Richard C. Atkinson was named president of the University of California in August 1995, just four weeks after the UC Board of Regents voted to end affirmative action in the admission of students.  The Regents’ decision reversed thirty years of history and made Richard Atkinson the first UC president in decades to face the conflict between the California Master Plan’s goal of broad educational access and UC’s high academic standards without the tool of affirmative action. 

UC’s often stormy transition to the post-affirmative action age was to be his first major task as president.  Entrepreneurial President analyzes this and other defining issues of Atkinson’s eight-year presidency:  UC’s expansion into new forms of  scientific research with industry; Atkinson’s much-publicized challenge to the nation’s dominant college-entrance examination, the SAT; and the 1999 arrest of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of espionage, which ignited a prolonged controversy over the University’s management of the national nuclear weapons research laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore. 

The Atkinson years were a seminal period in UC history, reflected in some important underlying currents of his tenure—his role in the evolving relationship between presidents and chancellors in the ten-campus system and administrative changes he introduced that altered the architecture of UC governance.  

One of the paradoxes of an administration that began with a governance crisis is that in a number of ways the Atkinson era seemed to exemplify what Clark Kerr meant in describing the twentieth century as unusually hospitable to academic enterprises.  Despite the challenges, it was a time of growth, expansion, and optimism for UC.  The University opened its tenth campus, UC Merced, and UC’s place as a leader among research universities was underscored by independent national studies demonstrating the high quality of academic programs throughout the system.  

The political and demographic stresses that set the stage for the Atkinson administration still remain today, intensified by the plunge in state funding for California public higher education generally.  Entrepreneurial President concludes with some reflections on the evolution of the UC system and its future.

The 2005-6 executive compensation controversy at the University of California has been explained as the result of a massive breach of compliance with the University’s compensation policies by the Office of the President (UCOP). For more than a decade, the explanation goes, UCOP failed to comply with its own compensation policies, embodied in the 1992-93 Principles for Review of Executive Compensation, and engaged in a longstanding pattern of secrecy and policy violations. This paper argues that both assertions are wrong. It begins by analyzing the issues leading to adoption of the Principles and presents the evidence that the procedures for implementing them were consistent with prevailing understandings of presidential authority and Regental intent. With several exceptions that will be noted, this remained the case throughout the administrations of UC presidents J. W. Peltason (1992-5) and Richard C. Atkinson (1995-2003). The situation changed as the result of two developments early in the tenure of President Robert C. Dynes (2003-2008). First, executive offers began to include benefits that were not traditionally employed at UC, and the Regents as a body were not asked to approve them. Second, the board was not informed about these benefits because a report mandated by the Principles, the Annual Report on Executive Compensation, was not submitted in 2004 or 2005. These were significant departures from the Principles, but they were limited to two years, 2003-2005. The idea that non-compliance with the Principles was endemic in UCOP stems from media portrayals of the controversy and from an audit commissioned by the Regents in response to the controversy, the April 2006 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report. The PwC report failed to acknowledge the extent to which the Principles had been followed in the decade after their approval, and its interpretation of that policy was so different from the way it had historically been understood as to constitute a re-interpretation. Many of the putative violations in the PwC report reflect this re-interpretation of the Principles, not evidence of a longstanding failure in compliance or a culture of secrecy in UCOP. This major lapse of institutional memory has had serious consequences for governance and the future role of the Office of the President.

This paper looks at the 1992-3 compensation controversy at the University of California in light of the factors that shaped the board’s policy response to the controversy, the Principles for Review of Executive Compensation. It discusses the events of 1992-3 in the context of the public and political debate over the appropriate model for executive compensation in elite public universities and the special difficulties these universities face in setting, explaining, and defending executive compensation policies and practices. It concludes by assessing the ways in which the University did and did not succeed in addressing the issues raised by the controversy—including the clash between public-service and market perspectives.

Richard C. Atkinson was named president of the University of California in August 1995, just four weeks after the UC Board of Regents voted to end affirmative action in the admission of students. The Regents’ decision reversed thirty years of history and made Richard Atkinson the first UC president in decades to face the conflict between the California Master Plan’s goal of broad educational access and UC’s high academic standards without the tool of affirmative action. 

UC’s often stormy transition to the post-affirmative action age was to be his first major task as president. Entrepreneurial President analyzes this and other defining issues of Atkinson’s eight-year presidency: UC’s expansion into new forms of scientific research with industry; Atkinson’s much-publicized challenge to the nation’s dominant college-entrance examination, the SAT; and the 1999 arrest of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of espionage, which ignited a prolonged controversy over the University’s management of the national nuclear weapons research laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore. 

The Atkinson years were a seminal period in UC history, reflected in some important underlying currents of his tenure—his role in the evolving relationship between presidents and chancellors in the ten-campus system and administrative changes he introduced that altered the architecture of UC governance.  

One of the paradoxes of an administration that began with a governance crisis is that in a number of ways the Atkinson era seemed to exemplify what Clark Kerr meant in describing the twentieth century as unusually hospitable to academic enterprises. Despite the challenges, it was a time of growth, expansion, and optimism for UC. The University opened its tenth campus, UC Merced, and UC’s place as a leader among research universities was underscored by independent national studies demonstrating the high quality of academic programs throughout the system.

Abstract

William Hazlitt and the Uses of Knowledge

by

Patricia Anne Pelfrey

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair

While Romantic literature provides ample evidence of the pleasures of knowledge, it also reveals strong counter-examples of knowledge as overwhelming, enervating, and potentially impoverishing. What inspired this reaction, and how was it channeled through Romantic writings?

William Hazlitt is a particularly representative figure in the search for an answer to the question of why knowledge became a problem for Romantic writers because of his highly articulate awareness of the distinction between knowledge as an engine of social progress and its potentially negative role in the development of individuals. Using a range of Hazlitt's essays--from his early metaphysical treatise on identity to The Spirit of the Age--as well as the writings of Thomas Love Peacock, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Thomas De Quincey, this dissertation analyzes the conflicted Romantic response to knowledge and its result, a variety of efforts to define the norms and values that should govern its organization, diffusion, and control. It makes two principal arguments.

The first is that Romantic ambivalence derived from a complex of ideas and anxieties about the potentially damaging effects of certain kinds of education and learning on the brain, damage that could diminish cognitive vigor and distort the inner experience of identity. The collision between this image of the individual disempowered by knowledge and Enlightenment faith in its role as the engine of collective progress was intensified by the sheer quantity of ideas, information, opinions, theories, and discoveries that daily inundated the British reading public and critics alike. Discussions about education and learning became entangled in assumptions about the nature of the self and attitudes toward social and intellectual progress, all in the context of the need to bring order into a universe of knowledge that seemed to be expanding at a breakneck pace.

The dissertation's second argument is that Romantic ambivalence is valuable in giving us a perspective from a time when acceptance of the uncontrollable character of knowledge was not yet complete. The Romantic idea that there could be something inevitable, perhaps disturbingly inevitable, about the growth of knowledge has fallen out of consciousness in most discussions of knowledge today. Its unceasing proliferation is widely celebrated, perhaps especially the evolving media and communication advances that have made learning a global enterprise. Useful knowledge has become the paradigm of all knowledge, rendering it immune from questions about what could or should be done about its less than beneficial outcomes. The contrast between Samuel Taylor Coleridge's On the Constitution of Church and State (1829) and Clark Kerr's The Uses of the University (1963), discussed in the final chapter, sheds light on the distance between Romantic attitudes and our own.