Ex-USC President James Zumberge Dies : Education: The former Antarctic explorer led the university to academic respectability. After a major fund-raising success, he had retired last year.

Former USC President James H. Zumberge, an Antarctic explorer who led the school to new academic respectability and increased financial stability, died Wednesday of a brain tumor, just a year after he retired.

A dignified, gray-haired man of patrician bearing, Zumberge, 68, seemed almost a stereotype of a university president when he arrived on the USC campus in 1980. During his decade in the president’s chair, he won vastly increased academic stature for a school known for its fraternities and football.

His resignation was announced last year on the heels of the triumphant $641-million Campaign for USC, one of the largest fund-raising efforts in the history of American academia.

A renowned geologist and authority on Antarctica, he led several expeditions to the polar continent. Cape Zumberge and the Zumberge Coast in Antarctica are named after him.

He died at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena on Wednesday afternoon.

Steven B. Sample, his successor at USC, said Zumberge’s death was “a great personal loss and a great loss for USC.”

“I expected him to be here with me for the next several years as an adviser,” Sample said. “Jim had a wonderful way of giving advice. There was a calm wisdom about the guy.”

Beyond helping to upgrade academic standards and raise funds for the school, he said, Zumberge will be most remembered for “his basic decency and integrity.”

During his presidency, Zumberge underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 1985. When he announced his resignation in 1990, he stressed that he had fully recovered from the cancer, and was departing simply because “there is a time to come and a time to go, and I think the time to go is now.”

Shortly after his retirement on March 31, 1991, he was found to have a brain tumor and was too ill to attend the inauguration of Sample last September. A brother of Zumberge died of brain cancer last year.

Zumberge was named president of USC in 1980, arriving at a time when the PAC-10 school was beset by scandals in its famed academic programs.

One of the first significant acts of his presidency was to make public a report admitting that during the previous decade, 330 academically deficient students were admitted strictly on the basis of athletic prowess. Many of those students played until they used up their athletic eligibility and never graduated.

In talking plainly about his own university’s violations, Zumberge set a platform for nationwide discussion of far broader reforms. He announced that such abuses would be prevented in the future by bringing the school’s powerful athletic department under the control of admissions procedures governing other departments.

During his decade at USC, the university started or completed 20 buildings, including the Norris Cancer Hospital. In 1991, the USC Board of Trustees named a fund in his honor that helps pay for faculty research.

Zumberge seemed to cross effortlessly the bridge that often divides academics from business.

“A lot of college presidents have the academic and intellectual credentials,” said Forrest N. Shumway, chairman of the Board of Trustees at the time that Zumberge stepped down. “But you need a business sense also. I think he was very well qualified in that area.”

But he was not without his critics. Because he spent an acknowledged 80% of his time raising funds, and served on numerous corporate boards, many students and faculty members felt he lacked a personal presence on his own campus.

He countered such criticism by saying, “As a scientist, my world was a thing world. I’d knock on rocks, look at a piece of ice, or measure a lump of snow. They didn’t talk back, and I didn’t have to impress them.”

Over time, he said, he became more conscious of the importance of “interpersonal relations.”

At the time he stepped down, he said he hoped he had helped USC become “known for being more than just a place that consistently fields a strong football team.”

Still, when the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges accredited USC for another 10 years in 1987, examiners said the campus appeared to lack “intellectual excitement and vitality.” That said, they praised the school for making “striking improvements overall.”

Zumberge was born in Minneapolis in 1923, and earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in geology at the University of Minnesota. He taught geology at the University of Michigan and Duke University.

He was president of Grand Valley State College in Michigan from 1962 to 1968, dean of the College of Earth Sciences at the University of Arizona from 1968 to 1972, chancellor of the University of Nebraska campus in Lincoln from 1972 to 1975, and president of Southern Methodist University from 1975 until 1980.

During his academic career, he was the author of 10 books and more than 100 journal articles. As a geologist, he served as chief organizer for three Antarctic expeditions and held numerous scientific and diplomatic geological posts dealing with the exploration of Antarctica. From 1982 to 1986, he was president of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research of the International Council of Scientific Unions.

Oft-honored, he was appointed by President Gerald R. Ford to the National Science Board in 1974, by President Ronald Reagan to chair the Antarctic Research Commission in 1984, and by Gov. George Deukmejian to the California Economic Development Commission in 1984.

He is survived by his wife, Marilyn, and four children: John, a geochemist; JoEllen, a Los Angeles public relations woman; James, a physicist at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Mark, a research scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

Funeral services are scheduled for next Wednesday at the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena. A campus memorial service is pending.