UC’s New Chancellors a Study in High Ideals, Personable Style

Quick, Albert Carnesale, what’s the name of your new school’s mascot?

The future chancellor of UCLA was taken aback.

After all, Carnesale, a Harvard University man for 23 years--the last three as its provost--is leaving a school with no mascot, where it’s a point of pride for students to sing their fight song in Latin.

“The Bruins?” Carnesale ventured, brightening when he realized he had correctly answered an interviewer’s question.

Talk about culture shock. Then there are the doubting colleagues who wonder why on earth he would want to leave the ivy-covered walls of the oldest and most renowned university in the country.

But Carnesale, who by all accounts has excelled in his post as Harvard’s No. 2 man, is ready to run his own show. And he’s got ambitious plans.

“My objective is simply: When informed people around the world sit around and say, ‘What are the great universities?’ . . . That list will include UCLA.”

Carnesale was unanimously approved as UCLA chancellor Thursday, along with University of Texas President Bob Berdahl as UC Berkeley’s next chancellor, in a teleconference linking UC’s 26 regents. Both men are slated to assume their posts July 1.

UC President Richard C. Atkinson praised the future leaders of UC’s flagship campuses and suggested that California was lucky to have them, given that they both had to accept pay cuts to take the $222,700-a-year jobs.

“These are individuals recognized throughout the world as leaders of higher education,” Atkinson said. “The fact that they would take these positions is a tribute to the excellence of the University of California.”

From his office at Harvard, Carnesale declared himself to be “honored and excited” by the prospect of assuming command of the largest campus in the vaunted University of California system.

Carnesale’s rise to prominence as an academic administrator has been swift--and recent. He became dean of the Kennedy School in 1991 and three years later was named provost. Friends say he has been eager to boost himself into a top position, and running a large campus like UCLA is ideal at this stage in his life.

“He’s 60 years old, and I think he sort of had one more move in him--so this was a very attractive possibility,” said Henry Rosovsky, Harvard’s former dean of arts and sciences.

Harvard is “much less politicized than UCLA,” Rosovsky said. But as chancellor, “Carnesale will understand the politics quickly, and he will know how to handle it,” Rosovsky said.

Carnesale is widely praised for his administrative skill.

As provost, he has excelled as “someone who keeps the trains running,” one staffer said. Another dubbed him, not disrespectfully, “the university’s pooper-scooper”--a reference to his ability to save bungled projects. Not only that, said the staffer, “but he gets it done quickly. Carnesale gets the meeting done in half an hour. He gets all the issues addressed, and everyone goes home happy.”

As dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Carnesale oversaw an awkward period when many top faculty bolted for positions in the Clinton administration. He has also been in charge of information technology at Harvard, and made it a priority to break down traditional barriers between disciplines.

But Carnesale’s early credentials made him an unlikely candidate for stardom at an institution like Harvard.

The son of a Bronx cabdriver, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Cooper Union and Drexel University and later a doctorate in nuclear engineering from North Carolina State University--”the kind of schools,” said Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard’s Center for Russian Studies, “that at Harvard, you would normally laugh at.”

Some colleagues privately sniff that Carnesale has never been an intellectual heavyweight. His four books--all dealing with nuclear arms control--were written with other authors.

“That is the part of him that is the least Harvard-like,” said Jim Brown, president of Harvard’s Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a Kennedy School colleague of Carnesale for more than 20 years. “He is not a major intellectual, not a scholar in that he cites book after book that he has written.”

As a consequence, Brown said, “within the Harvard context, he doesn’t have a place to fall back on to be a scholar.”

But if Carnesale doesn’t excel at writing esoteric tomes, he has far more real-world experience than most academics.

Although trained as a nuclear engineer, he has spent much of his career teaching and even helping create public policy as an authority on nuclear weapons and international security.

His expertise has taken him repeatedly to Washington, D.C., starting when President Richard Nixon appointed him to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1969. He advised U.S. negotiators in the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviets in the early 1970s and has been a nuclear policy advisor to presidents ever since.

Just after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, then-President Jimmy Carter selected Carnesale to head the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The retiring chairman was considered too cozy to the nuclear industry, and Carnesale was promoted by the White House as an independent voice to steer the commission on a new course.

But his nomination was scuttled by Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), because Carnesale had expressed some reservations about sinking billions of dollars into the Clinch River breeder reactor in Tennessee.

“I have always been engaged and interested in matters that affect the public,” Carnesale said.

What attracted him about the UCLA job was that it was so different from Harvard. “This is not a university that wishes it were Harvard. It’s an absolutely first-class public university that has become first class in a remarkably short period. . . . My aspiration is not--repeat, not--to turn UCLA into Harvard. UCLA has its own character, and it is important that it retain that character.”

Around Harvard Yard, Carnesale is praised for his quick, frequently acerbic wit. Colleagues admire his self-confidence, balanced with another commodity not always abundant in the ivory tower, a sense of humor: His desk has three boxes that read “In,” “Out,” and “Too Hard.”

He is decisive and well-organized, associates say, a quick study who swiftly assesses a situation and argues for the strongest position--even if it is not necessarily his own. He loves to glad-hand and works a room deftly.

Yet Carnesale is known to be the kind of regular guy who actually admits to watching television--and not just PBS. He enjoys basketball and cheered fiercely for the New England Patriots in the most recent Super Bowl. Fly-fishing is another of Carnesale’s passions, and he has vowed, when he moves to Los Angeles, to trade his snowshoes for roller-blades.

Divorced, he speaks with great pride of his 29-year-old son, Keith, an assistant district attorney outside Atlanta, and his daughter, Kim, a 27-year-old Harvard Business School graduate now working with Microsoft in Washington state.

Mostly, said Graham Allison, Carnesale’s predecessor as Kennedy School dean, “he knows enough not to take himself too seriously,” another rarity in the groves of academe. “Basically he’s sort of a smartass from the Bronx.”

Carnesale’s relaxed personal style made him a standout at Harvard, Brown said. “If there was anything that was a weakness, it would be some notion that because of this relaxed quality of Al’s, and this sense of humor, he is viewed by some people as being too shallow,” Brown said, adding, “I’m not sure there’s any evidence to support that.”

Carnesale is a large, sturdy man with thick, wavy white hair. He towers above the small, slender man with whom he has worked most closely, Harvard President Neil Rudenstine.

During Rudenstine’s abrupt, health-related sabbatical several years ago, it was Carnesale who, as provost, stepped in to take his place. As the second-ranking executive, Carnesale handles much of the university’s day-to-day operation, freeing Rudenstine to focus on Harvard’s $2.1-billion fund-raising campaign.

Like UCLA, Harvard has been plagued by rocky labor issues in recent years, and these too have fallen to Carnesale to resolve. Many of the disputes centered around benefits; Carnesale had advocated reducing benefits for part-time employees. Even his critics, however, note that the issues have been settled without strikes.

Minutes after his official appointment Thursday, Carnesale was already beginning to compile a to-do list in his head. At Harvard, he focused heavily on projects that cut across disciplines and professional schools to find ways to improve the environment, the quality of education and health care. He wants to do the same things at UCLA.

As an example, he said he might strengthen the Westwood school’s environmental studies department by combining the expertise of industrial pollution specialists, atmospheric chemists, economists, experts in the law and public health--”people who know about the field from a broad point of view. It takes a rather large university to have this kind of mix, and I think UCLA has it.”

He declined to weigh in on the state’s ongoing debate over affirmative action. But he insisted that it is important to maintain a diverse faculty and student body.

“That’s what’s essential if we are to achieve the very best level of education that can be achieved. Our challenge is how to best achieve that diversity. I can understand the regents’ concerns about the past methods of achieving it. We have to find alternatives that are acceptable to all.”

Understanding how to cope with Southern California’s ethnic and political complexity will be the single biggest challenge for a chancellor from the East Coast, said Bill Ouchi, professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

“In the East Coast, especially Boston, there is only one person who is politically powerful. In New York City, it’s the mayor,” Ouchi said. “Time after time, we’ve had transplants come out here and they spend all their time looking for that one person who is going to be their one protector and boss. They never find him. You’ve got to touch 50, 60 bases constantly.”

Carnesale himself says his first order of business will be to consult with the UCLA faculty, staff, students and alumni.

“I’m not pretending to be an expert on UCLA,” he said. “I hope to be one soon.”

ALBERT CARNESALE

“My objective is simply: When informed people around the world sit around and say ‘What are the world’s great universities?’ ... That list will include UCLA.” ****

Key goals and plans

* To lift UCLA into the ranks of the great universities but preserve its character.

* To maintain a diverse university community despite a statewide move to curtail traditional affirmative action. “I can understand the regents’ concerns about the past methods.”

* To push fund-raising but also the need to “spend efficiently.”

* To emphasize research and teaching across traditional disciplinary lines.

* To live on the Westwood campus.