UC Presidency: Tight Times Make Tough Job Tougher : Education: As system seeks new leader, fewer quick fiscal fixes remain. Post is magnet for public discontent.

It has been said, only partly in jest, that searching for a new university president is like looking for someone who walks on water.

One college administrator compares the job to “being mayor of a city where taxes are voluntary.” Another says it’s like being a corporate chief executive--”but without the clout.” And everyone in academia has heard this quip: A college president is someone who lives in a big house and begs for money.

Today, as the University of California seeks a new leader to replace outgoing President Jack W. Peltason, the job is more demanding than perhaps it’s ever been. So demanding, in fact, that some people say UC’s presidential search committee faces a new challenge: finding not just a qualified candidate, but one who is willing to take the job.

“These jobs have become a lot harder in recent years--the fractionalization of the campuses by race, ethnicity and gender, the hard economic times,” said Clark Kerr, president emeritus of the UC system, who has written extensively about college leadership. “Anybody who really can do the job will have a good job right now. And anybody smart enough to do the job is smart enough not to do the job.”

Today’s university presidents must navigate a complicated landscape of political, economic and societal obstacles. In addition to championing academics, they must be fund-raisers, labor negotiators and fiscal managers who serve a dizzying array of masters.

And the next UC president will head the nation’s largest public university system at a time when funding cuts have drained it of valuable resources.

During Peltason’s three-year tenure, UC has lost about $300 million in state revenues, and student fees have risen more than one-third. To cut costs, the university offered an early-retirement package that has depleted the ranks of its most experienced professors.

“We have been hurt by these last cuts. We’re not as good as we were,” said Peltason, adding that there are fewer quick fixes left for his successor. “We haven’t fallen off the cliff. But we have used up the short-term fixes.”

Even before the most recent funding cuts, the job had become so demanding that “you could work . . . 24 hours a day, seven days a week and never finish it,” recalled Peltason’s predecessor, David P. Gardner.

Already, one of the top contenders for the UC job has taken himself out of the running, saying he wants a position that provides more time and opportunity for contact with students.

UC Provost Walter E. Massey announced earlier this month that he has accepted the presidency of his alma mater, Morehouse College, a historically black liberal arts college in Atlanta with just 3,000 students. At Morehouse, he will work on campus and live nearby, unlike the UC president, whose office in Oakland is miles from the system’s nearest campus.

Massey has occupied UC’s No. 2 post since 1993 and was seen as one of the strongest candidates from inside the 162,000-student system. He knows both the benefits and downsides of the university’s top job.

“I don’t think the job at UC is too big to be done,” Massey said. “It’s about managing a large, multibillion-dollar institution whose product is research, education and service. That’s a remarkable job and it can be a very exciting job. But it can be a job that in some ways doesn’t turn out to be as satisfying.”

It all depends, of course, on where one gets satisfaction. Some people argue that on large campuses at least, the romantic notion of a tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking contemplative college president has been obsolete since the 1960s. Between accommodating faculty concerns, lobbying legislators, attending student events and schmoozing potential donors, today’s president has precious little time for reflection.

Peltason, whose departure from the UC presidency Oct. 1 will cap a career that included many high-level positions, said he has never had a job in which more people wanted to be told everything first.

“The regents need to be told before the newspapers. The chancellors want to be told before that. The faculty say, ‘How come you didn’t let us know?’ There’s a lot of base-touching,” he said.

University presidents also are magnets for public dissatisfaction, despite the fact that their boards usually have most of the decision-making power. The president of the University of Washington, for example, William P. Gerberding, has recently been vilified for making budget cuts that were required by the state Legislature. Though such controversy did not precipitate his quitting, it will make retirement a little sweeter.

“I’m leaving this presidency after 16 years and I am ready,” Gerberding said. “I loved this job. I sought it. I’ve been very well treated. But I want out.”

The job of college president is hardly thankless. A survey of 420 private colleges conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education last year found that 147 earned at least $175,000 a year. The president of UC makes $243,500--20% more than the president of the United States.

And there are perks as well. Many college presidents live in elegant, on-campus residences, get great seats at athletic events and make additional income sitting on corporate boards.

Nevertheless, Pepperdine University President David Davenport says the pressures sometimes outweigh the payoffs.

A few years ago, after a spate of highly publicized resignations of college presidents, Davenport wrote an essay listing the “Top Five Reasons Why Someone Might Choose to Leave a University Presidency.” No. 5 read, “I want to meet my children before they enroll as college freshmen.” No. 1 said simply, “To pursue a career in education.”

In short, argued Davenport, the job of university president has a way of taking over your entire life. And he warned that presidents who fancy themselves academics rather than administrators have the toughest time of all.

“With thousands of pages of government regulation to deal with, millions of dollars of funds to raise, and the countless additional challenges of operating a small city, few presidents are able to spend much time on ‘education,’ ” wrote Davenport.

“The high-burnout nature of the job has steadily made it less attractive to top people.”

The opening at UC netted an initial crop of 160 nominations and applications. But Roy T. Brophy, a member of the UC Board of Regents who is chairing the presidential selection committee, said it was easy to cut that list to 40 names because the vast majority were obviously unqualified.

Kerr, the UC president emeritus, said he wasn’t surprised. “I have given them some names. But it’s really kind of a short list,” he said. “My guess is all they’re getting is short lists.”

In the past, some candidates--and even some universities--have taken the initiative and tried to avoid burnout by laying down a few ground rules.

Gardner told the UC selection committee in his interview for the job that he would not work Sundays and that he and his wife would not attend university functions more than two nights in a row.

“We adopted that rule,” said Gardner, whose youngest of four daughters was 14 at the time. “It helped preserve the balance we thought was indispensable . . . and I never felt as though the job was slighted. I remained fresher. I did not feel overwhelmed.”

The University of Utah and Pepperdine are among a handful of schools that allow their presidents to periodically go on paid leave. Davenport took a semester off in 1991 and moved his wife and three young children to England.

“We traveled. I read 25 books. I grew a beard and took walks,” he said. And while his board had explicitly ordered him not to work, he came back full of ideas that he believes helped guide him through a major administrative restructuring of Pepperdine.

But some analysts cite an underlying problem that Sundays off can’t fix: The world has changed and university administrators need to catch up.

Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Aid to Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging corporate support of education, argues that the leadership style used by college presidents during the past two decades is due for a change.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, she says, presidents were expected to be “political brokers” who specialized in resolving conflicts. With federal and state investments in higher education still generally reliable and enrollments on the rise, presidents were judged largely on their ability to please a variety of competing constituencies. Their primary goal, Eaton argues, was to skirt controversy and keep the peace on campus.

But in the 1990s, Eaton says, dwindling resources and difficult societal issues may make it impossible to placate all constituencies.

In a recent essay titled “Where Have All the Higher Education Leaders Gone,” she calls for a new kind of university president who is willing to be provocative.

“The ‘high risk’ leader . . . will need to enjoy taking chances, thrive on challenge and change, and find public censure bearable,” she writes. “He or she will have to value respect over affection, vision over short-term gain and genuine disagreement over polite discord.”

The trick for UC’s new president may be to adopt those new approaches without abandoning some time-honored skills.

Robert Rosenzweig, the former president of the Assn. of American Universities, said the next UC president, like those who have come before, must develop constructive relationships with the people who hold the purse strings: the regents, the Legislature and the governor.

Kerr stressed the importance of having a thick skin.

“In addition to being a great public leader and a bean counter, the person has to have the resiliency of an NFL quarterback,” he said. “You start losing the game and you have to go on and win it, every Saturday.”

Brophy, the chairman of UC’s presidential selection committee, said the panel is looking for that new kind of leader.

“We want someone that can lead the charge to imaginative-type thinking that will produce a different UC than we have now,” said Brophy, who expects to present a candidate to the full board by early July. “We’re not criticizing the leaders of the past. I believe we had a good old campus system 20 years ago, but that won’t work 20 years from now.”

Though the selection process is confidential, several high-profile names are believed to be under consideration, including Vartan Gregorian, the president of Brown University, and James Duderstadt, the president of the University of Michigan.

Julie Peterson, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan, acknowledged that Duderstadt’s name has “come out as being on a list. Our response is he has not been contacted and he is not expressing interest in the position.”

Gregorian is more cagey. In an interview, he stressed that he has no intention of leaving Brown, but added: “I am not in the habit of turning down things I have not been offered.”

UC Chancellors Chang-Lin Tien of Berkeley and Richard Atkinson of San Diego are also considered contenders for the job, though their strong allegiances to their own campuses may work against them.

For his part, Peltason, whose shoes the next president is going to have to fill, looks at the search process with characteristic wryness.

“Most search committees get around and list the [ideal] criteria,” he said. “Then they find out that God--she’s not available. And they have to go find a human being.”

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Profile of a College President

Whoever becomes the University of California’s next president will join a group of administrators that is mostly white and male. The following data is from a survey of more than 2,400 college presidents who were in office in 1990.

* MEDIAN AGE: 54; 81% were between 41 and 60.

* SEX: 88% men, 12% women.

* ETHNICITY: 90.4% white, 5.5% black, 2.6% Latino and 0.4% Asian.

* LENGTH OF SERVICE: 12% had been in the job less than a year; 53% had served five years or less.

* ACADEMIC BACKGROUND: 43% had a degree in education; 17% had a degree in the humanities or the fine arts.

* HIGHEST EARNED DEGREE: 56% had earned a Ph.D.; 22% held a doctorate in education.

* TEACHING EXPERIENCE: Most presidents had taught full time, but two-thirds did not hold tenure as faculty members while serving as president.

* WHOM THEY REPORT TO: 74% reported directly to their college’s governing board; the other 26% were responsible to a chancellor, a state commissioner or a church representative.

* OTHER ACTIVITIES: Many sat on external advisory boards involving community services (67%), educational organizations (53%) and corporations (31%).

Source: American Council on Education