Carnesale not the leader UC system needs

Chancellor Albert Carnesale says he has no burning desire to be
the next president of the University of California though he
wouldn’t necessarily decline the position if asked to serve,
“Carnesale not seeking UC presidential office” (News,
Feb. 10).

This wavering obfuscation could prove prophetic in the coming
months because Carnesale might be the exact kind of leader the UC
Board of Regents is looking for to succeed the outgoing president,
Richard Atkinson.

Unfortunately, despite his competent stewardship of UCLA,
stellar fundraising skills and Harvard pedigree, Carnesale does not
possess the qualities desperately and currently needed by the UC at
one of the most critical points in its history.

Traditionally, leaders of this university have fit into one of
two distinct models: the consensus builder-fundraiser or the
activist-innovator. Perhaps more than any other current UC
chancellor, Carnesale embodies the former, and that’s why the
wishy-washy Board of Regents might very well give him the nod.

The consensus builder-fundraiser shies away from controversy and
ideology. He avoids doing anything to antagonize the regents,
governor and state legislature. He hesitates to implement bold
policies or take his institution into new, uncharted directions.
And, because of his broad constituency and ability to inspire few
great admirers and even fewer determined enemies, he is a master
fundraiser, able to tailor his pitch to diverse audiences without
having to defend controversial or polarizing policies.

In contrast, the activist-innovator isn’t afraid to ruffle
a few feathers if that’s what it takes to implement their
vision.

Perhaps the archetype of the activist leader at the UC is Clark
Kerr, who, as university president during the1960s, was chief
architect of California’s Master Plan for Higher Education.
He presided over the planning that led to the opening of the San
Diego, Irvine and Santa Cruz campuses.

Although Kerr’s position of leadership made him the
scourge of the Berkeley-based Free Speech Movement, it was his
refusal to adopt tactics advocated by Gov. Ronald Reagan (the
governor at the time) to deal with the student protests that got
him fired by the board. And, according to a recent San Francisco
Chronicle article, he was scrutinized by J. Edgar Hoover’s
FBI.

More recently, Carnesale’s immediate predecessor as
chancellor, Charles E. Young, also exemplified the activist model.
From the beginning of his 29-year tenure, when he protested the
firing of philosophy professor Angela Davis as an affront to
academic freedom, to the end, when he vigorously defended
affirmative action, Young always made his views clear and never
shied away from speaking truth to power. (Indeed, Young’s
outspoken support for affirmative action might be the chief reason
he was passed over for UC president.)

Young’s aggressiveness wasn’t always for the good.
He severely curtailed student power when he prohibited student
government officers from serving on the ASUCLA Board of Directors.
He was also against academic student employees exercising their
basic right to form a union.

But Young never lacked vision, and it was under his leadership
that UCLA ascended from an above-average regional institution to
one of the nation’s premier research universities.

Compare that description to Carnesale. In the nearly six years
since he took charge at UCLA, his most conspicuous and emblematic
achievement has been to garner major donations for the Center for
Health Sciences from both entertainment-mogul David Geffen, the
quintessential Hollywood liberal, and a group of Reagan supporters,
seeking to venerate their right-wing superhero (who might be the
worst thing that ever happened to the University of
California).

Only an expert consensus builder could preside over the renaming
of UCLA’s two most prominent institutions ““ the
now-David Geffen School of Medicine and the soon-to-be-rebuilt and
renamed Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. The centers are named
after two of the most prominent, and most ideologically opposite,
Americans. Otherwise, Carnesale has played it safe. He was well
into his tenure before he finally admitted that he would maybe,
kinda, sort of, like to be able to use affirmative action in
admissions.

And while Carnesale came from Harvard, promising to put UCLA on
the short list of world-class universities, he uttered nary a
whisper of protest this winter when Gov. Gray Davis radically
slashed the university’s budget in response to
California’s economic woes while giving the state’s
prison system its customary budget increase.

Atkinson himself began his tenure as a consensus builder, cowed
into submission by the thuggish, reactionary Board of Regents of
the mid ’90s. But in 2001, perhaps anticipating retirement
and hoping to leave a more substantial legacy, he boldly challenged
the dominance of the SAT in university admissions and has since
presided over a significant and controversial restructuring of the
admissions process.

What is clear, however is the need for an activist-innovator,
not a consensus builder-fundraiser to lead this university into an
uncertain future. Today, the university faces almost too many
problems to list: dire financial straits; lingering doubts about
its commitment to enrolling a diverse student body; insufficient
infrastructure for accommodating the projected 60,000 additional
students who will flood UC campuses over the next decade; and
Regent Ward Connerly’s latest, nefarious ballot
initiative.

With these growing concerns, the UC needs a president who will
stand up and lay out a course of action, not one who will wait for
the snail-paced Board of Regents to convene a task force. We need a
leader who will demand the university’s proper share of the
state-budget pie; take a stand on diversity; come up with a plan
for handling the burgeoning student population; push ahead on the
years-delayed 10th campus in Merced; and tell Connerly to shut
up.

Despite all his fundraising prowess, Chancellor Carnesale is not
that leader.

Weiner is a first-year law student and former Daily Bruin
Viewpoint editor.