Finalists for Top UCLA Post Are Interviewed

Four finalists for UCLA chancellor--including UCLA’s law Dean Susan Prager and medical Dean Gerald Levey--were interviewed Tuesday by a selection committee meeting secretly in Oakland, according to sources close to the search.

The committee also interviewed Harvard Provost Albert Carnesale and University of Pennsylvania Provost Stanley Chodorow as candidates to lead UCLA after longtime Chancellor Charles E. Young steps down in June.

Separate closed-door interviews will be conducted today by another search committee scrutinizing candidates to replace UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, who has resigned effective June 30.

Among the contenders for that job is economics professor Laura D’Andrea Tyson, sources said. She recently returned to the Berkeley campus after a four-year stint as President Clinton’s chief economic advisor.

The interviews cap a five-month nationwide search by UC President Richard C. Atkinson and his advisory committees to find the best-qualified leaders for the University of California’s two largest and most prestigious campuses.

“I would much prefer that we were doing one campus, not two major campuses at once,” Atkinson said. But he wants to move forward as quickly as possible to minimize the disruption caused by the unprecedented turnover in leadership.

He hopes to soon pick a top candidate for each campus and submit the names simultaneously to the UC Board of Regents for approval in March or April.

Yet the timetable is far from secure, he said, noting that “there are complications on every front.”

For instance, both 17-member search committees, which are made up of faculty, regents, students and administrators, asked Atkinson to put Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice on their short list for an interview, sources said.

Many of them were dazzled by her credentials: a 42-year-old political science professor who is in charge of a $1.3-billion budget as Stanford’s second-in-command. She is also an African American Republican who was President George Bush’s national security advisor for Soviet affairs.

But Rice said she told Atkinson she did not want to be interviewed for either $222,700 job.

“I’ve decided at this stage of my life I don’t want to be a university president,” Rice said. She said she wants to remain as provost for another few years, and perhaps return to studying Eastern European politics.

Other candidates have been scared off by political turmoil within the university system, including the UC regents’ decision to ban affirmative action, sources said.

Atkinson has also greatly limited the pool of prospects by insisting on a rare combination of talents.

Not only does he want an administrator with the skill and experience to manage a huge, multifaceted institution, he believes the candidate must also have a distinguished academic record to win the respect of the ever-powerful faculty.

“A Nobel laureate who could not read a ledger would not be someone we would want,” Atkinson said. “And someone who came out of Peat Marwick and was a top administrator but had no academic background would not fly either. There has to be a good amount of both.”

Furthermore, Atkinson and some regents are loath to poach chancellors from other UC campuses, fearing that it would send a wrong message to the smaller schools.

Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, who sits as a regent, voiced strong disagreement. He said it would be wrong to disregard viable candidates such as UC Riverside Chancellor Raymond L. Orbach, who has been considered for the UCLA position, and UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry T. Yang, whom the Asian American community has been pushing to replace Tien at Berkeley.

“For years, UCLA and Berkeley have been seen as the flagship institutions,” Davis said. “From my perspective, promoting someone from one of the other schools makes good sense. . . . Upward mobility is very much a part of America.”

Here are the leading candidates for UCLA chancellor, as identified by sources:

* Carnesale, 60, the Harvard provost, is a foreign policy and arms control expert who served as dean of the Kennedy School of Government. Trained as a nuclear engineer, he worked for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the 1970s and participated in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I).

* Chodorow, 54, the provost at Pennsylvania, spent 26 years at UC San Diego including serving as an administrator while Atkinson was San Diego’s chancellor. A medieval expert, he was a history professor and Fulbright scholar before becoming dean of arts and humanities. He was associate vice chancellor for academic planning before going to Penn in 1994.

* Levey, 60, became provost of medical sciences and dean of the UCLA Medical School in 1995. He was recruited by UCLA from Merck & Co., where he was senior vice president for medical and scientific affairs. Trained as a medical doctor, he was a researcher in endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health.

* Prager, 54, has been dean of UCLA School of Law for 15 years. A family law scholar, she was a UCLA law professor for a decade after briefly practicing law in North Carolina. She was an aide to the late Sen. Thomas H. Kuchel, former Rep. Paul “Pete” McCloskey and the late Assemblyman John G. Veneman. She is also a member of Stanford University’s board of trustees.

Sources said another leading contender for UC Berkeley chancellor is Carol Christ, a Victorian literature scholar and Berkeley’s vice chancellor and provost.