Presidential Papers—Richard Atkinson

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.

Richard Atkinson was in some respects an unusual University of California president. He was the first to have been an academic entrepreneur, the founder of a private company based on his research into cognition, learning, and computer-assisted instruction as a faculty member at Stanford University in the 1960s and 1970s. A former director of the National Science Foundation appointed by President Jimmy Carter, he guided NSF through the perilous rapids of the Nixon anti-science era. During his fifteen years (1980-1995) as chancellor of UC San Diego, he encouraged research partnerships with industry that were instrumental in transforming the San Diego region into a world leader in technology-based industries. By the end of his tenure, the National Research Council’s 1995 report on graduate programs in U.S. universities ranked the scholarly and scientific caliber of UCSD’s faculty and graduate offerings tenth in the nation, higher than any other public university except UC Berkeley. 

Many college and university presidents tend to be either administrative planners or long-term strategists. Atkinson was neither. His management style ran more toward inventive extemporizing and scanning the horizon for opportunities to advance his goals. This tactical flexibility turned out to be an advantage in the chaotic atmosphere that marked his entry into office, just weeks after the UC Board of Regents voted to end affirmative action in admissions and employment. It was a historic and nationally controversial decision that precipitated several overlapping crises: public outrage, student protests, deep tensions in shared governance, and legislative threats to the Constitutional autonomy of the University. The eight years of the Atkinson administration were rarely routine, in part because many of the issues that faced UC were situated at the crossroads of politics and principle. 

This collection of speeches and papers shines a light on the events that shaped the Atkinson years, but it is equally revealing about the concepts and convictions that were the driving force behind his presidency. As UC President Emeritus David S. Saxon puts it in the foreword:

There are two ways of judging the accomplishments of university presidents: by the battles they have won and the battles they have fought. The battles won are reflected in such bottom-line measures as the size of the institutional budget and the distinction of the faculty. . . . But understanding the ideas and ideals of a particular presidency requires a far broader perspective—a sense of the battles a president has faced as well as the battles that have been won. These live on in a president’s public speeches and papers.

Paper presented at the Glion Colloquium, Glion, Switzerland, June 2003.

Remarks on the occasion of receiving the medal.