The Right Talents for UCLA, Berkeley Posts

The newly named chancellors of UCLA and UC Berkeley are dynamic leaders with the right combination of talents to help lead their campuses through the formidable challenges ahead.

It might seem as if UCLA’s Albert Carnesale and UC Berkeley’s Robert Berdahl face only smooth sailing, for they have landed jobs at public universities with cascading private revenue streams and high academic reputations.

But in fact, Carnesale, provost of Harvard, and Berdahl, president of the University of Texas, face two challenges daunting enough to test the strongest of mettles:

* A steep decline in government funding because of growth in mandatory spending on the national debt, health care and welfare. University leaders have always had money worries, of course, but both leaders will find their public revenue streams drying up at the same time they inherit campuses with buildings not up to code and laboratories not up to date.

UCLA’s Carnesale is clearly a gifted fund-raiser, having been instrumental in helping Harvard hit the halfway mark in its $2.1-billion capital campaign. But both he and Berdahl must resist thinking that budget problems can be quickly solved by hiking tuition, a strategy often favored by university heads for its simplicity. This would be a mistake, for as a recent UCLA survey of 251,323 college students showed, students today are already borrowing more money, and suffering more stress from their borrowing, than at any time since the survey began in 1965.

* The need to maintain diversity in the wake of Proposition 209, a measure prohibiting race and gender from being considered as admissions criteria. Both Berdahl and Carnesale must devise creative ways of ensuring diversity. For instance, both UCLA and Berkeley have strong graduate schools of education. By helping the more troubled schools in their communities to reform curricula and train teachers, both campuses could build the diverse talent pool California so clearly needs.

During one of his interviews with UCLA’s search committee, Carnesale said, “I’m here to take you from the ranks of excellent universities to the top 10.” An inspiring goal, to be sure, but not an easy one to fulfill, for definitions of excellence vary dramatically among professors on the two campuses. Some professors say excellence is best measured by the National Research Council, which in a 1995 survey ranked UC Berkeley as the nation’s best overall graduate school and ranked several UCLA departments as among the nation’s 10 best.

Other professors deride the council study, saying it recognizes only the professors who publish the most papers and bring in the biggest grants. Excellence, they say, lies in the quality of teaching.

If anyone can resolve this debate, which will help determine how the two campuses distribute their dwindling public revenues, it will be Carnesale and Berdahl. For in addition to being gifted administrators, they are also outsiders. Unlike most of the other finalists considered for their jobs, they are untethered to any one faction and thus free to confront this most dicey of dilemmas.