UC Regents: Lots of Pomp,
Little Circumstance

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Can a part-time board cope with
UC's complex problems?

This is the first in a series of reports on the governance of higher education in California. Trombley, Senior Editor at The California Higher Education Policy Center, and a former higher education reporter for the  Los Angeles Times, has been observing the UC Board of Regents for more than 30 years.

A young woman rose to address the University of California Board of Regents in January 1993, as the board, once again, was discussing a possible increase in student fees. The woman was a UCLA graduate student who began to tell the regents how difficult it was to finance an education on a campus located on the expensive west side of Los Angeles.

Regent Roy T. Brophy, who was chairing the meeting, listened for a few minutes until a university administrator whispered in his ear that the student was not on the "official list" of speakers. Brophy then gaveled her into silence, saying, "We listened because we thought you were a resource."

At that point a voice from the back of the cavernous meeting room called out, "She is a resource--she's a student."

For some in the audience, those few minutes typified the behavior of the regents, the governing board for one of the largest and, some would say, the finest public university in the world--arrogant, aloof, and insulated from the real lives of the people who make up the university.

Although less a club for rich white males than it was 30 years ago, the regents still affect an imperial style as they govern a university that has nine major campuses, an eight billion dollar annual budget, 160,000 students and another 133,000 employees, including 39,000 academic personnel.

Meetings, usually held at a largely-empty medical facility in the Laurel Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, are conducted with considerable pomp. Members address each other as "Regent So-and-so," seldom as "Roy" or "Frank" or "Alice." Half of the board members sit with their backs to the audience. Until recently, a velvet rope separated the regents from UC chancellors, vice presidents, reporters and other hoi polloi in the auditorium.

When they are not sitting around the long rectangular meeting table, board members huddle in secluded backstage offices, where their privacy is guarded by UC police officers. Reporters are issued maps with directions to reach the rest rooms without disturbing the regents.

When the board meets in San Francisco, Southern California regents usually stay at the expensive Clift Grand Heritage Hotel, while in Los Angeles the hotel of choice is the Westwood Marquis near UCLA.

Regents once were picked up at airports and driven to meetings in limousines but now must settle for rental cars, with student drivers. The limos disappeared during the governorship of Jerry Brown, who drove himself to board meetings in a small blue Plymouth.

Security is heavy. Fifteen to 25 university police, in uniform and plain clothes, are on hand for a routine board meeting. This costs an average of $7,400 for a two-day meeting. (In contrast, only a handful of officers is present when the Board of Trustees of the much larger California State University system meets in Long Beach.)

When protest demonstrations are threatened, as they were when the regents voted last July to abandon the university's "affirmative action" policies, hundreds of UC, city and state police--some in riot gear--are at the ready.

Pocketbooks and briefcases are searched. No weapons or other dangerous items ever have been found, but university police once attempted to confiscate a woman's protective whistle, fearing she might blow it to disrupt the regents' deliberations.

"We think these are reasonable steps," said Wayne Kennedy, UC's senior vice president for business and finance. "In today's world, I would rather err on the side of being too cautious." Guillermo Rodriguez, Jr., a UC Berkeley graduate who served as a student member of the Board of Regents during the 1989-90 academic year, sees it differently.

"A lot of that has to do with being untouchable and wanting to be that way," said Rodriguez, who is now executive director of the Latino Issues Forum in San Francisco. "The fact that they are not accountable to the people of the State of California shelters them and they become so isolated, they feel the need to have such an army around them."

If the regents are, indeed, "untouchable" and "not accountable," a major reason is to be found in Article 9, Section 9, of the California Constitution, which, since 1868, has allowed the Board of Regents to run the University of California with considerable autonomy.

As a practical matter, the regents often bend to the political will of the governor or the Legislature, who, if displeased, can punish the university by cutting its budget. A recent example is the July vote to end affirmative action in admissions, contracting and hiring policies--actions the board would not have taken without heavy pressure from Governor Pete Wilson, who has made opposition to affirmative action an important part of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

But constitutional status has given UC far more independence than most public universities enjoy. Typically, when a scandal surfaces in the news, legislators will thunder against the university's arrogance and incompetence, threaten hearings, investigations and constitutional changes, but in the end, do nothing.

Regents and UC officials say this relative immunity from public accountability has made it possible to build the finest public university system in the land. Three major new campuses have been built in the last three decades--Irvine, Santa Cruz and San Diego--and the prestige of the other six campuses--Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, Santa Barbara, Riverside and San Francisco Medical Center--has been enhanced.

Until state budget cuts began to take their toll in the 1990s, University of California faculty salaries were among the nation's highest, and student tuition charges were low. Now UC salaries have fallen below those of many other research universities. And undergraduate tuition charges, averaging more than $4,200, are among the highest for public universities.

The regents have proven to be wise investors, building an enviable $20 billion portfolio for the university's retirement fund. The annual investment return has averaged 14.3 percent over the last ten years. There is more than enough money in the fund to pay full retirement benefits for every UC employee if they all left tomorrow. This surplus made it possible for the regents to offer early retirement buyouts to almost 10,000 faculty and staff members, helping to offset state budget cuts in the early '90s.

If the regents' constitutional status has enabled them to move with relative speed and flexibility, their independent ways frequently upset lawmakers in Sacramento. Some legislators, like State Senator Nicholas C. Petris (D-Oakland) are strong supporters of the university, but others seethe at what they consider to be the board's high-handed and "public be damned" attitude. The board has been called the California equivalent of the "College of Cardinals" or the state's own "House of Lords."

Officials of the California State University were thinking about asking the Constitutional Revision Commission for the same kind of constitutional protections that the University of California has, but decided against it after seeing the climate of legislative distrust that has developed around UC.

Eighteen of the 26 regents are appointed to 12-year terms by the governor, subject to State Senate confirmation. Seven others serve because of the offices they hold--governor, lieutenant governor, president of the university, state superintendent of public instruction, speaker of the assembly, and the president and vice president of the UC alumni association. A student member, selected by the board, serves a one-year term.

Although the board's luster has dimmed somewhat in recent years, appointments still are sought eagerly. John G. Davies, who was Governor Pete Wilson's personal attorney and is now his judicial appointments secretary, was named to the board in 1992, after telling Wilson that the Board of Regents "was something I would really like to do." Some prominent Californians have made heavy financial contributions to both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor, hoping to obtain a regental appointment from the winner.

This puzzles Clair W. Burgener, the 75-year-old former Republican congressman who is the current board chairman.

Board Chairman Clair W. Burgener

"This is a difficult, unpaid job," Burgener said during an interview at his country club near Rancho Santa Fe. (Regents are not paid to attend meetings, but their expenses are reimbursed.) "It took at least 40 days of my time last year and that's an awful lot to ask of a citizen. I think the terms are twice too long, but that's a minority view on the board."

Davies is the only white male among Wilson's first five appointments. Over the years, especially with the appointments made by Wilson and by former Governor Jerry Brown, the group has become somewhat more representative of the state's population. The current board includes two African Americans, two Asian Americans, two Mexican-American women and one Cuban American. But nine of the 18 current appointed members are white males, of whom at least five are millionaires. In 30 years, the number of female regents has increased only from three to four.

What the regents have gained in racial diversity they have lost in prestige and political clout. Thirty years ago, the board included such influential figures as department store executive Edward W. Carter, oil man Edwin W. Pauley, entrepreneur and art collector Norton Simon and two women from publishing empires--Dorothy Chandler (Los Angeles Times) and Catherine Hearst (San Francisco Examiner and other Hearst newspapers).

"Those were powerful people and they had direct recourse not only to the media but to movers and shakers in Sacramento," said William K. Coblentz, a San Francisco attorney who was a regent from 1964 to 1980. "I remember some years ago when I went up to Sacramento with Carter and Pauley and we just roamed the halls of the Capitol, talking to legislators about the university and its budget and its problems. I don't think that kind of thing goes on much anymore."

Regents of two and three decades ago were "very conservative, but they really cared about the university, they took a lot of pride in what they were doing," said Herbert F. York, a former chancellor at UC San Diego and also former director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. "Today's group doesn't seem to be as interested or as committed."

But a club-like atmosphere still surrounds the regents. Some kinds of behavior are acceptable within the club, others are not. After former Regent Jeremiah Hallisey, a San Francisco attorney, made public the terms of a grandiose retirement package the board had approved for President David P. Gardner in 1992, several other regents snubbed Hallisey.

"There was a minimum of necessary politeness," Hallisey recalled in an interview.

Regent Alice J. Gonzales, of Rocklin, wrote a letter chastising Hallisey for his action, and took the unusual step of reading her letter aloud at a public session of the board.

Brophy, a wealthy Sacramento developer, recalled that when he moved to the regents from the Cal State Board of Trustees in 1986, "The board members were very comfortable with what they were doing and made it clear they didn't need any interference from an underling that came aboard from what many regents considered to be an institution--CSU--that shouldn't be speaking in the same room with the members of the governing board of the University of California."

Ward Connerly, another successful Sacramento businessman and one of Governor Wilson's two African-American appointees, said he was surprised to find, upon joining the board in 1993, that regents were seated at meetings according to seniority.

"I thought, 'well, God damn it, I'm going to be spending as much time as the rest of these people, and yet I'm here at the back of the bus because of my short tenure as a board member,' and I just almost instantly rebelled at that and consciously sat closer to the front, where tradition would suggest I should not be sitting."

On Thursday nights, after day-long committee meetings and before the full board assembles on Friday, the regents dine together, usually with the university president, the campus chancellors and other top officials. Sometimes faculty members, alumni and major donors to the university are invited. Often the dinners are held at expensive restaurants like the Carnelian Room, on the top floor of the Bank of America building in downtown San Francisco.

These are supposed to be strictly social gatherings at which no university business is discussed, especially since passage of a state "open meeting" law in 1980.

Former State Assemblyman William T. Bagley, a co-author of the legislation and now a regent, insisted that the board adheres to the law. "Nobody gets up and says, 'Tomorrow we're going to vote on this,'" he said. "It's mostly to get acquainted with the faculty, with the administrators, with the alumni support groups."

But other regents said university business is discussed routinely at these affairs. "What else are we going to talk about?" asked one. "Our sex lives? That would take about three minutes."

Brophy said that former President Gardner used one of the Thursday night dinners in 1992 to lobby the board to allow him to release news of his retirement package, instead of the regents announcing it as had been planned. "He released three meaningless sentences that he wrote himself," Brophy said. "They didn't tell youl anything, and that was when the secrecy thing became the principal issue."

The "secrecy thing"--the widespread belief that the regents had conspired behind closed doors to cover up details of the handsome payments they were making to Gardner--has plagued the board ever since.

A penchant for secrecy is the source of many of the board's problems with legislators, the news media and the general public.

The regents' bylaws, as well as state law, allow the board to discuss personnel matters or pending litigation in executive session, away from the prying eyes of reporters. Since almost any university matter can be interpreted as dealing with personnel or litigation, the board meets privately whenever it so desires.

Instead of making as much of their business public as possible, regents spend a lot of time behind closed doors planning how to keep the public and the press from finding out what is going on.

The transcript of a March 1992 executive session of the now-defunct regents committee on administrative compensation shows that much of the time was spent discussing ways of preventing reporters and legislators from learning details of the Gardner retirement settlement.

Often, the regents confer in executive session for hours about controversial matters, then appear for brief, bland public sessions.

Last July, for example, there was a lengthy closed-door discussion of embarrassing disclosures that doctors at the UC Irvine Center for Reproductive Health had taken human eggs without consent, fertilized them and then transferred the embryos to other patients. University employees who blew the whistle on this operation were paid more than $900,000 to keep quiet.

There were important questions to be answered. Did the dean of the UC Irvine medical school or other campus officials know about the doctors' activities? Who signed the contracts allowing this work to proceed? Did Jack Peltason, who later became the university's president, and who was UC Irvine chancellor when the egg exchanges allegedly began, know? Did Laurel L. Wilkening, the current chancellor, know? Who authorized the "whistle blower" payments?

None of these questions was asked when the board emerged from its sanctuary to discuss the matter in public. Instead, there were lengthy "dog and pony" presentations about the university's insurance coverage and its "risk management" program. It would have been possible to listen to all of this without realizing that beneath these bland recitations lay an explosive issue that could cost the university millions of dollars in law suits, as well as its good name.(Ironically, two weeks after the meeting, it was revealed that one of the top officials of the much-praised risk management program allegedly embezzled almost one million dollars by writing fraudulent checks to herself and several relatives.)

After the meeting, Regent Tirso del Junco, a Los Angeles physician, said, "There are still many unknown factors but we are going to find out and, when we do, we will make our findings public."
More likely, enterprising reporters will find out and the result will be another rash of bad publicity for the university and its governing board.

Some of the regents' bitterest battles have been political--most recently last summer's decision to do away with the university's affirmative action policies in admissions, contracting and hiring.

"The role of the board is to keep the place honest and to provide a barrier" between the university and overheated public opinion, said Daniel Simmons, professor of law at UC Davis and former chairman of the statewide faculty Academic Council. But on some occasions the board seems to act as a conduit for political heat, not as a buffer against it.

Sociologist Neil J. Smelser, a longtime UC Berkeley faculty leader and occasional administrator who is now director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University offered this analysis:

"Constitutionally, the regents constitute a body that is a magnificent buffer between the university and the day-by-day politics of the state, and that's kind of remarkable because they're political appointees," Smelser said.

"But if you look at the dynamics of the regents, they are very, very part-time. They cannot have a grasp of the institution, and their origins are such that they mainly look at the world in corporate andl legal terms...They can't govern really, not in a direct sense, but they feel a need to, or some of them do.

"When some issue of ungovernability or some crisis or some squeeze or some embarrassment comes to the university, the regents are basically helpless. They don't know what to do. But at the same time, they're held responsible. So this leads to all kinds of finger-pointing and scapegoating and internal conflict and trying to find out who's responsible and so on that makes for all the mischief that arises in crisis times."

One such time was the 1950 firing of 31 faculty members who refused to sign a special UC loyalty oath. On a close vote, the regents ousted the non-signers in an action that was widely viewed as part of the anti-Communist hysteria then gripping the country.

The California Supreme Court later ruled that the state had pre-empted the field of loyalty oaths and ordered the regents to rehire the professors. Some returned to the university, others did not. One, David Saxon, who was an assistant professor of physics at UCLA when he refused to sign the oath, later became UC's president.

"This was a moment of historical change for the university," said William J. McGill, former chancellor at UC San Diego and also former president of Columbia University. "The regents shouldn't have gotten involved, but some felt they were custodians of the university and they just couldn't understand that a substantial number of faculty who weren't Marxists would have felt so strongly about (not signing the oath)."

Through the 1950s and early '60s, as UC planned and built its new campuses, and the academic reputations of the other campuses, especially Berkeley and UCLA, soared, the regents mostly stayed out of politics, although a few board members maintained close ties with the Red-hunting California Un-American Activities Committee.

"Those were the glory years," said former Regent William M. Roth.

But 1964 brought the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, ushering in a new period of student activism. Conservatives bridled as campuses became centers of protest against the Vietnam war, racism and other perceived ills of American society. In 1966, Ronald Reagan ran for governor, promising to clean up the "mess at Berkeley," and, at the first regents meeting after Reagan was elected, UC President Clark Kerr was fired by a 14-8 vote.

"Instead of being a protection from external politics, the regents seemed to become instruments of external politics," Kerr recalled in an interview. "Ted Meyer and Phil Boyd (influential regents at the time) came to see me and asked me to resign. They argued that the governor wanted a new president. Phil Boyd said, 'Pat Brown (former Governor Edmund G. Brown, whom Reagan had just defeated) got his president and now it's Reagan's turn.' That was the only argument I couldn't accept so I said no, I wouldn't resign."

Despite the fact that the board dismissed him, Kerr gave the regents generally good marks for their performance during his eight years as president. "Overall, I think this was an exceptionally good board that made great contributions to the university," he said.

Throughout the turbulent late 1960s and early '70s the regents hovered on the edge of political interference. They delayed, but finally approved, promotions and tenure appointments of professors who were accused of being left wingers or who had sympathized with thel Free Speech Movement. They rejected several candidates for the UC San Diego chancellorship because they were believed to be too liberal.

Although pressured by the American Legion and others to fire Herbert Marcuse, a UC San Diego faculty member whose densely written books were thought to be an inspiration for left-wing student groups, the regents never did so. However, they did dismiss Angela Davis, a Marcuse protege, who held an acting assistant professorship in philosophy at UCLA.

Board meetings were lively during that period. Reagan often attended and sometimes tangled with liberal Democrats on the board like Roth and Frederick G. Dutton and with Norton Simon, a Republican who disliked Reagan intensely.

Roth recalled that, "after one meeting, the governor came up to me and said, 'God damn you, Roth. What right do you have to claim I'm political? It's you and your liberal friends who are political.' Then there was the time Reagan called Norton Simon a son of a bitch and challenged him to a fist fight. That was the Ronald Reagan I liked best."

In the 1980s, a fierce controversy preceded the regents' decision not to invest in any company doing business in South Africa. Meeting at the Lawrence Laboratory on a Berkeley hilltop, the regents found themselves besieged by protestors, and then-Governor George Deukmejian had to be helicoptered to safety. That incident is cited often by those who defend the tight security measures at regents meetings.

Regent Ward Connerly

The most recent regental foray into politics was the July 1995 vote to terminate the university's affirmative action policies. The issue was first raised early in the year by regent Ward Connerly, an appointee of Governor Wilson, who argued that granting racial preference to African Americans and Latinos stigmatized the recipients of such favors and was unfair to whites and Asian Americans.

Connerly had some support among the board members but probably not enough to change the existing policies, which were supported strongly by UC President Jack Peltason and the chancellors of all nine campuses. Then Wilson seized upon the issue as a way to make himself nationally visible in the 1996 Republican presidential race.

By the time the regents gathered at Laurel Heights for the decisive vote, they were in the national political spotlight. Every major newspaper and television station in the country had carried countless stories, columns, editorials and debates about the issue. Almost 300 news media representatives were accredited for the meeting, which was the first Wilson has attended since 1992.

With the affable Clair Burgener now in the chair, the regents departed from their usual practice of peremptorily dismissing all but "official speakers." They listened for six hours as more than 60 speakers praised and criticized affirmative action. But few, if any, opinions were changed by the oratory, and the final votes went the governor's way--14 to ten in favor of ending affirmative action in admissions, 15 to ten in contracting and hiring. Victory in hand, Wilson appeared a few hours later on the national television morning news programs.

Charles E. Young, who has been chancellor at UCLA for 26 years, said the voting was the "most blatant political act" he has seen in his long university career. Former Regent Coblentz called the action "shameful."

The affirmative action votes were not only examples of political interference by the regents, but also signals of the board's intention to go its own way, less dependent than before on the recommendations of the university president and the campus chancellors.

This movement developed in the wake of the bad publicity surrounding the David Gardner retirement package.

As president, Gardner had tightly controlled the regents' agendas, resolving controversies in private conversations beforehand and rarely allowing them to surface at the board table.

"The meetings were a show for the public and the media primarily," said Guillermo Rodriguez, the former student regent. "Gardner arranged everything in advance. He even wrote the motions and handed them to key regents to read."l

The board went along with most of Gardner's recommendations and, to a considerable extent, with those of his successor, Peltason. Student fees were raised repeatedly. Early retirement was offered to all faculty members, no matter how valuable they might be to the university. Brophy said some regents were unhappy about the blanket buyout offer but were told by administrators that the move was required by federal law. "It turned out later that just wasn't true," he said.

Nor did the board push Peltason and the chancellors to make UC more efficient and cost-effective in an era of tight state budgets. The impractical notion that all UC campuses should aspire to the academic prestige and research reputations of Berkeley and UCLA was not seriously challenged.

"What this university is going to have to face are difficult decisions about the role and mission of each campus and, campus by campus, which programs to strengthen, which to maintain, which to cut back and which to phase out," Harold M. Williams, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust warned as he left the Board of Regents in February 1994. "It is no longer possible for us to afford excellence in all areas of knowledge, including those supported currently and important new areas of knowledge as they develop."

But Williams' warnings were ignored.

The acquiescent role of the board had rankled other regents for quite some time, especially Glenn Campbell, director emeritus of the Hoover Institution, Los Angeles attorney Frank W. Clark, Jr., and Del Junco, the Los Angeles physician and former chairman of the state Republican Party. They thought the Board of Regents should be more than a rubber stamp for administrative decisions. Some of the newer regents--Connerly, David S. Lee, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and alumni regents David Flinn and Peter Preuss--agreed.

"Candidly, I felt that the board wasn't doing its job," Connerly said. "There was a tendency to kind of lay back and go along with the program and not say anything. There were heavy issues that ought to be discussed but nobody was discussing them. The board seemed to me to be giving deference to staff that I didn't think we should be giving."

Connerly thought the administration should be treated as one of many constituencies, along with UC faculty members, students, alumni and others. Jack W. Peltason, who succeeded Gardner as president, disagreed. In a January 1994 letter to Connerly, Peltason warned that this approach "would radically undermine the authority of (the university's) officers and make it extraordinarily difficult for them to bring tough or controversial recommendations" to the board.

Peltason said his recommendation about a given matter reflected a consensus of the chancellors, faculty leaders and others in the university community and was brought to the board "with a very strong presumption that it will be supported." If any regent should vote consistently against these recommendations, that "almost by definition becomes a vote of no confidence by that particular regent."

Some UC administrators believe the regents already have become unduly meddlesome. In an interview last spring, UCLA Chancellor Young complained, "Some of them are into all kinds of administrative detail. You wouldn't believe the time that now goes into answering questions from the regents because they think they might be asked a question by some reporter."

Some board members believe that the proper role of the regents is to select a university president and then stay out of the way, unless the president makes major mistakes. Dean A. Watkins, chairman of the board of a Palo Alto electronics company and a regent for 26 years, is probably the strongest supporter of that point of view.

But this seems to be a minority opinion among the current regents, and it is likely that the university's new president, Richard C. Atkinson, will be dealing with a more activist board.

Most regents say they agree that the role of the board is to make major policy decisions, not to try to run the huge, complex university on a day-to-day basis. But it is not always easy to separate the two. "Sometimes there's a fine line between policy formation and administrative implementation," Brophy said. "It's easy to slip over that line and start to micromanage."

As an example, several university officials cited a request by Regent Clark, who has taken a special interest in the financial problems of the university's medical centers, for daily reports on bed occupancy rates in the five UC teaching hospitals.

But the mood of the board clearly is shifting. More regents want to know why the administration is recommending a particular course of action and what options were considered. "There has been a change in the culture," Connerly said.

"The board should be more active and not just be a rubber stamp for the administration," said David Lee. "The board needs to know what the alternatives were to the recommended policy, and that doesn't happen often. I hate it when a president says, 'Trust me, Bunky.' If that's the case, why should we be there at all?"

But the question is whether the regents, no matter how eager they may be to play a larger role in UC decision-making, can find an effective way to do so.

Board members have no staff of their own and must depend on UC administrators for most of their information. As Neil Smelser pointed out, the regents are part-timers who often cannot know enough about complicated university policy issues to make intelligent decisions.

When controversy rocks the university, whether it be the Free Speech Movement or ethical lapses at the UC Irvine fertility clinic or an employee embezzling funds, the regents tend to thrash about in angry confusion, blaming the president, the chancellors, the press and each other. Accusations are hurled. Fingers are pointed. Marathon closed-door meetings are held. In the end, little is done.

Perhaps the regents should forget about playing a meaningful role in running the University of California and settle for their success as investors and for the pleasures of the Thursday night dinners.