Attorney and developer fought for the construction of UC Merced

Leo Kolligian, a San Joaquin Valley attorney, developer and former chairman of the University of California Board of Regents who championed the construction of the first new UC campus in 40 years, UC Merced, died March 20 of leukemia at his Fresno home. He was 90.

Kolligian was appointed a UC regent by Gov. George Deukmejian and served from 1985 to 1997. He was chairman in 1988, when the Legislature authorized the Merced campus, the 10th in the UC system.

Since its opening in 2005, UC Merced has grown to include more than 90 full-time professors and 1,800 students. One of the first buildings on the campus was the library, named after Kolligian and his first wife, Dottie, who died in 2002.

Kolligian “probably had a more profound influence on that campus than any individual regent has had on any campus,” said Jim Erickson, a UC vice chancellor emeritus who raised funds for UC Merced, in an interview this week.

Students in the San Joaquin Valley had been underrepresented in the UC system, enrolling at about half the rate of high school graduates from other major regions of the state.

Kolligian fought relentlessly for a campus in the Central Valley, Erickson said, “because the young people there had been left out [and] couldn’t afford a UC campus elsewhere.”

Another reason for Kolligian’s passionate advocacy for the campus was seeing his son, Lee, and the children of his friends settle in other parts of the state after leaving the Central Valley to attend college elsewhere.

“The brain drain he was seeing . . . was an important theme in his wanting a university in the valley,” said Lee Kolligian, a Santa Monica attorney and graduate of UCLA and Stanford Law School.

Leo Kolligian was born Aug. 25, 1917, the son of Armenian immigrants who owned farmland and a vineyard in the Fresno area. He earned a bachelor’s degree from what is now Cal State Fresno and a law degree from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

He entered private practice in 1946, after serving a year as deputy state attorney general. He practiced law for more than 40 years and also became a developer, building Fresno’s River Park shopping center with two partners.

After UC Merced was approved, he and his wife became the first members of the campus foundation’s board of trustees.

As major benefactors whose $1-million gift helped underwrite construction of the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library, they helped attract other community leaders to become donors, Erickson said.

In addition to his son, Kolligian is survived by his second wife, June, a brother and three grandchildren.

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elaine.woo@latimes.com