Former UC President Charles Hitch Dies

Charles Johnston Hitch, the unflappable, cigar-smoking 13th president of the University of California who guided the UC system through the threat of Draconian 1960s budget cuts and the impassioned student protests during the Vietnam War, died Monday in San Leandro. He was 85.

The immediate cause of death was pneumonia, although Hitch had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, according to a UC press release.

The Boonville, Mo., native, educated at the University of Arizona, Harvard and Oxford, was a world-renowned economist who served as assistant secretary of defense and comptroller of the Pentagon in the Kennedy Administration. He was UC president from 1968 to 1975, taking over at the height of the student protest movement.

“His era was not a quiet time in [UC’s] history,” UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young said Monday in a prepared statement. “This was the era of student unrest and state budget battles. Charlie chose those battles, fought them with quiet perseverance, and, over his 7 1/2-year tenure, steered the university out of turbulence and into relative calm.”

Hitch’s stormy tenure as UC president was marked by his strident campaign for the right of Communist Angela Davis to teach philosophy at UCLA and weathered the controversy over a UC Berkeley course taught by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.

Although the Board of Regents eventually fired Davis, Hitch cast one of the few dissenting votes against the action. He also defended the right of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse to teach at UC San Diego even though he was a Marxist.

Former colleagues Monday praised Hitch’s spirited protection of the university’s budget in the face of threatened cuts by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and his careful and often agonizing shepherding of campus life when student unrest over the Vietnam War swept the nine-campus system.

“His leadership was marked by total integrity, steadfast good judgment, great intelligence and seemingly inexhaustible patience,” said former UC President Clark Kerr, fired from his post during the 1968 student protests, setting up Hitch’s rise to the president’s post three years after he had arrived at the university as vice president of business and finance. “No one could have done it better.”

Through it all, Hitch, who was once described by historian Theodore White as an “action intellectual, a man who combines theory and decision-making,” kept a sign tacked to his office wall that read: “A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.”

Following his retirement, Hitch became president of Resources for the Future, a Washington-based think tank through which he lobbied Congress on human rights causes. He retired from that position in 1978, and spent much of his time thereafter on the golf course.

Despite suffering two mild heart attacks in 1969 and 1971, Hitch insisted, in the low-key style that marked his UC presidency, that health played no role in his retirement.

“To the best of my knowledge my health is fine,” he said in an interview after his 1974 retirement announcement. “The only counterindication is that my putts are not dropping.”

Hitch’s wife, Nancy, died in 1983. He is survived by his daughter, Caroline Hitch Rubio of Hayward, two grandchildren and several nieces and nephews.