Sue Young, 69; Enhanced Role of Chancellor’s Wife

Sue K. Young, a forceful advocate for the hard-working spouses of college presidents during the three decades her husband, Charles, was chancellor of UCLA, died Friday at her home in Thousand Oaks after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 69.

Young was an energetic chancellor’s wife who planned conferences and hosted social affairs for groups as large as 5,000 and regularly represented UCLA at off-campus events.

She fulfilled the role for a dozen years before it occurred to her that the women who assumed such duties were sorely underappreciated--like the universities were “getting two for the price of one,” she once lamented.

Largely because of Young’s efforts, the UC Board of Regents in 1987 created the position of associate of the chancellor, open to the spouses of the heads of each of its nine campuses. Young assumed the post at UCLA. Although the position provided benefits such as a travel allowance but no salary, Young saw it as a major advance.

“Now we are official,” she said in a 1987 interview. “Do you know what it is like to be known as ‘wife of’ for 20 years?”

Not every chancellor’s wife leaped at the title and its perks, preferring the role of volunteer over that of quasi-employee.

Yet Young “brought the issue to the forefront,” said Andrea Rich, who was UCLA executive vice chancellor before becoming president and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“She got enormous support from other spouses from around the country and changed the view from the trustees’ perspective and faculty perspective of the professional qualities necessary to be the spouse.”

Young was also a poet and lyricist. She wrote the New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary, the Scholastic Rhyming Dictionary for Children and “Writing With Style,” also for children.

Born Sue Daugherty, Young was a native of Colton whose high marks in high school earned her a four-year scholarship to UCLA. The daughter of a Southern Pacific railroad man, she could not afford the costs of traveling to and from the Westwood campus and instead accepted a scholarship to nearby San Bernardino Valley College. She met her future husband there and quit college to help put him through school.

During the Korean War, while her husband was on active duty in Japan with his National Guard unit, Young went to work for Southern California Gas Co. When he returned, she settled into the full-time role of housewife and mother. “It simply didn’t occur to me,” she told The Times in 1986, “that I could be a student after I got married.”

In 1973, she was a member of the Los Angeles Civil Service Commission when she made the painful discovery that almost all career fields required a college education. Only then, after 25 years of marriage and five years as the “wife of” a university chancellor, did Young think of returning to school for her long-deferred degree.

The following year she enrolled at Santa Monica College to renew her rusty academic skills, then transferred to UCLA, where few students or professors knew that she was anything more than another undergraduate, albeit somewhat older than most.

At 45, she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in political science. She completed 18 months of graduate work in linguistics, stopping short of a master’s degree when the demands of her work as the chancellor’s wife left too little time for study.

Several years later, in 1985, Young became chairwoman and chief executive of the Council of Presidents/Chancellors Spouses of the National Assn. of State University and Land-Grant Colleges.

She began to hear other spouses voice frustration about how little recognition they received for the considerable contributions they made to the life of their respective colleges and universities. “We all agreed on the importance of a title to move out of the realm of being ‘the wife of,’ ” she told the Chicago Tribune.

She also believed that the spouses deserved a salary “or at least the right to turn it down,” she said.

Young addressed the controversial issue of compensation for college presidents’ spouses in “The Question of Remuneration,” an article in a 1984 publication of the state universities association.

“Someone does have to do the things a president’s wife does,” she wrote. “There is not a university presidency in the nation that is a one-person job. Whether or not a wife exists, someone is performing the vital administration of social events. Should there be public acknowledgment that a necessary and valuable job is being done that, were it not for the free labor of the spouse, would have to be paid for?”

Hers was not the prevailing view, however. According to a survey by the universities association, most spouses opposed giving up their volunteer status.

Young’s cancer diagnosis came toward the end of her husband’s 29-year tenure as UCLA chancellor; Charles Young retired in 1997.

Two years later, he accepted the post of interim president of the University of Florida. He took the job on less than a full-time basis and maintained their home in Thousand Oaks so his wife could remain close to her doctors at UCLA.

In addition to her husband, Young is survived by a son, Charles Jr.; a daughter, Elizabeth Young-Apstein; and seven grandchildren.

The funeral will be private; a memorial program at UCLA will be announced later. Donations may be made to the UCLA Foundation for the Sue K. Young Scholarship Fund, c/o Rhea Turteltaub, UCLA Foundation, 10920 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1400, Los Angeles, CA 90024.