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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.

According to Atkinson, academic freedom is concerned with protecting the conditions that lead to the creation of sound scholarship and good teaching. Tanner holds that forum analysis is inappropriate to the higher educational context. Chipman asserts that falling prices of storage and transfer make the price of knowledge more purely dependent on the value assigned to the intellectual property itself.

Richard C. Atkinson, president-elect of the AAAS, is profiled. His personal and professional accomplishments are chronicled. References.

Mr. Atkinson will assume his $243,000-a-year post facing both criticism from some abortion opponents and the promise of disruptions by people opposed to the regents' recent action in abolishing many affirmative-action policies. One of Mr. Atkinson's first challenges will be to deal with the aftermath of the regents' recent decision to drop race and gender as factors in admissions, hiring and contracting. \"I think it's going to be very explosive,\" said Lee Felarca, spokesman for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action by Any Means Necessary. \"Our group particularly wants to make things as big and as hot as possible because we think that's the only way we're going to force the regents to take back their decision.\"

Nope, the glory of the standardized test is that if an incompetent student's teachers have been giving her all A's in filthy rich Scarsdale or Beverly Hills rather than offend her socially prominent parents, this is the day everyone will finally find out. Meantime, if a shy and barefoot sharecropper's son with a speech impediment zips through the test, checking off every box correctly, those scores are going to come back as 800s, the full scholarship offers are going to start arriving in the mailbox down by the tree, and no white supremacist is going to be able to do a thing about it.