.

“The candidate that was selected is the present vote of the committee and, further, I’m certain he’ll be the selectee of the Board of Regents,” Brophy said.

Atkinson’s nomination comes after a seven-month search process that has proved difficult and at times embarrassing for UC. In June, the board’s top choice for the job, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee, withdrew his name at the last moment after Brophy had told the board that Gee would accept.

Then 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 even harder to find a new president. Peltason, who has led the nine-campus, 162,000-student system for nearly three years, steps down Oct. 1.

Atkinson is described by people who know him as brilliant, focused and energetic. Colleagues note that during his 15 years at UC San Diego’s helm, he has increased enrollment 62%, enlarged the faculty by 47% and expanded the campus’s facilities--including student housing, classrooms and medical school space--by 121%.

Moreover, he has fought to protect the school during recent budget cuts, some faculty said.

Those successes are just the latest in a long string that began when he graduated from the University of Chicago at the youthful age of 19. Atkinson and his wife, a renowned psychologist named Rita Atkinson, have co-authored what is known as the bible of psychology textbooks. He is widely respected for his scholarship on human memory and cognition. And those who have worked with him closely say he knows how to get things done.

“Given the complications of the university’s administrative structure these days, Dick is about as sound and as successful an administrator as I can see on the horizon,” said Robert C. Ritchie, the director of research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, who served as Atkinson’s associate chancellor from 1986 to 1990. “He really is a very shrewd, forward-thinking planner.”

Some students complain that Atkinson is aloof and uninvolved. And colleagues say that if you get the normally charming Atkinson angry--contradict him in public, or disagree in a way that he perceives to challenge his authority--you had better watch out.

“He can fly off the handle and definitely smear the wall with you,” said a UCSD faculty member, one of several people who described Atkinson as having a fierce temper. “You can talk to him one day and he’s sweetness and cream and the next day he’s raving at you. When he’s criticized, he gets his back up.”

Still, even those who have experienced Atkinson’s explosive temper said Tuesday that he’d make a solid leader for UC.

“This is the NBA of the mind. Can he slam-dunk? That’s what I care about,” said UCSD biology professor Paul Saltman, who has witnessed what he calls Atkinson’s “short fuse.” “What he has done for this campus is a model of integrity.”

Despite his occasional brusqueness, Atkinson gets high marks for being responsive to the faculty. Early on, one faculty member noted, he created a special associate chancellor’s position to act as a liaison with the faculty--the only such position at UC.

And he is considered an unstoppable fund-raiser.

“He can charm the skin off a snake,” said Ritchie. “To be a good fund-raiser, you have to be able to do that. Dick can be one of the most charming, warm, delightful people you’ve ever met. And it’s genuine. It’s part of his character.”

Sources said Tuesday that Atkinson, who was a finalist for the UC presidency in 1992, did not get the job then in large part because of an embarrassing incident in his personal life: the allegations of a former Harvard University professor who accused him of impregnating her in 1977 and tricking her into having an abortion.

Atkinson was separated from his wife at the time.

The woman, Lee Perry, sued Atkinson in 1981, claiming that Atkinson had promised to impregnate her again at a more convenient time and had engaged in fraud and deceit when he broke that promise.

In 1986, Atkinson settled the suit, agreeing to pay Perry up to $275,000. He stressed that he was not admitting liability and his lawyer said Atkinson and his wife settled because they were worried about the cost of litigation and were eager to put the matter behind them.

Sources said the regents’ presidential search committee considered the impact of the litigation this time around, but ultimately decided it was far enough in the past that it could be discounted.

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Profile: Richard C. Atkinson

Richard C. Atkinson, 66, chancellor of UC San Diego, has been nominated to succeed University of California President Jack W. Peltason, who retires Oct. 1. The UC Board of Regents will meet Friday to consider his nomination.

* Born: March 19, 1929

* Residence: La Jolla

* Education: After completing two years of high school, he entered the University of Chicago and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1948. He then completed Ph.D work in both mathematics and psychology at Indiana University, receiving his doctorate in 1955.

* Career highlights: After two years in the Army, he became a lecturer in applied mathematics and statistics at Stanford University in 1956. The next year he went to UCLA, where he taught for four years before returning to Stanford. He remained there until 1975, when he became deputy director of the National Science Foundation, rising to become director two years later. He has been UC San Diego’s chancellor since 1980.

* Family: Married to the former Rita Loyd, a psychologist. They have one daughter, who is a neurosurgeon.