UCLA’s Young Has Passed the Test of Time : Education: Controversies and achievements are combined in a long-running record.

At the age of 36, just months after becoming the youngest person ever to run a major American university, UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young defied his bosses on the UC Board of Regents and refused to fire radical Angela Davis.

Today, at 63, Young has served as chancellor longer than anyone in the nation. And he is still sparring with the regents.

In recent months, Young’s impassioned defense of affirmative action--and blunt criticism of regents who do not agree--have prompted many people to compare his past and present. On campus, where Young has become less visible over the years, some faculty and students have quietly celebrated the “return” of their fiery leader.

But it is a much different Chuck Young today from the robust wunderkind who took over UCLA nearly a generation ago. His interests and style now are more suited to the corporate boardroom than the ivory tower, some say. And it is as much the fight for control over his 419-acre empire as it is his firm stance on philosophical principles that has put Young at odds with his bosses.

Young has openly criticized the regents for being too meddlesome and compared one of them, an African American who called for ending race-based preferences at UC, to Jesse Helms, the conservative Republican senator from North Carolina.

Young, who has apologized to the regents twice in the past four months for what he has called his “overly frank” remarks, seems at once contrite and unbending.

“Clearly, I’ve said some things that have at least caused other people to think [my job] is more on the line at the moment,” said Young, who is four years away from mandatory retirement. “I don’t want to be fired, but I’m not going to do my job with not being fired the uppermost thing in my mind.”

Irascible and hard-charging, the 6-foot, 2-inch administrator rarely backs away from a challenge. “Relentless” is how one admiring colleague describes Young. “Arrogant” is the way several regents have put it.

Many of his peers in higher education are effusive. Said California State University Chancellor Barry Munitz: “He’s presided over the single greatest educational success story since the Second World War.”

Young has said that his guiding vision has been to transform UCLA from a good institution into a great one, nationally recognized for the excellence of its many components. His contribution, he said, has been a “steadfastness and commitment to see that it [the job] got done.”

During Young’s tenure, UCLA has grown into a premier research university--a sprawling intellectual and athletic enterprise employing more than 21,000 people and ranked academically among the best. When he took over, UCLA had but a single endowed professorial chair, a prestigious position backed by its own private funding. Now, there are 106.

With mixed results, Young has spearheaded major construction projects on and off campus, and led UCLA into a new realm of high-stakes business ventures. Since 1968, UCLA’s physical plant has expanded 57%, and the school’s operating budget has increased tenfold to $1.8 billion, in large part because of Young’s enormous success at building private fund raising.

UCLA has become a bigger and bigger business--and Young is its top businessman.

“The man moves freely between the education institution and the corporate community,” said Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz, who confers frequently with Young as a board member of the UCLA Medical Center. “He’s running the equivalent of one of the biggest corporations in the city.”

Many university leaders such as Young find that their job these days requires them to navigate a complicated world of high finance, administration and fund-raising. These duties have put Young in close touch with some of the city’s leading corporate citizens.

Young has recruited them to serve on the various “boards of visitors” for either campuswide issues or professional specialties such as the business school. And they have occasionally invited Young to sit as a director of their companies.

During the last several years, Young has served on six corporate boards. Like other UC chancellors, he has supplemented his university salary--now $204,000--with corporate stipends. As a director of the computer chip giant Intel Corp., Young was paid $26,000 last year for attending meetings, and this year he made more than $300,000 by exercising stock options, a company spokesman said.

Increasingly, Young’s duties as chancellor have brought him the trappings of success more associated with CEOs than Ph.Ds.

Once known around campus for his early morning jogs, Young now gets his exercise golfing at the Sherwood Country Club, which he said he paid $150,000 to join. He shares a locker room with the likes of actor Tom Selleck and hockey great Wayne Gretzky. Young changed his political party registration from Democrat to Republican in recent years, about the same time he moved out of the chancellor’s residence on campus and built a home in a gated community in Thousand Oaks. His $1.2-million house, which overlooks the golf club’s 13th fairway, was purchased with financial assistance from UCLA and its donors. A $41,700 annual housing allowance helps pay the mortgage.

A university-paid limousine service sometimes has chauffeured Young to the airport and various meetings, while a university plane occasionally has flown him and his aides to UCLA sporting events, including one trip that cost more than $8,000.

In 1992, a report commissioned by the regents sharply criticized the spending practices, perks and compensation of top university officials, including Young. Since then, Young has discontinued using university funds to pay for such things as first-class airline upgrades. But he continues to draw on his $33,000 annual expense fund to pay allowable expenditures including dining club dues and theater tickets, golf fees, flowers, and meals for donors and staff. The fund comes from the UC president’s office and, in recognition of UCLA’s size, is among the largest given to any chancellor.

Young said all his business expenses are necessary to further the interests of the university. Many of them involve fund raising, he pointed out. “It says a lot about my job . . . [and] the things I’m expected to do,” he said.

Young added that he does not relish many of these social obligations, especially cocktail parties. “I must have been to 10,000 [of them],” he groaned.

The busy lifestyle has taken its personal toll. Young said he regrets that, particularly in his early years as chancellor, his family life suffered because his job took “first, second and third place.”

His marriage, now in its 45th year, nearly ended when his wife, Sue, filed for divorce in 1974 and moved out of the chancellor’s house, taking their two children and leaving behind Jacques, the family poodle. The couple later reconciled.

In 1975, Young plowed his car into a tree, breaking his jaw. He pleaded no contest to drunk driving. Now, he says, he rarely drinks because of a liver condition arising from an illness as a young adult.

“I had a drinking problem,” he said, adding that the accident “taught me what I thought everyone really needs to be taught . . . that they’re mortal.”

Over the years, Young’s professional longevity has prompted friends to joke that he is immortal .

“We used to say of Chuck lovingly and admiringly that he had nine lives,” said William P. Gerberding, president of the University of Washington. “I think he’s on about 14.”

Despite popular support on campus for his affirmative action stance and his orchestration of the university’s tremendous growth during the last three decades, Young has found himself embroiled in various campus controversies during the 1990s that have focused attention on his academic and spending priorities.

In 1993, Young’s office received 2,000 letters of protest from alums and others around the world objecting to his plan to consolidate or downsize four professional schools, including nursing and public health, because of state budget cuts.

The same year, Young inflamed Latino activists when he announced his decision--on the eve of Cesar Chavez’s funeral--not to give department status to a faltering Chicano studies program. Student protests and a headline-grabbing hunger strike followed.

When peace was finally made and the fasters invited Young and his staff to join them for a symbolic meal of tortillas and atole , a traditional corn-based gruel, the protesters said that nobody from the chancellor’s office showed up.

Instead, Young treated 14 members of his staff to a $600 lunch of margaritas, ahi tuna, and Key lime pie at his country club, records show.

“That was a thank-you for all the people who had spent the better part of a week, essentially 24 hours a day, working there at UCLA to resolve the dispute,” Young said.

Last year, pressure from two state senators forced Young to cancel a controversial contract between the business school and fallen junk-bond king Michael Milken to produce video lectures. Others criticized the Westchester Bluffs, a faculty housing project Young pushed that was hurt by a downturn in the real estate market and is now expected to pencil out at a $7-million loss.

About the same time, Young issued an apology after angry sports boosters objected to a deal he approved to sell a large block of Rose Bowl tickets to a broker in exchange for a $100,000 donation.

Those who know him well say that Young has always acted with UCLA’s best interests at heart. Controversy, they point out, comes with the job.

Young’s job is among “the hardest . . . in the world,” said Andrea L. Rich, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor, who has announced that she will soon leave her post as Young’s second-in-command. “People are angry most of the time about something. They tend to aim it at who’s the most visible.”

Some faculty members say that Young is out of touch with the soul of UCLA. And many students view their chancellor at a distance, if at all.

This spring, at a Pauley Pavilion pep rally to celebrate the basketball team’s NCAA championship, Young was greeted by a chorus of boos that one student leader attributed to frustration about “classes getting cut, quality going down, paying more and getting less.”

At another widely publicized campus forum with Young, only 50 students showed up.

“Do you know what the greatest misconception of you is on campus?” one student asked Young, his voice echoing in a sea of empty chairs. “‘That you don’t exist.”’

Young told The Times later that he is not disengaged.

“I’m not putting in any less time,” he said. He acknowledged, however, that he may be less visible because he frequently travels on business, is trying to spend more time with his family and neighbors, and likes to try to get away from the office on Friday afternoons.

Passing the Torch

No one would have questioned the chancellor’s visibility in September, 1968, when a vigorous, dark-haired Chuck Young took the reins of UCLA. He was the handpicked successor of Franklin D. Murphy, the man credited with bringing UCLA out of the shadow of UC Berkeley.

The two could not have been more different. Murphy was a short, talkative man from the Midwest. Young, tall and reserved, had been raised in a modest household in San Bernardino County.

Yet the two men enjoyed an unusual synchronicity.

“It was an amazing experience,” Murphy said in an oral history made public after his death last year. “I could communicate what I was interested in in less than a sentence--almost with a look or a gesture.”

In 1960, the year Young received his Ph.D. in political science, Young had been plucked by Murphy from administrative duties in the office of then-UC President Clark Kerr. In looking for an assistant, Murphy discovered an heir.

“It was almost like primogeniture,” said William Coblentz, a San Francisco attorney and regent from 1964 to 1980. “Franklin . . . blessed him. It was almost like ‘This is my boy, he is my successor.’ ”

When Murphy left UCLA to become chairman of Times Mirror Co., the parent company of the Los Angeles Times, the stage was set for Young to become a new kind of UCLA chancellor--tough, yet youthful enough to bridge the generation gap.

He quickly won kudos for keeping a lid on UCLA in the late 1960s while UC Berkeley erupted. He chose not to summon police to put down demonstrations, met face to face with radicals, shrugging off such epithets as “honky,” and surrounded himself with under-30ish subordinates.

But if anything clinched his reputation, it was his defense of acting professor Angela Davis, a communist whose politics drew the ire of regents. In a test of wills, Young refused to fire her; the regents finally did it themselves.

“I think his proudest moment was protecting Angela Davis,” said one high-ranking UC official. “I heard him make a speech at a UCLA alumni dinner recently where he got an ovation for reminding them how he stood for academic freedom. He felt worshiped for that.”

Young also demonstrated an appetite for details, a disregard for bureaucratic protocol, the enthusiasm of a football coach, as well as a formidable temper, subordinates say.

He prided himself on making decisions quickly and never looking back. His singular vision, say former aides, was to make UCLA better.

“He bellowed his vision,” said Christian Smith, a former UCLA assistant vice chancellor who worked with Young for 20 years until he left in 1992. “He more than once said, ‘We will decide what we want to do, then we will figure out how to pay for it.”’

Those who failed to live up to his expectations felt his wrath. He has berated students, football officials, reporters, members of his inner circle and even noisy custodians.

One student columnist for the college newspaper felt the brunt of his anger after she wrote an article questioning the amount of money spent renovating the chancellor’s residence. He denounced an error in the story and publicly upbraided her at a regents meeting. “What I do remember is this huge, hulking, flailing, angry, tall man yelling at me,” she later wrote in the Daily Bruin.

Dean Florez, UCLA’s first Latino student body president, recalled another outburst when, he said, Young kicked him out of a year-end reception for student leaders at the chancellor’s residence. He said his faux pas was taking issue with a condescending comment Young made about students.

“Dealing with Chancellor Young has always been, ‘I know better than you. . . . Nobody tells me how to run my university,’ ” said Florez, who went on to Harvard Business School and now heads a nonprofit company that assists minority businesses.

Young acknowledged having a temper that sometimes flares. Stress, he said, has “caused me to overreact on occasion to incidents.”

Touched by Scandal

Young’s career took off during the ‘70s, but it seemed to stumble in 1977 when he became linked with a scandal over misspent funds by the UCLA Foundation, the fund-raising arm of the university.

One UCLA vice chancellor was prosecuted, fired, and forced to repay the foundation about $85,000 for disallowed expenses. The state attorney general also launched a probe of foundation expenditures, including those made on Young’s behalf for overseas trips, a yacht club membership and a summer home.

State attorneys dropped their inquiry when foundation officials volunteered to pay back questionable expenditures and voted retroactively to approve those made on Young’s behalf, recalled James Kindel, then the foundation’s general counsel.

Kindel said that trustees could have probed Young’s role further but “we decided it was not in the best interest of the university to do it.”

Young said the matter was fully investigated. His only regret, he said, was his “dumb decision” to use the summer home. He said he thought the Newport Beach house had been provided by an anonymous alum but was later shocked to learn it had been rented for him with foundation funds.

Eventually, the foundation--and fund raising-- would hold the key to Young’s success.

“I think that’s the legacy that Chuck Young wants to leave behind, to have really brought about this private philanthropy,” said Bob Wilson, real estate developer and UCLA Foundation president who has given the school close to $2 million.

Even before taxpayers delivered their angry message of Proposition 13, Young was warning about dwindling state support, which has dropped from 33% to 25% of the school’s income during his tenure. Young responded with a push that increased private giving 250%. Last year, the foundation’s net assets totaled $228.4 million.

Those numbers pale by comparison with private schools, but higher education experts say UCLA is among the top fund-raisers for public universities. And boosters point to the 1982 campaign as a sort of institutional coming of age.

Young set a goal of $200 million for the fund-raising drive--and the foundation eventually raised nearly double that.

Many times it was Young who clinched major gifts, said James Collins, chairman of the board of the Sizzler restaurant chain and head of the 1982 campaign. “Whenever it was necessary or was appropriate, he was Johnny on the spot,” Collins said.

Even more than his personal touch, others praise Young’s systematic approach to fund raising. They say he has built an enviable organization that targets donors with individualized appeals matching their personal or business interests with specific areas of study.

“He’s got a good staff and he’s recognizing, I think, to get money you have to spend money,” said John E. Anderson, a businessman Young coaxed to give UCLA’s business school an unprecedented $15 million.

Young’s position as the university’s financial emissary put him in close touch with Anderson and other successful entrepreneurs. Courting them for substantial gifts to the school, he won their admiration and, often, friendship. In some cases, they also helped him out financially.

Anderson helped Young in 1991 by guaranteeing a short-term $215,000 loan for the chancellor, records show. Anderson said in an interview that he did not recall the loan guarantee but characterized Young as an excellent risk for any banker.

By the early ‘80s, Young had become a good friend and golfing partner of maverick financier Charles Knapp. Young courted Knapp for donations to UCLA, and Knapp asked Young to sit on the board of Financial Corporation of America, a savings and loan holding company that Knapp built into the second largest in the nation.

While Young was serving on the FCA board in 1981, Knapp help arrange $260,000 in financing from FCA to allow the chancellor to acquire and furnish a Rancho Mirage condo without putting up any money of his own, records show. Federal regulators sharply criticized the transaction, which was not properly disclosed or approved by banking officials.

Young said in an interview that he needed Knapp’s help in acquiring the condo, because “at that point in time, the major problem was the down payment and, I guess, even the monthly payments.”

Knapp left FCA in 1984 and was convicted in 1993 of federal bank fraud in an unrelated Arizona case.

A Crushing Blow

Coming off UCLA’s hugely successful fund-raising campaign and basking in the afterglow of high national academic rankings, Young seemed perfectly positioned in 1992 to become UC president when David Pierpont Gardner resigned.

Young campaigned hard and made the final cut, sources say, but at the last minute, the regents chose a compromise candidate: UC Irvine’s chancellor, Jack W. Peltason.

Supporters say Young was robbed by regents seeking a more malleable candidate. “He was too independent,” said one supporter. Others say that for all Young’s strengths, he carried too much baggage, was too partial to UCLA, and was flawed by his temper. Whatever the reason, Young was devastated. After pitching in as a member of Peltason’s transition team, close associates say, Young lost his steam.

“There was a period where he just didn’t have the energy. It just wasn’t there,” said Winston C. Doby, UCLA’s vice chancellor for student affairs.

Even today, some say Young remains estranged from daily university concerns.

“To try to describe him as being engaged, having a firm hand on UCLA, planning for its future--that’s nonsense,” said one close faculty associate.

However, many around campus who had written him off just a year ago now say Young’s ringing defense of affirmative action seems to have relit his professional fire.

“It’s given him a reason to fight for UCLA again,” said one faculty member.

After the Board of Regents voted to end the use of race and gender in UC’s hiring, contracting and admissions this month, Young looked shaken. Asked whether the action made him question his commitment to staying in his job, the 63-year-old chancellor paused a full 15 seconds.

“No,” he finally said. “My commitment to the future of the University of California is as great or greater than ever.”

One recent day, when he agreed to let a reporter follow him around, his schedule was packed with 10 hours of meetings and appointments.

It began serenely at 7:15 a.m., with the chancellor sorting through his mail in an office decorated with fresh flowers and mementos of a long career.

Then came the hurricane: A four-hour meeting with his top aides; a 90-minute forum with students; a 2 1/2-hour strategy session about the future of the UCLA Medical Center, and a two-hour reception for Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

He brought his first meeting to order by clapping his hands and whistling. “Duke! Go!” he barked at Charles “Duke” Oakley, the campus architect, signaling him to give his report on library expansion. Someone asked if UCLA could get state funding for this project, but Young refused to waste precious time discussing something so futile. “Forget it. Move on,” he said.

By late afternoon, Young had stopped barely long enough to wolf down half a sandwich. Outside his last meeting of the day, his chief of staff waited in her car to drive him to meet Pakistan’s prime minister, who was receiving the honorary UCLA Medal. The aide greeted him with a fistful of briefing papers and a freshly pressed shirt.

Young smiled. Another cocktail party for UCLA.