THREE FORMER UC LEADERS
PASS AWAY IN LATE SUMMER
The University of California lost three of its former leaders in late summer, as President Emeritus Charles Hitch and Chancellors Emeritus Roger Heyns of UC Berkeley and Vernon Cheadle of UC Santa Barbara passed away within weeks of each other.
All three men led the University during some of its most tumultuous times. Hitch was president from 1968 to 1975; Heyns was chancellor at UCB from 1965 through 1971; and Cheadle was chancellor at UCSB from 1962 to 1977. Hitch died of pneumonia in a San Leandro rest home on September 12 at the age of 85. Heyns, 77, died of heart failure on September 11 while vacationing in Greece. Cheadle died July 23 at a Santa Barbara hospital after suffering a stroke. He was 85.
WILKENING MOVES TO DISMISS
UCI FERTILITY CLINIC FACULTY
The unfolding tragedy of the UC Irvine fertility clinic scandal spilled over into the domain of the Academic Senate in late summer as UCI Chancellor Laurel Wilkening announced that she would seek to dismiss two tenured UCI faculty members who served as directors of the clinic, called The Center for Reproductive Health (CRH). The clinic operated under a management agreement with UCI until it was closed in June.
Wilkening said she would ask the UCI Senate's Privilege and Tenure Committee to consider charges against Ricardo Asch and Sergio Stone, both professors of obstetrics and gynecology at UCI, and that she had moved to give a required one-year's notice to a third center director, Jose Balmaceda, who is a UCI professor in-residence. P&T hearings are confidential and UCI academic affairs officers said in September that this confidentiality extends to the charges that are being submitted. No tenured faculty member has ever been dismissed from the UCI faculty and only two have ever been permanently discharged from any of the University's campuses.
A second Senate issue has been raised by the scandal: the legal indemnification the UC normally provides to faculty who are sued in connection with their University work. On August 17, UC's General Counsel's Office announced that it would not pay the CRH physicians' legal fees in a lawsuit brought against them by former patients John and Debbie Challender, but that it would decide whether to defend the doctors in other lawsuits on a case-by-case basis. This denial of indemnification was based on an assertion that, in their work, the doctors were acting outside the scope of their employment, acting fraudulently, or acting under a conflict of interest.
Asch, Stone, and Balmaceda have denied knowingly doing anything wrong. Allegations brought against them, however, include the possibility of underreporting of clinic income and the "unconsented" transplantation of human eggs and embryos. The University's bill thus far for the fiasco is at least $1.48 million, a figure that includes legal fees and payments to whistleblowers. Ten lawsuits already have been filed in connection with CRH, and another 20 malpractice actions are in process.
On August 16, following months of negotiations with the Academic Senate, President Peltason put his signature to a revision of UC's policy on the outside professional activities of faculty members. The change is being codified as a revision to UC's Academic Personnel Manual, specifically APM-025.
The heart of the revision is that faculty consulting work now is limited to a fixed number of days. "A full-time faculty member on a nine-month appointment normally may not engage in compensated outside professional activity for more than 39 days during the academic year," the revised policy says; faculty with fiscal year appointments may not engage in more than 48 days of such activity during the fiscal year. Thirty-nine days works out to one day per week during an academic year, a figure many faculty disliked, since they regarded it as a presumptive University claim to the weekend days of faculty.
Like the policy it replaced, the new APM-025 stipulates that faculty supply their departments with information regarding their outside professional activities, through means of an annual report. The new APM-025 specifies, however, that such reports include a "certification" that the faculty member did not exceed the outside employment time limits set forth in the policy. "Professional activities" is an operative phrase in the new policy, as it notes that work that is not "directly related" to a faculty member's field or discipline is not affected by the policy, so long as such work doesn't interfere with the faculty member's commitment to the University.
These revisions were prompted in part by the furor that erupted last year over the service of UC administrators on corporate boards. This, coupled with controversies over the "Western Consortium" UC Berkeley and the Foundation for Medicine at UCSF, led to pressure on the Office of the President to develop a better-defined outside employment policy for UC faculty. However, the practical effect of the new regulations remains to be seen.
"I always thought this was an issue we should never have gotten into," said Arnold Leiman, chair of the Senate's Academic Council. "Some of our very best faculty are involved in this work, their consulting is of great value to the University and there is little evidence that faculty are abusing their consulting privileges." The policy is effective immediately, but as a transition measure, chancellors may grant exceptions to its time limitations during 1995-96 in order that faculty might honor pre-existing commitments.