Young Gives Parting Advice to UC Regents

IRVINE — For weeks, UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young had wrestled over how to say goodbye.

After 29 years at the helm of the Westwood campus, he had delivered his last commencement speech, wiping away tears after telling students that he too was finally graduating. He had attended more formal tributes and farewell dinners than he could count. Now it was time to bid adieu to his bosses--the UC Board of Regents with whom he has clashed off and on for three decades--and the famously outspoken Young could not decide whether to go quietly or with a rant.

“I guess six months ago,” Young said earlier this week, “I would have thought, ‘Aha! I’m going to have a chance at my last regents meeting [to say], ‘You’re a bunch of . . . ‘ “

But with just 10 days to go before his June 30 retirement, Young resisted that urge at a regents meeting Friday and instead gave the regents a polite mix of praise and prodding. First he praised them for selecting an excellent successor, Harvard Provost Albert Carnesale. Then he covered the checklist of issues he’s been chiding them about for years: urging them to resist political pressure, safeguard diversity and see to the fiscal health of the prestigious nine-campus system--even if that means raising student fees.

Finally, his voice wavering, he wished that the members of UC’s governing board could someday experience what he has: “a wonderful and requited love affair with a great university.”

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This is an emotional time for the usually stoic administrator. The youngest head of a major university when he was appointed at age 36, Young--now 65--is today the longest-serving college leader in American higher education, earning $222,700 a year. Close associates say that in recent months, as his departure has drawn nearer, Young has at times seemed unable to imagine life after chancellorhood.

At the same time, Sue Young, his wife of 47 years, has been fighting a fierce battle with cancer. This week, after the couple learned that she has not responded as hoped to chemotherapy, someone asked Young how he was holding up.

“Doing great,” he responded. “I haven’t cried yet today.”

Such displays have caught some colleagues by surprise. The tall, often irreverent chancellor is better known for his thick skin and sometimes rough edges. But lately, the gray-haired institution-builder and master fund-raiser has revealed that he is also just a man--and a husband--for whom letting go could never be easy.

“I can’t tell people how my heart --and this is going to sound corny --how filled my heart has been with the outpourings of love and appreciation that have come. And how much outpouring there’s been for Sue,” Young said in an interview this week, covering his face with his hands for a moment when tears came. “It’s real. It’s real. And it helps.”

Young’s connections to UC date back to the early 1950s when he enrolled at UC Riverside as an undergraduate. He earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in political science from UCLA, then served as a professor, an assistant chancellor and vice chancellor before being chosen for the top job in 1968.

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One year later, as campuses were torn by the antiwar and black power movements, he clashed with the regents for the first time, refusing to accede to their demand that he fire professor Angela Davis because of her communist views. The regents eventually did it themselves.

Over the years, he also sparred openly with the board over student fees (he believes they should be higher), over governance (he believes the board has a tendency to micro-manage) and most recently over affirmative action.

Young and UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, who also steps down June 30, were vocal opponents of the regents’ 1995 decision to ban consideration of race and gender in UC admissions. Both men warned that UC’s educational mission would suffer as its student body became less diverse.

Given that Young, by his own count, has endured 250 regents meetings--eating up a full two years of his life--you might expect he’d be glad to be finished with that duty. But a few months ago he sought to become a regent himself, applying to be UC Riverside’s alumni representative to the board. He was not chosen.

“I thought maybe I could have an impact,” he said, “in helping regents understand what they ought to be doing.”

Young also briefly entertained a faculty proposal to make him interim dean of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. He decided against it, he said, in part because it could have been awkward for his successor to have the ex-chancellor so near at hand.

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“This is the right time to leave--the right time for the university and for me,” Young said. “I may six months from now say, ‘Oh, my god! I’m no longer the chancellor! I’m devastated! . . . But I am amazed that there is almost none of that now.”

Young, who is credited with building UCLA’s huge fund-raising machine almost from scratch, does plan to remain involved in the campus’ current $1-billion campaign. And UC President Richard C. Atkinson has asked him to serve as what Young calls “a kind of university observer” on various issues.

But most immediately, Young--who leaves UCLA with nearly twice the faculty, three times the library books and 10 times the operating budget as when he found it--plans to spend time with his family. His benefits package, which includes not only a pension but a lump sum payment of more than $240,000, had seemed to set them up for a comfortable retirement.

Sue Young’s illness, however, has led the couple to postpone plans to build a house near the Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks. The Youngs had also been planning to take an extended road trip around the country to see friends. They still want to make the trip, Young said, but they may not drive.

“[We’ve decided], no matter how much time we’ve got left, let’s do things now and not think about doing them some time in the future,” he said. “We’re talking more, spending more time together. Saying the things we think. . . . Because there’s no time like the present.”