New Leader of UC System Is Upbeat About Challenges

Bob Dynes, intent on his BlackBerry, squeezed into his airplane seat and raced to catch up on e-mail before his Friday night flight to San Diego took off. He brushed aside a flight attendant’s warning to switch the device off -- “Oh, right, OK” -- then resumed his furious tapping as she disappeared down the aisle.

But she sneaked back up on the man just named to head the nation’s most prestigious public university system and caught him, hunched over, doing the “BlackBerry prayer,” as he puts it. She sternly ordered Dynes to surrender the device. He did so, red-faced.

“Here I’d just been appointed the president of the University of California. I’m 60 years old and I felt like a third-grade kid and the teacher had caught me with a note,” Dynes said last week, laughing.

A focused, disciplined man with a quick, self-deprecating sense of humor, Robert C. Dynes, chancellor of UC San Diego, is certain to need all those qualities as he takes the helm of UC’s 10-campus system this fall.

With 190,000 students, UC is facing an enrollment boom at the same time it confronts deep budget cuts stemming from the state’s $38-billion budget shortfall. It is struggling to maintain racial and ethnic diversity on its campuses under restrictions imposed by the state’s ban on affirmative action. And, within months, it must decide whether to compete for the right to continue running Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nuclear weapons design lab it has managed for 60 years.

Reflecting on his new role last week, however, Dynes, an experimental physicist who entered academia from industry little more than a decade ago, sounded undaunted, even upbeat.

“OK, I don’t want to sound like a Pollyanna here, but there have always been problems,” he said in an interview in his UC San Diego office. “The University of California has faced different challenges at different times, and it has always come through strong. The fiscal issues worry you, and they should, but they’re not unique. And you come through them just fine if you keep your head screwed on right.”

Appointed June 11 by the university’s Board of Regents, Dynes said his own head has been “buzzing” with thoughts of the new job, even as he continues to carry out other duties, from shaking thousands of hands at UC San Diego’s seven commencement ceremonies to presiding over campus budget discussions.

A week ago Sunday, with his hand still numb from congratulating graduates, he carried a glass of wine out into his yard and weeded his vegetable garden, a restorative activity that friends say is typical of a man who strives for balance -- and contrasts -- in an often hectic life.

“He’s a quantitative scientist who loves live theater, and has this fascination with the imagination and something as random as art,” said Vice Chancellor James Langley. “Bob has brainpower, creativity and just incredible stability.”

Efficient, Disciplined

He also is efficient and exceptionally disciplined, his colleagues said, finding time to teach physics classes and conduct his own research while serving as chancellor.

A committed runner, Dynes was once asked to describe his proudest accomplishment: “He said that he’d run at least 30 miles a week for the last 30 years,” Langley said.

Dynes said he expects to spend the next several months defining his priorities, but will start by consulting each of the 26 UC regents. Some he knows well; others not well enough. “It’s important to me to engage them, one on one,” he said. “You can’t leave regents behind on these issues, or you can’t get anything done.”

The most pressing issue he faces is budget cuts. The university is expected to raise student fees next month by about 25% and is considering reductions in student programs and services, even layoffs. Simultaneously, it must contend with a surge in demand as the children of baby boomers reach college age.

Dynes said he would consider capping enrollment, if necessary.

“If we reach the point where the growth begins to erode the university’s quality, my inclination would be to just slow or stop the growth until that changes,” he said. “We cannot sacrifice that quality.”

Some legislators have said that, given the state’s budget crisis, construction should be stopped on the system’s 10th campus near Merced in the Central Valley.

Dynes said he wants to look at the university’s growth projections before taking a position on that. In the long term, Dynes said, “I believe UC Merced is the right thing to be doing ... but the strategy right now is something we have to look at.”

The new UC leader also said it would be premature for him to weigh in on whether the university should compete for the contract to run Los Alamos. He wants to know first what the terms of the deal with the federal government would be.

Los Alamos Bid

Although UC has run the laboratory for six decades without competing for the management contract, the Energy Department decided this year to put the operation to bid when the current deal expires in 2005. The decision followed a series of management lapses at Los Alamos, including employee thefts.

Dynes, who has served for several decades on scientific advisory panels overseeing Los Alamos, said that, if the contract conditions “are not consistent with the university’s mission, then we should be prepared to back away.”

But should the university decide to compete, several regents said, Dynes’ scientific expertise would serve UC well.

Dynes grew up in Ontario, Canada, and was the first in his family to graduate from college -- after his mother and teachers pushed him to give up the idea of a career in ice hockey. He spent 22 years at AT&T; Bell Laboratories, where he did semiconductor research and became director of chemical physics research in 1983. He joined the UC San Diego faculty as a physics professor eight years later.

He moved rapidly through the academic ranks, becoming chairman of the physics department by 1994 and, a year later, senior vice chancellor of academic affairs. A year after that, he was named chancellor.

Some San Diego students, including student body president Jeremy Paul Gallagher, said that Dynes does not interact with students as much as they would like. But other students and faculty members praise him for being approachable, even when he’s clearly busy.

On a recent afternoon, fourth-year student Kaelyn Helmer stood hesitantly, uncertain whether to approach the chancellor as he showed a group of visitors around campus. Dynes gestured to her to approach.

“You’re the chancellor, right?” asked Helmer, 21. “My parents told me you’re going to be the new UC president. Hey, congratulations, that’s very good for San Diego!”

Dynes thanked her, grimacing slightly at the idea that he might be perceived as a cheerleader for UC San Diego in his new job. “Now, some people are going to be sensitive about that,” he said, shaking Helmer’s hand. “I’ve got to kind of shift gears here and get into the new mode.”

Jennifer Theune, who graduated in June 2002 but works on campus, came up too. “Can I still call you ‘Chancellor’?” she asked.

“You can still call me Bob,” Dynes responded.

Stand on Diversity

After Dynes’ appointment, some UC student representatives criticized him for what one described as lukewarm support for increasing diversity on campus. Dynes defended his record.

“It’s a passion for me,” he said. “California is an ever-changing state, and if we’re not finding and educating the best, brightest and most motivated students from all backgrounds, then we’ve failed. It’s as simple as that.”

The San Diego campus, along with most others in the system, saw its numbers of African American, Latino and American Indian students plummet in the late 1990s, after the ban on affirmative action in public institutions. The figures have rebounded slowly since then, with the percentage of underrepresented minorities admitted for this fall standing at 15.2% -- nearly even with the percentage in 1997, before the ban took effect.

“We’re moving in the right direction,” Dynes said.

Faculty members and administrators on campus credit Dynes with pushing the creation five years ago of a charter school on the campus serving talented, low-income students from the San Diego area. It is intended as a long-term effort to help promote ethnic and socioeconomic diversity on the campus.

Cecil Lytle, one of the project’s most fervent supporters on the faculty, initially questioned the chancellor’s commitment, as did others. But in the end, Dynes “handled it extremely well, mediating between the campus’ instincts for elitism and the community’s desire to help its most vulnerable citizens,” said Lytle, provost of Thurgood Marshall College, one of six undergraduate colleges on the campus.

‘Unusual Mixture’

Lytle said he had no doubts of Dynes’ support for diversity or that he would make a good UC president.

“He’s gregarious, and he’s got this very unusual mixture of backgrounds, from industry to academia,” Lytle said. “He can move in different communities very easily.”

Charles F. Kennel, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, agreed, saying that Dynes is a capable administrator who finds ways to “connect with all sorts of people.” But he added that he worried a little about Dynes’ ability to say no to people who seek his attention.

Now Dynes and his wife, also a physics professor, are preparing to leave this community that has absorbed their talents and interest for a decade.

Frances Dynes Hellman, an expert on magnetism, has taught at the UC campus since 1987; the two were married in 1998, the second marriage for him, the first for her.

On a recent weekday, they laughed easily together, telling a visitor stories -- of their wedding on a boat in Hawaii, of a second, public ceremony in the Bay Area and of mistakenly buying tickets to a production of “Hamlet,” in Japanese, on their last visit to London.

Yet they both got serious when speaking of leaving the campus and San Diego, a city they have clearly loved.

Dynes said that, when the search began, he wasn’t sure he wanted the president’s position.

“Just look at the job,” he said, laughing. “It’s a very complex job.”

And besides, he continued, he lives in a house overlooking San Diego’s fabled Black’s Beach. He runs on the beach almost every morning and his wife plays soccer in several local leagues. Baseball enthusiasts, they can leave their labs and be watching a Padres game 15 minutes later.

But by the time the call came, he said, he was ready. “I think the University of California can make just an enormous difference in this state,” he said. “I reckon I’ve got about five years to do some of the things I’d like to do, and that’s exciting. That’s very exciting.”

Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein contributed to this report.