Colleagues Call Modest Peltason a Great Guy as Well as Best Man for Job : Profile: Behind the UCI chancellor’s affable exterior is a superb administrator and consensus builder, they say.

IRVINE —  Don’t be deceived by his endearing “country cousin” manner, say colleagues of UC Irvine Chancellor Jack W. Peltason, who is in line to be president of the University of California system.

The 68-year-old Peltason is a brilliant administrator, a keen observer of human nature and a vociferous defender of the role of a research university in society, they say.

“The regents need a very strong president and a very able president, and it’s very hard to imagine anybody more gifted than Peltason is, both in terms of his vision, his experience and his ability to deal with persons of all sorts,” said UCI professor Francisco Ayala, a renowned evolutionary biologist who served on the academic committee that sought candidates to replace retiring UC President David P. Gardner.

William R. Schonfeld, UCI’s dean of social sciences and a friend of Peltason’s, said, ‘There is only one other person in the country who could do the job equivalent to the job Jack Peltason would do, and that person is David Gardner.”

Peltason’s chief accomplishments in his eight years at UCI, say supporters and critics alike, are building bridges between the university and Orange County’s business, social and political leaders as well as spurring the phenomenal expansion of the 16,500-student campus and raising its academic stature among the nation’s great research universities.

“He’s a healer and a consensus builder,” said one regent who confirmed Wednesday that Peltason is the unanimous choice of the UC regents’ committee searching for a successor to Gardner. “Jack Peltason is just a superb choice.”

And after years of struggle to stanch the flow of red ink at the UCI Medical Center, which in one recent year posted a deficit of $12 million, Peltason was credited with negotiating with legislators and Medi-Cal officials to help improve rates of reimbursements for the indigent patients who once made up more than half the hospital’s patients.

“He’s done a superb job with the hospital, handling the indigent problem at the overtaxed medical center,” said the regent, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He’s done super work with the state Medi-Cal people.”

An unassuming man who conveys the image of a rumpled, mumbling professor not unlike Peter Falk’s Lt. Columbo TV character, Peltason had little to say Wednesday. Yet he eventually emerged from a champagne reception in his honor to apologize for ducking press inquiries about the UC president’s post, which will be decided formally by the full Board of Regents on Friday in San Francisco.

“It’s not my story to tell,” Peltason insisted. “I don’t want to be rude, but until someone makes an official announcement, I can’t say anything.”

Earlier, however, he told a group of senior faculty members of his impending Oct. 1 appointment as UC president. One faculty member who asked not to be quoted by name said the chancellor told them: “I assure you, gentlemen, I shall be fair to all campuses--and for you, a little fairer.” Then he laughed.

Friends and supporters who flocked to the reception in his fifth-floor suite of offices in UCI’s administration tower took it as a given that Peltason would take over the 10-campus UC system.

“Most people felt very good that he received this recognition,” said Dr. Walter Henry, UCI’s vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the College of Medicine. “We all feel it’s an excellent choice for the University of California.”

“We’re ecstatic at the news,” added UCI professor Gregory Benford, an award-winning author of science fiction and other novels and a close friend of Peltason’s. “I’ve long thought him the foremost chancellor in the system. And in this hour of crisis, we need someone with a long history with the University of California, and someone who is first class. That is Jack Peltason.”

Nationally known as a scholar of constitutional government, law and the U.S. Supreme Court, Peltason is also considered a devoted family man who dotes on his wife, Suzanne, their son, two daughters and six grandchildren.

He is a prodigious reader--a speed-reader who devours tomes in his field of political science as well as keeping up with more popular works. He sneaks away occasionally to Benford’s condominium in Hawaii to keep up with his scholarly research, typing on his laptop computer.

“He’s very easy to talk to, very analytical,” UCI Athletic Director Tom Ford said. “He reads everything that comes into his office. He responds to everything. He’s very thorough. He has the ability to break down a (problem) . . . into its simplest terms. . . .”

“I always have a good feeling coming away from a meeting with him, even though it might not be what I wanted to hear,” Ford said.

Peltason is also the kind of boss who becomes just “one of the guys” at Monday night football parties held in the homes of professors on campus.

During the U.S. Senate hearings on Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court last fall, Peltason was one of about 10 faculty members and administrators debating the process in UCI professor Henry Pontell’s Irvine back yard.

“It wasn’t like he was holding court, like ‘Jack’s here, everybody stand up and bow,’ ” Pontell said. “He’s an everyday Joe.”

“He’s a very merry man, not a dour, strict man, and in this sense he is very different from Gardner,” Benford said. “He is a good guy to drink with.”

Ayala, who is among the crop of internationally known scholars attracted to UCI under Peltason, recalled that the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Frank Press, told him: “One of the great things about Irvine is that they have Jack Peltason as chancellor.”

But he was taken by surprise when he actually meet Peltason. “He looks like this very middle-American type of person who represents motherhood and apple pie,” Ayala said. “Yet one of the remarkable things one notices about him is that with this very long record of administration, he seems to have almost nobody who speaks ill of him. . . .

Peltason has been in the top echelons of higher education for 25 years, first as the chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later as president of the American Council on Education in Washington.

One of the founding vice chancellors of UCI, Peltason returned in 1984 as chancellor, succeeding the extremely popular founder of the campus, the late Daniel Aldrich.

Regents current and past say he is a very close friend of retiring UC President Gardner, and a special favorite of the regents for his charm and self-deprecating humor, and his ability to put issues in perspective.

Peltason had always been among the UC names in the running for the top job. But he had campaigned hard for UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young. Sources at UCI and elsewhere indicated that when regents deadlocked between Young and UC San Diego Chancellor Richard Atkinson, they began examining other candidates and settled on the popular Peltason.

His age was considered by some to be a liability, particularly since he has continued past the mandatory retirement age of 67 by special exemption of the regents. For this reason, many suggested that he would be only an interim choice to lead the UC system during its worst budgetary crisis in history.

But Board of Regents chairman Meredith L. Khachigian, while declining to discuss particular candidates, did say the regents were “definitely seeking a permanent appointment.”

If Peltason didn’t lobby for himself, he would consider it his duty to serve if asked, say friends.

“He’s well aware of the Roman senator Cincinnatus, who came when the (Roman) Republic called, served and then went back to his farm,” Benford said. “So did George Washington. So will Jack Peltason. The university needs him now, and I think he feels the university faces its greatest problems in decades. It needs someone who doesn’t need to learn the job. . . . Jack is a good man to have at your back in a fight.”

Staff writers Robyn Norwood, Lanie Jones and Donette Dunbar contributed to this article.