• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

When Chancellor Albert Carnesale leaves Westwood this spring, he will leave behind something to which he never gave much thought: a legacy.

The rosy-faced 69-year-old chancellor led UCLA through the highs and lows that came during an almost decade-long tenure marked by significant changes to the UC admissions policy, severe budget cuts, record-setting fundraising, a cadaver scandal and ambitious campus construction projects.

Carnesale arrived in Westwood in 1997, soon after California voters banned consideration of race or ethnicity in public agencies with the passage of Proposition 209, a move that outlawed affirmative action and sharply lowered minority enrollment at UCLA.

Carnesale was the target of much of the dissent that came with the 1996 ban, though he often lamented the minority drop, from which the campus has yet to recover.

“The captain is responsible for what happens on his or her watch, but those things happened despite good efforts,” said Bruce Willison, the Carnesale-appointed dean at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, referring to decreased minority enrollment.

During his time at UCLA, Carnesale also rode out some of the worst budget cuts to higher education that the state has ever endured.

State support at UCLA dropped from 20.7 percent to 15 percent, a loss that led to considerable fee increases for undergraduate and graduate students.

After his resignation announcement, several deans said Carnesale dealt with the funding difficulties well.

Instead of responding with blanket, campuswide funding cuts, Carnesale trickled down decision-making power to lower-ranking faculty who were more able to make informed decisions, Willison said.

“It’s important not to just socialize the cuts,” Willison said, referring to Carnesale’s decision to look at programs individually rather than making equal cuts across the board.

“There was careful thought taken to where we should not take cuts and where additional cuts needed to take place,” he added.

Willison praised Carnesale’s choice not to cut all campus programs evenly, but rather cut what he and other deans within each department decided was least important to the university.

Though many appreciated his knack for delegating, the Bronx native knew when to take charge, and when it came to fundraising, he often did.

The Campaign UCLA program topped even the most optimistic expectations and will likely round off at $3 billion when it comes to a close this year.

Many attribute Carnesale’s record-breaking fundraising to his charm, a quality that struck the committee in charge of replacing his predecessor, Charles Young, nearly a decade earlier.

“He devoted the time and effort that was necessary,” said Cliff Brunk, chairman of the UC Academic Senate. “He has a winning personality and that’s something that counts.”

Donors weren’t the only ones charmed by the chancellor.

Soon after moving into the chancellor’s mansion, Carnesale, who began his tenure at UCLA as a bachelor, met his wife, Robin.

The couple tied the knot more than three years ago.The two have frequented UCLA football games and other campus events and, together, have watched UCLA evolve.

With a $3 billion construction plan, the campus transitioned in the time Carnesale was chancellor from a commuter college to a residential university, as more undergraduate and graduate students moved into university housing.

Though the achievement was partially overshadowed by some construction delays, nearly 5,000 more students can be housed on or near campus today than when Carnesale began his tenure.

One of Carnesale’s most notable accomplishments was organizing the Fiat Lux program, a series of seminars emphasizing learning through dialogue.

The chancellor started the program after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and even taught a course on national security himself.

But it wasn’t all peaches and cream for Carnesale while he was at UCLA, as some of his aspirations for the university fell flat.

One of Carnesale’s visions was to bring experts from various fields within the university together to make UCLA more interdisciplinary, a notion the chancellor had trouble getting across, Willison said.

“I suspect that one of the chancellor’s biggest disappointments is that people didn’t grasp his vision as succinctly as he would have liked,” he said.

Carnesale’s tenure was also hurt by scandal at the UCLA willed body program.

Employees at the institution, the nation’s oldest willed body program, faced allegations that they sold hundreds of cadavers that had been donated to the program for research.

The scandal, likely the university’s most infamous while Carnesale was in office, forced university officials to suspend the program.

Though it will likely take years for Carnesale’s legacy to take shape, faculty buzz soon after he announced his resignation indicates that the chancellor’s tenure will likely be remembered as low-key and principled.

“I may have agreed or disagreed on certain positions but I always felt like they were coming from a principled position rather than an opportunistic one,” said Robert Rosen, Carnesale-appointed dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television.