Harvard Provost to Be Appointed UCLA Chancellor

Two outsiders--the head of the University of Texas and the provost of Harvard University--will be named chancellors of the University of California’s flagship campuses today, capping a nationwide search conducted during a period of great tumult in the nation’s premier public university system.

Sources said Harvard Provost Albert Carnesale, a nuclear engineer who once negotiated arms controls with the Soviets, will be named chancellor of UCLA to replace Charles E. Young, who is stepping down after 29 years.

University of Texas President Robert Berdahl, a noted scholar of German history, is expected to replace UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, who is returning to teaching engineering.

The official action comes today as the UC Board of Regents holds a telephone conference call to officially approve the choices.

Although UC chancellors report to the 26 members of the board, the approval of Carnesale and Berdahl is largely a formality because the board has delegated the task of filling the jobs to Richard C. Atkinson, president of the nine-campus system.

A majority of the regents contacted Wednesday said they had not been informed of Atkinson’s final selections but would support them given the caliber of talent lined up during the six-month search.

That UC would turn to two outsiders to lead its most prestigious campuses is “the most significant thing about the appointments,” said Robert Rosenzweig, president emeritus of the American Assn. of Universities and a former UCLA vice chancellor.

“I’m really pleased and encouraged the university has gone outside its usual cadre of people and brought in some fresh views and hopefully some different ideas. The University of California at the top administrative levels has been a fairly ingrown organization. That is never healthy.”

Rosenzweig described Berdahl and Carnesale as principled leaders who “will stand up for what they think are the best interests” of their new campuses.

Neither Berdahl nor Carnesale would comment Wednesday.

The two men enter the UC system at a critical juncture. Long regarded as the nation’s most distinguished public university system, its nine campuses are grappling with difficult and complex issues on several fronts, including the aftermath of drastic budget cuts of the early 1990s, an anticipated wave of new students over the next decade and the need to maintain a diverse faculty and student body while phasing out affirmative action.

Atkinson would not comment Wednesday. But he has said that candidates for both jobs must be top-notch scholars respected by their faculties. He also has insisted that they be effective administrators capable of handling large and sometimes fractured public institutions.

Berdahl and Carnesale have this combination of talents, according to colleagues and sources close to the search.

Carnesale rose to the top of UCLA’s list by dazzling the 17 members of Atkinson’s search committee with his vision for the Westwood campus during his interview last week.

“He told us, ‘I’m here to take you from the ranks of excellent universities to the top 10,’ ” said a committee member who requested anonymity.

Carnesale will assume the post as UCLA embarks on the public phase of a $1-billion-plus fund-raising campaign. The Harvard provost has been instrumental in helping Harvard hit the halfway mark in its $2.1-billion capital campaign.

Harvard colleagues say Carnesale has been able to pull together disparate factions for major projects on the decentralized Cambridge, Mass., campus--talent that could serve him well in Westwood.

He is an “energetic, intelligent person who has skill in bringing people together” and would be a major asset in attracting top-quality faculty, said UCLA political science professor James Q. Wilson, who taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard when Carnesale was its dean.

Wilson predicted that Carnesale would be a “lively promoter of the institution’s interests.”

“He comes from an institution which has extremely high standards for faculty members, and if he brings those standards here, it would help the university,” Wilson said.

Carnesale, 60, has been Harvard’s provost since 1994 and briefly served as acting president when President Neil Rudinstine took a medical leave.

Trained as a nuclear engineer, he is an authority on U.S. foreign policy, nuclear weapons control and international security. He has advised presidents from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton.

In the early 1970s, Carnesale worked for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and was an advisor to the delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union.

During the 1980s, he collaborated on or edited several books about arms control and avoiding nuclear war.

Despite the weighty concerns of his professional life, Carnesale is known to be blessed with disarming charm and is considered to be outgoing and even irreverent at times.

“It’s a great loss for Harvard,” said Alan Altshuler, who served as Carnesale’s academic dean at the Kennedy School. “Al combines a very deep understanding of the academic enterprise with a wonderful, warm facility for dealing with people. He is a fine academic and a great academic administrator.”

The choice of Carnesale was being celebrated at UCLA as much as it was being lamented at Harvard.

Michael Dukakis, the former Democratic presidential nominee who now teaches public policy at UCLA, said he was thrilled that his former advisor was continuing to move up in academia. “He’s terrific,” Dukakis said.

In the search for Berkeley’s chancellor, Berdahl impressed the committee as a confident administrator and scholar who was best suited among the candidates to follow the much-beloved Chancellor Tien.

“Tien is a hard act to follow,” said Regent Ward Connerly, who participated in Berdahl’s interview. “He brought a lot of energy and enthusiasm for the job.”

California State University Chancellor Barry Munitz, who has known Berdahl for years, said the University of Texas president has faced issues in Austin similar to those in Berkeley: the problems of juggling a major athletic program, a large campus and a massive fund-raising campaign and competing for the most gifted faculty.

“He will fit in very well and very quickly with the other chancellors,” Munitz said.

Berdahl, 60, headed the Texas campus during its unsuccessful defense of a legal challenge to a law school affirmative action program. The program was struck down by the Texas Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court let that ruling stand.

Professors say Berdahl was active in the defense of the program and is working to develop an alternative that will ensure that minorities come to the University of Texas in significant numbers.

Bernard Rapoport, former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents, said he was disappointed to learn of Berdahl’s move.

“California’s gain is our loss. We are really sad about it,” Rapoport said. He and other colleagues described Berdahl as a “consensus builder” who believes that the purpose of the university is to serve the community and change students’ lives.

“One of the things I really like about him is that although he is a most capable administrator and very much aware of the economic part of the educator’s office--money is so important--he never loses sight . . . that kids need to know a lot more when they get out than when they come in. . . . There is a deep, deep commitment to learning.”

Berdahl went to the 48,000-student campus in Austin as president in 1993. He came from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he had been vice chancellor for academic affairs since 1986.

He was a professor of history in Illinois; before that, he served as dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of Oregon. He began his academic career as an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

By bringing the two nominations to the regents today, Atkinson will be completing the searches that began last year when Young, 65, and Tien, 61, announced their decisions to resign effective June 30.

Both men had grown frustrated and were sometimes critical of the UC bureaucracy and the regents, which in 1995 voted to roll back affirmative action despite the impassioned protests of all nine UC chancellors.

In the aftermath of the debate, some UC officials speculated that the university would have trouble attracting quality leaders.

But the selections of Berdahl and Carnesale may prove them wrong, and suggest that running either campus remains among the best jobs in higher education.

“If you think about it, they are taking over the flagship institutions in the system at a time . . . when relations with the Board of Regents are stormy at the least,” said Rosenzweig of the American Assn. of Universities. “It’s a considerable vote of confidence in the future of the University of California.”

Berkeley, based on the quality of its faculty, was ranked the best overall graduate institution in the nation, according to a 1995 report by the National Research Council.

UCLA was ranked lower--13th in the nation and behind UC San Diego--but is the largest of the UC campuses, with nearly 35,000 students. It boasts the West’s most renowned medical center.

“What has happened now is Berkeley clearly is the leader in graduate education in America, and UCLA has arrived in the front ranks. UCLA’s role now is to move from being among the top dozen to being among the top four or five,” said Bill Ouchi, professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. “The competition at that level is very tough.”

With Berkeley’s and UCLA’s top jobs apparently filled, Atkinson will have picked four of the system’s nine chancellors, marking an unprecedented turnover of leadership. Atkinson recently began a search to fill a fifth opening, at UC San Francisco, and has said the selections will be his most lasting contribution to the university.

As the UCLA search narrowed, Atkinson said he was looking for the best possible leaders.

“If someone came out of the East and never set foot in California and the search committee said, ‘Yes, that is exactly the person who should be leading UCLA,’ that is the person we would choose,” he said earlier this year.

With the help of his advisory committees, Atkinson pared down a list of about 80 candidates for each institution to four, who were interviewed last week.

Aside from Carnesale, the finalists for UCLA were University of Pennsylvania Provost Stanley Chodorow; Susan Prager, dean of UCLA’s Law School; and Gerald Levey, provost of UCLA’s medical sciences and dean of the Medical School.

Other than Berdahl, those interviewed for Berkeley were William Kirwan, president of University of Maryland; Carol Christ, provost at Berkeley; and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a Berkeley economics professor who until recently was President Clinton’s chief economic advisor.

The day after the interviews, Tyson, who was never fully convinced she wanted the job, withdrew her name from consideration. And Kirwan, an affable mathematician, said this week that he had not sought the Berkeley position and had no interest in switching jobs.

UCLA’s Ouchi said it was “almost inevitable” that the regents would have to turn to outsiders to fill the Berkeley and UCLA posts.

“It’s because we do not have decentralized management on those two campuses, “ Ouchi said. “Therefore, there is nobody below the level of chancellor who has full, general management responsibility for a major subunit--and, thus, no place to grow a major chancellor for a $2-billion-a-year campus.

“This is one of the major management problems that the new chancellors on both campuses will have to face.”

Weiss and Woo reported from Los Angeles and Dolan from San Francisco. Also contributing were Times staff writers Elizabeth Mehren in Boston and Richard Lee Colvin in Los Angeles.

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Academic Appointments

Albert Carnesale

UCLA’s New Chancellor

AGE: 60

BORN: Bronx, New York

CURRENT POSITION: Provost and professor of public policy, Harvard University.

RESPONSIBLITIES: university-wide planning of academic programs.

PREVIOUS POSITIONS: professor, North Carolina State University; scientist, U.S. Arms Control & Disarmament Agency; dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

EDUCATION: Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Cooper Union and Drexel Institute. Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from North Carolina State University.

AREA OF EXPERTISE: Carnesale is an expert on American foreign policy and international security, especially on issues involving technology, nuclear weapons and arms control. He has written books about energy policy, weaponry and war.

PERSONAL: Married, Janet Hohl in 1962; 2 children.

AT UCLA: Takes the helm from Charles E. Young, who has served since 1968. Will oversee a 400-acre campus with 35,000 students, more than 21,000 employees a $2 billion budget. Though publicly funded for the most part, the university is in the midst of a private fundraising drive that may eventually top $1 billion.

QUOTE: “The first goal is to maintain . . . the levels of excellence throughout the university. That’s excellence in teaching, in research, in service. Second is to help provide the resources to achieve goal one.”

Sources: Harvard University, Contemporary Authors, American Men and Women of Science.

****

Robert Max Berdahl

UC Berkeley’s new chancellor

AGE: 60

BORN: Sioux Falls, S.D.

CURRENT POSITION: President, University of Texas at Austin

RESPONSIBLITIES: Heading a 48,000-student campus

PREVIOUS POSITIONS: Vice chancellor for academic affairs, University of Illinois; history professor at the University of Massachusetts and University of Oregon

EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree Augustana College; master’s degree, University of Illinois. Ph.D. University of Minnesota

AREA OF EXPERTISE: Late-18th and early-19th century German history; author of “The Politics of Prussian Nobility,” 1988

PERSONAL: Married since 1958, Margaret “Peg” Lucille Ogle, who now works for the Urban League; six children

AT BERKELEY: Will take over a 30,000-student university known both for its unruly politics and top-rated academics--the National Research Council in 1995 rated its graduate schools the best in the nation; Berkeley is in the midst of a $1.1-billion fund-raising drive.

QUOTE: “I have to be a go-between--leading faculty to understand why people don’t want to support work they think is insular and leading the public to understand the various needs and functions of the university and how they relate to the community’s needs.”

Sources: Who’s Who, 1997; Houston Chronicle