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“Let me tell you my favorite UCLA athletic story this year,” UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale said Tuesday.

Go right ahead.

Rocking the Rose Bowl with victories over Alabama and Michigan in football? A magical eight-game winning streak and run to the Sweet 16 in men’s basketball?

“Women’s gymnastics,” he said.

That team won a national championship, competing during a winter quarter in which the team members posted a 3.5 grade-point average. Five gymnasts were All-Americans, four were academic All-Americans.

“That’s athletic excellence,” Carnesale said.

The UCLA-USC football rivalry commands center stage this week, but the men who run both universities insist there is athletic life beyond football. USC President Steven Sample said so Monday, in support of his embattled athletic director, Mike Garrett. Carnesale said so Tuesday and said the school is negotiating to extend the contract of its athletic director, Peter Dalis.

The Bruins also won NCAA championships in 1999-2000 in men’s volleyball, men’s water polo and women’s indoor track and field. In each of the seven years of the Sears Cup competition, which ranks athletic programs based on championship finishes in all sports, the Bruins have finished among the top five.

“There are very few universities in the country that have broad-based excellence academically and broad-based excellence athletically,” Carnesale said. “Fortunately for us, UCLA is one of those very few.”

Carnesale arrived at UCLA in 1997, after 23 years as a professor and administrator at Harvard. In an interview in his Murphy Hall office, Carnesale discussed rivalries here and in the Ivy League, the purposes and standards of the athletic department and expectations for the storied UCLA men’s basketball program.

Question: Harvard and Yale folks call their annual football game “The Game,” as if there were no other that mattered. How do you compare the UCLA-USC rivalry to the Harvard-Yale rivalry?

Answer: Harvard and Yale are far apart. UCLA and USC are in the same city, so to some extent you’re constantly reminded of the athletic rivalry.

At Harvard and Yale, you sort of remember it once a year, and it’s a relatively small part of the Harvard or Yale population that pays attention to it. Here, you have the combination of the same city with two major athletic powers on the national scene. There are very few other rivalries--I don’t know if there are any you can think of--where they’re located in the same place. I think that’s the major difference. People never forget about the rivalry. The game is sort of a culmination to something that’s been going on all year.”

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Q: Harvard and the other institutions of the Ivy League do not award athletic scholarships and do not aspire to compete with the athletic powers of the NCAA. What should the role of the athletic department be within a prestigious university like UCLA?

A: One of the things that I found interesting was, when I was interviewed by the search committee for this position, there was not one question about athletics, despite the fact that I was coming from Harvard and people might have worried that I might not know the football is the one with the pointy end. That was not what was high on the list of priorities of the faculty, students and administrators in searching for a chancellor.

I think the athletic department does have an important role to play at a university like UCLA. First of all, it’s a window to the world of UCLA. Many people first know about UCLA through its athletic program, especially youngsters. They may not know what the letters UCLA stands for, but they know who the Bruins are. So it’s an important early impression of what the university is about. Therefore, it’s essential that it be something of which the university is proud.

That begins with the student-athlete--that they are indeed student-athletes, and how they conduct themselves as representatives of a university.

Second, that there’s an element of best effort and excellence about what they do, that they make the most of their skills and talents, just as you would hope a student would do in a physics or literature class.

Third, that the coaches are perceived primarily as teachers. That’s one of the wonderful things--if you speak to the coaches at UCLA, you’ll get that sense, that they think of themselves more as teachers than anything else. And it’s also true you want to have a successful program as measured by won-lost records.

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Q: While excellence throughout a broad-based athletic program might satisfy some alumni, isn’t there a loud and easily disgruntled core of alumni that believes any men’s basketball season that does not end with an NCAA championship is a failure?

A: That’s a common perception, but there’s no evidence that it’s true. Certainly, you would never know from the letters I get or the e-mails that I get that there’s rabid alumni out there that care only about winning the national championship.

I think UCLA alumni and fans have their heads screwed on right. They’re much more interested in the kinds of things I talked about. For example, there was far more concern early on about handicapped parking [19 football players last year pleaded no contest to misdemeanor misuse of handicapped-parking permits] than I ever heard about the records of any team. They wanted to be sure the coaches weren’t involved, that there wasn’t something rotten in Denmark--much more concerned about that.

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Q: In men’s basketball, within the past few months alone, UCLA has acknowledged a secondary NCAA recruiting violation, seen a continued erosion in attendance at Pauley Pavilion and watched two players leave school for the NBA draft and several others scramble to pass summer-school classes to remain eligible. How concerned are you about the direction of the program?

A: I do believe that, among all of the sports, basketball may be the most difficult to maintain all of the ideals we’ve talked about and be competitive at the highest level. Partly it’s because of the money that can be made in the pros. Partly it’s because of the enormous temptation to go professional early--straight out of high school or after one year of college. I do think, in many ways, that is the greatest challenge, more than any of the other sports, and not just at UCLA.

I think every chancellor and president of a university that has a competitive athletic program is concerned about how we will manage to maintain those ideals with the NBA compensation being what it is.

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Q: The most recently released NCAA statistics reveal that men’s basketball players enter UCLA with grade-point averages and SAT scores significantly below those of other student-athletes. If several of those players are struggling academically once enrolled, how concerned are you about their readiness for college, and how willing are you to relax academic standards for them?

A: Basketball tends to be an inner-city sport, where schools generally are not as good and students are generally not as well prepared. Let’s be realistic: The students that come to play tennis or gymnastics or swimming are more likely to have come from suburban schools and wealthier families in which they had more educational advantages than is the case for basketball. Universities are reflective of the society around us.

But, just as in any other sport, these student-athletes have to maintain and meet the academic standards set by the university and the NCAA, with no exceptions. That’s becoming more difficult at every university, but certainly there are no exceptions to those expectations.