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Richard C. Atkinson was named president of the University of California in August 1995, barely four weeks after the UC Regents voted to end affirmative action. How he dealt with the admissions wars—the political, legal, and academic consequences of that historic and controversial decision, as well as the issue of governance—is discussed in this book. Another focus is the entrepreneurial university—the expansion of the University's research enterprise into new forms of scientific research with industry during Atkinson's presidency. The final crisis of his administration was the prolonged controversy over the University's management of the Los Alamos and Livermore nuclear weapons research laboratories that began with the arrest of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of espionage in 1999. Entrepreneurial President explains what was at stake during each of these episodes, how Atkinson addressed the issues, and why the outcomes matter to the University and to the people of California. Pelfrey's book provides an analysis of the challenges, perils, and limits of presidential leadership in the nation's leading public university, while bringing a historical perspective to bear on the current serious threats to its future as a university.

Richard C. Atkinson’s eight-year tenure as president of the University of California (1995–2003) reflected the major issues facing California itself: the state’s emergence as the world’s leading knowledge-based economy and the rapidly expanding size and diversity of its population. As this selection of President Atkinson’s speeches and papers reveals, his administration was marked by innovative approaches that deliberately shaped U.C.’s role in this changing California. These writings tell the story of the national controversy over the SAT and Atkinson’s successful challenge to the dominance of the seventy-five-year-old college entrance examination. They also highlight other issues with national significance: U.C.’s experiments with race-neutral admissions programs; the challenges facing academic libraries and the University’s pioneering activities with the California Digital Library; and the University’s involvement in new paradigms of industry-university research. Together, these speeches and papers open a window on an eventful period in the history of the nation’s leading public research university and the history of American higher education.

In arguing for the primacy of basic research, Science, The Endless Frontier defined the national research system as residing in its research universities, the locus of most basic scientific research and all graduate and postgraduate education in the United States. According to research by AnnaLee Saxenian, professor and dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, and her colleagues, one-quarter of all engineering and technology firms established in the United States between 1995 and 2005 had at least one immigrant founder.

Atkinson was named president of the University of California in August 1995, barely four weeks after the UC Regents voted to end affirmative action. How he dealt with the admissions wars is discussed in this book.

Sproul’s admonition to UCLA’s students came at a sensitive moment in the history of the University of California. In 1932 the Los Angeles campus—long fought for by Southern California citizens and interest groups, long delayed by University leaders in the north, and only recently settled in the hills of Westwood where it stands today—had recently made UC the nation’s first multicampus university.¹ UCLA was a fledgling institution at that point, very much in the shadow of its distinguished older sibling four hundred miles away at Berkeley. Sproul’s remark was an attempt to lift morale and instill a sense