Leading Candidate Bows Out in Hunt for UCLA Chancellor

Deborah A. Freund, the Syracuse University provost who had been the top candidate to replace Albert Carnesale as UCLA chancellor this summer, has withdrawn from consideration, forcing the University of California to reopen its search for a new leader of the Westwood campus.

A respected health economist who has held the No. 2 post at Syracuse since 1999, Freund pulled out of final negotiations with UC President Robert C. Dynes late Thursday, mainly because her husband was not offered a faculty position at UCLA, according to sources close to the search.

In a phone interview Friday, Freund, 53, confirmed that she was no longer a candidate for the post.

“I was so honored to be talking to President Dynes at the highest levels about this, but in the end we decided it wasn’t right for the family,” Freund said. “And I needed to put my family first.”

She would not discuss her husband’s efforts to land a faculty position with either of two UCLA departments that considered him, economics and public policy. Her husband, Thomas J. Kniesner, is chairman of the economics department at Syracuse, a private university in upstate New York.

“There were many reasons that went into the calculus but in the end, it just wasn’t right,” Freund said. She declined to be more specific, and Kniesner could not be reached for comment.

But several sources close to the search process said the UCLA departments’ decision not to offer a professorship to Kniesner, a labor economist who holds an endowed chair at Syracuse, amounted to a deal-breaker for Freund.

“It was a condition she set, and when that didn’t work, she pulled out,” one source said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of personnel decisions.

Why Kniesner did not receive an offer was not immediately clear, although several of those interviewed cited the complexities of finding the right positions for both members of a highpowered academic couple. Some UCLA sources said the UC president’s office and the departments may not have handled Kniesner’s review skillfully and others suggested that his interviews had not gone well.

On Friday, UCLA economics department Chairman Gary Hansen said he could not discuss the situation, citing the confidentiality of personnel actions. UCLA professor Adrienne Lavine, the faculty senate chairwoman, also wouldn’t comment.

In recent days, UC officials had said the negotiations with Freund were all but complete, although no job offer had been made. Dynes was expected to make a final recommendation to UC’s Board of Regents any day, with a vote on the matter possible as early as next week.

If she had become chancellor, Freund would have been the first woman to head UCLA. In the interview Friday, Freund suggested that she felt some regret at the missed opportunity.

Her withdrawal means that just six weeks before Carnesale is scheduled to step down as chancellor, UC leaders must begin again in their efforts to find a successor. The national search that led to Freund took more than five months and produced hundreds of candidates.

On Friday, UC spokesman Michael Reese said the hunt for a new chancellor would not start from scratch.

“We have a search committee and a clear sense of what the campus needs in its next chancellor,” he said. “We even have a group of candidates who were at various stages of the process.” He would not identify the other candidates.

Reese said it was too early to discuss whether Carnesale, who has served in the top UCLA post since 1997, would be asked to stay on beyond June 30.

William G. Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at USC, said it had become increasingly difficult to find the right candidates to lead such enormous and complicated public campuses as UCLA.

“These are 24-hours, seven-days-a-week jobs. They burn people up and out,” he said.

Though emphasizing that he did not know any details of Freund’s candidacy, Tierney said UCLA may turn to another person on its wish list. But such a move “always creates a strange sensation when you find out you are No. 2 and not No. 1.”

Freund’s decision comes at an awkward time for UC and for Dynes, who has led the public university system since 2003.

Since November, the UC president has been embroiled in a statewide controversy over executive pay and perks, after media reports that the university system spent millions on undisclosed or questionable compensation. Two recent audits have found that UC in recent years repeatedly violated or circumvented its own policies to provide additional salary or perks to top administrators.

More revelations and criticism are likely next week, with the expected release of another audit at a regents meeting.

Universities across the country increasingly face challenges in hiring leaders because candidates are often married to other academics who also want jobs at the new campuses, said Sheldon Steinbach, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education, a higher education umbrella group to which UC belongs.

“In recruiting a chancellor, it is not uncommon to find their spouse a comparable position to what they had” at their prior university. But, especially with faculty positions at prestigious universities, “this is not always a slam dunk,” said Steinbach, who stressed he was not familiar with the UCLA search.

Steinbach said people should keep in mind that situations often involve difficult family decisions as well as professional ones.

“There are human beings here,” he said.