Chancellor Albert Carnesale, who saw UCLA through eight years of
substantial growth and a state budget crisis that led to hundreds
of millions of dollars in funding cuts, announced today that he
will step down from his position at the end of June 2006.
Carnesale, a renowned expert in international affairs and
foreign relations, intends to take a one-year sabbatical, after
which he said he would like to return to UCLA as a professor to
teach and pursue scholarship in public-policy issues.
The chancellor, who has been at the helm of the university since
1997, said he was leaving the job a little earlier than planned,
but felt the time was right for him to leave his office in Murphy
Hall.
“I’ve always thought of this as a 10-year
term,” he said.
“I want to be at the top of my game as chancellor because
that’s what’s fair to UCLA, and as I resume my teaching
and scholarship, I want to be at the top of my game there as
well.”
Carnesale cited the end of a major UCLA fundraising campaign in
December, the scheduled completion of several campus construction
projects this year, and a more promising outlook for university
funding from the state budget as reasons why he felt he could
safely pass the mantle of chancellorship to someone else.
The UC Office of the President will begin the search for a new
chancellor as soon as possible.
With his announcement, Carnesale is returning to his roots in
teaching. He came to UCLA by way of Harvard, where he was a
professor, dean of John F. Kennedy School of Government, and
eventually provost of the university.
He has also worked as an adviser to the Department of Defense
and the director of the CIA, and served as a high-level negotiator
during arms talks with the now defunct Soviet Union.
Carnesale said he is interested in once again taking an active
role in governmental policy-making and advising, duties he could
more easily assume as a private professor than as the leader of a
major public university.
Daniel Neuman, the executive vice chancellor, said he was
“chagrined” by the chancellor’s announcement of
his intention to retire. He praised Carnesale for his “deep
intelligence, thorough commitment, and keenly attuned sense of
integrity.”
“There were times when (Carnesale) might have been
encouraged to exaggerate something that would be in his interest to
do so, and he would always refuse,” Neuman recalled.
“He always focused on the truth in conditions when others
might have been a little more elastic in their response.”
Carnesale is the eighth chief executive of UCLA, and the fourth
to own the title of "chancellor." (Until 1952, the leader of UCLA
was a provost.)
Carnesale will likely be remembered as one of the
university’s most prolific fundraisers. He introduced
“Campaign UCLA” in 1997, an initiative which has since
raised nearly $3 billion and made UCLA the top fundraising public
university in the nation.
Campaign UCLA is scheduled to finish in the middle of this
year.
Neuman credited Carnesale with being the driving force behind
Campaign UCLA’s success. “At the beginning, we
weren’t certain we should launch a billion-dollar campaign,
and here we are approaching $3 billion,” he said.
Jared Fox, president of the Graduate Students Association, said
the chancellor’s dedication to fundraising helped graduate
students secure fellowships and made UCLA competitive with other
schools when it came to graduate-student recruitment.
Under Carnesale’s leadership, UCLA garnered the reputation
of a top-tier public-research university on par with private
schools. Since 1997, UCLA has doubled the amount of its research
support to $821 million, and the average GPA and SAT scores of
incoming students has risen.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Carnesale
organized the Fiat Lux seminars ““ and taught one himself
about national security.
UCLA also continued the transition from a commuter college to a
residential university during Carnesale’s tenure with the
addition of new housing projects, and it expanded its facilities
significantly with an ambitious $3 billion capital program.
But it also experienced a sharp decline in state funding as
California’s budget crisis forced the governor and
legislature to tighten their belts. Since 1997, UCLA’s annual
operating budget climbed from $2.2 billion to $3.5 billion, even as
the state’s contribution to the operating budget fell from
20.7 percent to 15 percent.
The budget cuts led to higher student fees and caused some to
question whether a public institution such as UCLA could maintain
its prestigious status. Carnesale stirred some controversy in
October 2004 when he suggested UCLA might have to double its
student fees ““ offset by some increases in financial aid
““ to stay competitive.
Jenny Wood, president of undergraduate student government,
criticized Carnesale’s call to “privatize” the
university. “There are more proactive ways to make sure
students’ needs are met and that students can have access to
the university,” she said.
But Wood also said she was looking forward to working with
Carnesale and “opening the lines of communication”
between students and the administration in the chancellor’s
last year.
Not all of Carnesale’s ambitious expansion plans for the
university came to fruition on time or on budget. The Ronald Reagan
UCLA Medical Center will be an estimated $35 to $45 million over
budget when it opens in 2007.
And Weyburn Terrace, a new graduate-student housing complex that
cost over $100 million, opened a year behind schedule; residents
there have experienced a slew of construction-related problems.
Administrators have partly attributed the construction problems
to the rising cost of construction in Southern California.
Neuman said though construction may have been late and
over-budget on some projects, they will be valuable to the
university when they are completed.
“We’re talking about a legacy, Carnesale’s
legacy, of a real first-rate building inventory that any other
campus would be proud to have,” he said.
Carnesale declined to discuss his accomplishments in terms of
his “legacy.”
“It’s important that, as the leader of an
institution, you’re a guardian of the long-term,” he
said.
Carnesale also expressed some frustration with the steep
declines UCLA ““ and the UC system in general ““ has seen
in black and Latino student enrollment since affirmative action was
outlawed in California in 1996, though he acknowledged he had
little control over it.
“We never have recovered, with all our effort. We’re
better off now than we were then, but it set us back more than
eight years,” he said.
Nevertheless, Carnesale said he has enjoyed his time at UCLA,
and he was optimistic for whoever would take his place at the head
of UCLA. “In general, the university is doing quite
well,” he said.