UCLA Health, Nursing Cuts Called Ill-Timed : Closures: Plan to shut down departments comes as country is emphasizing reform in the care industry, officials say. Faculty and students promise to fight proposal.

UCLA faculty and students see officials’ plans to dismantle the prestigious, 32-year-old School of Public Health as a cruel irony, representatives of the school said this week.

Just when the nation has begun to emphasize public health and disease prevention through health care reform, UCLA may be left on the sidelines, said Dr. Abdelmonem Afifi, dean of the School of Public Health.

“This is a time when a public health approach is being widely advocated. And UCLA would be extremely ill-advised to step out of that at this time in the history of the country,” Afifi said. “If implemented, this plan will not only disassemble and kill one of the best public health schools in the country--the fourth largest--it will weaken the position of UCLA as a leading institution of research and education.”

At the School of Nursing, which would lose its undergraduate program and parts of its graduate school, the sentiments were the same. “They clearly have not considered our contract with the state to provide service where there is need, such as the need for nurses,” School of Nursing Dean Ada M. Lindsey said.

Faculty members from both programs said they will fight the plan. In the second protest in a week, about 150 students and faculty from UCLA’s public health and nursing schools rallied Thursday in front of the alumni center, where the UC Board of Regents were meeting. Walton Senterfitt, a doctoral student in public health and a spokesman for the demonstrators, said the proposed changes are “against the best interests of UC as well as the people of California.”

“I was aghast by this initiative,” Senterfitt said. “The mission of the School of Public Health is to address something that is on the nation’s and the state’s and the county’s most urgent agenda: health care reform. I think this shows the university administration is out of touch with the community and the priorities of the nation.”

Chancellor Charles E. Young said the restructuring is necessary because of harsh economic conditions. Young announced June 3 that the university would avoid another year of severe across-the-board budget cuts by selectively closing the undergraduate nursing school and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and breaking up the graduate schools of architecture and urban planning, public health and social welfare. Parts of those three schools would be merged with a new School of Public Policy. Tenured and tenure-track faculty would remain and move with their programs into different schools. But many administrative jobs would be lost.

The move would save $8 billion annually, helping to offset a 20% cut in state funding over the last three years, officials said.

“This initiative is an attempt to protect and preserve these programs as best we can,” said Executive Vice Chancellor Andrea Rich. “It would save an enormous amount of administrative overhead but maintain the academic core. It was pressed upon us by the terrible fiscal crisis. . . . I am terribly sympathetic to everyone’s pain.”

Rich defended the concept of uniting the schools under a new School of Public Policy as an opportunity to be more responsive to the nation’s needs. For example, studies in gerontology and child welfare could benefit by uniting researchers in public health and social welfare, she said.

“There are a whole set of issues interlocking, for which these groups can be brought together,” she said. “It’s in no way an attempt to pull back from the health care needs of the nation.”

But to the public health faculty and students, splitting the school would be tantamount to killing it.

“Historically, when they want to get rid of a program they dwindle its resources and depreciate the program until it’s worth almost nothing,” said Jeff Caballero, president of the School of Public Health students association.

Breaking up the school would seriously erode its reputation, resources and its longstanding national leadership position in public health, Afifi said. Two faculty members are former presidents of the American Public Health Assn. and two other faculty members recently served on the Clinton health reform task force.

Loss of the school would also mean that a graduate would get a degree from a non-accredited program until the new School of Public Policy could reapply for accreditation in public health.

“I think (UCLA administrators) know how prestigious we are,” Afifi said. “But I think they made the wrong assumption that distributing the department into other entities would be equivalent to maintaining the department.”

Lindsey said: “It would seem to me . . . important to keep programs where the graduates can be employed and contribute to the economy of the state.”

But one faculty member said he believed that the schools were targeted because of their inability to generate substantial funding for the university.

“I don’t think they really thought about the type of work we do and the relative standing of our program when they put this initiative forward,” said Dr. Robert Valdez, an associate professor and a member of the Clinton health care reform task force. “I think they perceive these schools to be either politically or financially weak because we don’t attract large of sums from alumni.”

Many alumni go to work in public health and social services, which are not lucrative fields and rarely produce wealthy benefactors, he said.

The public health school has been hurt by a decline in funding from the federal government, Rich said. Those funds dried up in 1989.

“It was always the understanding that if the federal government pulled out we would get the money from the state. Well, we didn’t get the money from the state,” she said. The university “had to fill in to keep things going. We don’t have enough money for that now.”

But according to Afifi, the faculty will argue that breaking up the school will not save money. They also say that the initiative violated university procedures regarding faculty participation in decisions.

The proposal could be implemented as soon as July 1, 1994, but first must be endorsed by the Academic Senate. During this review, Rich said, faculty and students “will have ample opportunity to express themselves.”

Public health proponents said they will be working to persuade the Academic Senate that a fair process was not followed.

“It’s going to be a real fight,” graduate student Senterfitt said. “This (initiative) was hatched in secrecy and the administration thought they could effectively pull it off before the word got out. But we can mobilize and get the message out that this is an attack on the School of Public Health and, indirectly, on the public’s health.”

Times staff writer Larry Gordon contributed to this story.