Thursday, June 17, 2004
Ralph Cicerone:Chancellor of UC-Irvine; Pres, National Academy of Science?
The ANNOTICO Report

Ralph Cicerone, a sports-crazy kid, grew up in rural Pennsylvania, with little knowledge of his own skills and less ambition. He had really just wanted two things, he said: to play sports and to have a job.

He'd grown up marking the seasons by changes in uniform – football quarterback, basketball captain, baseball captain – and "that was all I cared about."

He had gone to college – the first in his family to do so – partly because he wanted to play college ball, and partly to avoid the cycle of layoffs where men and women were basically in good times employed and in bad times unemployed. College was seen as a way to get out of that cycle."

He marvels about the difference college has made in his life.

It was 1958, Sputnik had just been launched, and a startled America had begun searching out kids who showed promise in math and science and "channeling" them toward scientific careers. "I was channeled, and I loved it." Cicerone almost went to a small Catholic college where he could play sports, and where the aroma of bread baked by the nuns almost tipped the balance, but "somehow I came across the idea that if I went to a bigger university, I could switch" majors.

He chose Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where for the first time in his life he encountered grueling intellectual work and stiff competition. The experience transformed him from a baseball player to a scientist, from a lackadaisical student to a focused scholar.

When the opportunity to become a baseball announcer was offered years later in 1980, he remembers now, "I had to think, do I really want to do this? And I came very close to saying: yes, this is what I want to do. It was a real decision point."

Cicerone and his wife Carol met and married while graduate students at the University of Illinois. They spent several years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where they had a daughter, Sara. Their move to the University of California, San Diego had been undertaken to benefit the career not of Dr. Ralph Cicerone, the atmospheric chemist, but of Dr. Carol Cicerone, the research psychologist. "She had a really good offer, and I basically tagged along," the chancellor says.

Carol Cicerone, now a UCI professor of cognitive sciences, remembers her husband's role as a lot more proactive than that. "I had been offered tenure track at UCSD. He made arrangements for himself at Scripps Institution of Oceanography so I could accept that job," she said. "There have been times in my career when difficult decisions had to be made and he gave me the strength to continue. I must say, he is the most ardent feminist in the family."

Here, a man whose love of sports, almost lured him to be a baseball announcer, is instead a leading environmental scientist, a University Chancellor, and now to become the President of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Cicerone, we salute you.

UCI CHANCELLOR TO JOIN SCIENTIFIC HIGH SOCIETY

Ralph Cicerone is poised to take the helm at National Academy of Sciences.

Los Angeles Times
By Joel Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 16, 2004

Ralph Cicerone, UC Irvine chancellor and a leading environmental scientist, will leave his post at the end of the next school year and is all but certain to become president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

As chief of the fast-growing Orange County campus for six years, Cicerone is credited with continuing the university's steady climb through the nation's academic ranks in the midst of a state fiscal crisis.

"This is a huge and different opportunity to do some things I am excited about and that can make a difference." Cicerone said Tuesday. "I am going to miss UCI, but I am excited for the challenge."

Cicerone would assume control of the nation's leading society of scientists, which boasts more than 190 Nobel Prize winners among its 2,000 members. The private, nonprofit organization conducts studies, many commissioned by Congress on high-profile topics such as stem-cell research and global warming.

Cicerone, 61, said he welcomes the opportunity to affect policy in Washington and believes politics has encroached too far into scientific research.

"I'm worried about the polarization in some sciences, and I want to work on communicating the value of science," he said. "Our country has to have a reasoned basis for some of the decisions we are making" in fields such as the environment, medicine, census-taking and space exploration.

Before becoming UC Irvine's fourth chancellor in 1998, Cicerone headed the university's department of earth system science and served as dean of physical sciences.

Earlier in his career, the Pennsylvania native worked as a director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and taught at the University of Michigan. He earned his bachelor's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Illinois in electrical engineering.

Cicerone is regarded as one of the country's leading experts on global warming. He was elected to the Academy in 1990. In 2001, he headed a landmark study on climate change for the organization that concluded the planet has experienced relatively rapid temperature increases over the last 20 years and that much of the change has been caused by humans.

He was listed as one of nine researchers who contributed to the research that won UCI professor F. Sherwood Rowland a Nobel Prize...

Reese said the search for Cicerone's successor will not begin until the academy membership elects him Dec. 15.

A nominating committee has recommended that members elect Cicerone president. Members are entitled to make additional nominations, but none has ever done so in the academy's 140-year history.

Despite three years of state cutbacks in funding, UC Irvine has experienced significant growth under Cicerone. Reese said the university has made impressive gains, compared with other UC campuses, in the amount of federal research money its faculty receives. Since 1998 these grants have increased to $235 million a year from $126 million, a result, university officials said, of the hiring of many accomplished, high-profile researchers...

Reese said under Cicerone, the university pioneered innovative admissions programs, including one that guarantees entrance to any state high school senior who graduates in the top 4% of his class.

UC Irvine's enrollment has grown more than 25%, to 24,000 students, under Cicerone.

Cicerone said he also was pleased with efforts to improve UCI's student life, including revamped basketball and baseball programs, the expansion of the student center in progress and the addition of several summer camps for children in the surrounding community.

A top priority for his final year, Cicerone said, is to raise the remaining $35 million of the $50 million that UCI must contribute to construction of a new hospital. He also pledged to continue pushing for a long-sought law school.

For the most part, UCI faculty and administrators applauded Cicerone's nomination as academy president, and said they were disappointed to see him leave.

"We're very happy for Ralph but sad for UCI," said Abel Klein, a mathematics professor and chairman of the UCI academic senate. "For the first time, the campus really had some leadership…. Things are going really well right now. We don't need this."...

He expressed confidence that his departure comes as the financial outlook for UCI and the university system begins to improve.

"I would have felt very badly leaving when things were down. But I'm optimistic that the worst is behind us," he said. "I'm very invested in this place and may have some regrets someday about leaving, but they haven't hit me yet."

Los Angeles Times: UCI Chancellor to Join Scientific High Society
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/
la-me-uci16jun16,1,7815024,print.story?coll=la-headlines-california
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UCI PROFILES:

RALPH J. CICERONE

Chancellor; Daniel G. Aldrich Chair in Earth System Science;
professor, chemistry....Down to Earth

Ralph Cicerone is equally at ease in his roles of atmospheric chemist, student advocate and UCI's fourth chancellor.

Someday when Ralph Cicerone has been UCI chancellor long enough to get totally settled in, when his large, bare office has filled with books and his schedule has relaxed, someone may be able to persuade him to demonstrate the baseball radio announcer he might have become instead.

It almost happened. Cicerone had loved baseball before he loved science, long before he became a professor. As a sports-crazy kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania, he had gone to college – the first in his family to do so – partly because he wanted to play college ball. When the opportunity to become a baseball announcer was offered years later in 1980, the chancellor remembers now, "I had to think, do I really want to do this? And I came very close to saying: yes, this is what I want to do. It was a real decision point."

While the move to San Diego had worked out spectacularly for his wife, it wasn't so promising for Cicerone. "I really enjoyed my time at Scripps, but there really wasn't much of a career there. It wasn't a fit for what I really wanted to do."

Then he received two simultaneous opportunities. He was offered the position of director of the Atmospheric Chemistry Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. And he had an inside track on the baseball radio announcer job for the San Diego Padres. He knew he could get the radio job, and even though "I think my voice is kind of dull," he was sure he could become good at it. The pay for the two positions was the same.

Trying to maintain two academic careers in the same family was very hard, and for a time Cicerone considered giving up the struggle. He thought, "Why don't we arrange it so my wife can stay here and develop her career and I'll do something completely different?"

He chose to remain a scientist and the two-career fit stayed tight. With no job in Boulder for Carol, the family endured more than six years of a commuter marriage, with Cicerone and their daughter in Colorado and his wife remaining in San Diego.

"He was at home with our daughter, and I came home on weekends," Carol Cicerone said. "We said that if anything happened to disrupt Sara's life, we'd have to change. But she thrived with him."

Cicerone's decision to stick with atmospheric chemistry – he'd actually testified to Congress on the subject while still at the University of Michigan – set the course that ultimately led him to the UCI chancellorship. He continued research on global climate change, which led in 1989 to his selection as founding chair of a new department at UCI, now called Earth System Science. Five years later, he was appointed dean of UCI's School of Physical Sciences.

Because of his research contributions to the question of ozone depletion, Cicerone's name appears on the citation for the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to UCI's F. Sherwood Rowland. In 1997, Cicerone was one of six American scientists to receive a prestigious United Nations award for research that seeks to protect the earth's fragile ozone layer. And in October, he received the 1999 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science.

As a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former president of the American Geophysical Union, Cicerone is one of a small corps of international experts on global warming – many of them at UCI – sure to be approached for information and opinion on the subject through the coming years. This will inevitably raise UCI's profile internationally.

Cicerone's dual role as UCI chancellor and scientific researcher is one he intends to maintain. He has told colleagues he plans to commit 10 to 20 hours per week to research and work with students. He believes it will keep him in touch with the day-to-day lives of UCI's student, faculty and research communities, which in turn will make him a better administrator. But it might not be easy. Cicerone said he's been looking for advice on how to pull it off, asking around to find other chancellors who've kept up their research. "There aren't many role models."

Impressive as is the new chancellor's professional resume, other qualities drew the attention of the 17-member selection committee that recommended him to succeed former Chancellor Laurel Wilkening. Committee member Aram Chaparyan, UCI student body president, said Cicerone had impressed him as "kind and confident, straightforward." Another member of the committee, Patricia Kitcher, said she knew he was the man for the job when he described how it had felt to be first in his family to go to college, and how poor a student he'd been at first. UCI has many first-generation students, and Cicerone was seen as able to understand this constituency.

His choice also was popular with the faculty, said James McGaugh, director of UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. To McGaugh, it did make a difference that Cicerone was a "dedicated, loyal" part of the UCI community.

"Ralph is devoted to the building of UCI," McGaugh said. "It's said some people want important positions because they want to do something, and others because they want to be somebody. He's the first: He wants to do something."

Following his appointment in April 1998, Cicerone spent extensive time in May and June with former Chancellor Wilkening before taking the reins in July. For an interview later that month, on a blistering-hot day when conversations tended uneasily to the subject of global warming, Cicerone played host in a spacious office that still bore an untenanted air of bare bookshelves and tables.

McGaugh's description of Cicerone included the comment that the chancellor is "the kind of person who allows you to finish your sentences," and that is true. Another administrator described Cicerone as soft-spoken, making comments in a voice so low-pitched that people have to quiet down and lean in to hear him. That too is true. In conversation, he is careful and exact but not guarded. He wants to be accurate, but he seems to have no interest in projecting an image of perfection. Asked once what he'd meant by a particular comment, he embarked on a quick reply, then suddenly stopped. "What did I mean by that?" he asked himself and fell silent to think it over before offering a more complete description of just how he'd finally learned to study as a college sophomore, although he was still lousy at taking tests.

As Cicerone takes the helm of a major public university, he says he faces again and again variations on the same question, "What do I see as the mission of UCI? I'm trying to get it down to 25 words or less." The bedrock question takes him back to his own past, about what it had been like to start college when college wasn't in the family culture, and about the difference it has made in his life.

He began with no concept of how far he would actually go, with little knowledge of his own skills and less ambition. He had really just wanted two things, he said: to play sports and to have a job. "When I went away to college, it was to avoid the cycle of layoffs where men and women were basically in good times employed and in bad times unemployed. College was seen as a way to get out of that cycle." He'd grown up marking the seasons by changes in uniform – football quarterback, basketball captain, baseball captain – and "that was all I cared about."

"I still feel that way about college, that a main reason why people should go to college is to find out what they're interested in, what they're good at, what they enjoy and don't enjoy, and find out what it's like to compete against the really best people in each field.

"I tell about a student who came to UCI because she loved to dance. She told me she thought she could be the world's greatest dancer when she came here. I became aware of her in her junior year because she transferred into mathematics as a major. What!? From fine arts and dance to mathematics? Well, it turned out she had found that in comparison to the young men and women majoring in dance, she was good but she wasn't going to be the greatest. But math was easy for her, so she became a math major. She had nearly all As and now is in a doctoral program in mathematics.

"I had that same kind of instinct, that you go away to college partly to find out what you're good at, whether you can compete against the people who are the best in what you think is going to be your field. And if you can't, you either keep plugging along or you switch to something that you enjoy more, or that you can be the best at."

The dancer-turned-mathematician illustrates one important part of the direction Cicerone has in mind for UCI. He wants UCI's undergraduate offerings to be as comprehensive as possible, so that students can look around and find what fits them.

But there's another part that he stresses again and again: It's important for students to feel they're measuring themselves against the best of their peers, so the quality of the university has to be high. What Cicerone really wants is for UCI to be as good as the best private universities, but he knows it's more realistic – and more attainable – to work at making UCI a flagship campus of the University of California.

Perhaps because of his own background, Cicerone's views of higher education have a deeply populist streak. America's public universities, he believes, have a near-sacred duty to deliver on the American dream. One news story quotes him as saying, "The experiment of what the United States is about is to block a class-based society. The public universities are at the forefront of this experiment."

Did he really say that? "That's the way I feel. I think people had better catch onto this because I'm really annoyed that we haven't been asserting this goal for a long time now. Public universities in the United States have to be as good as the best private universities, or at least aspire to that, or we are not holding up our part of the bargain of the whole experiment of what the United States is all about. I don't want it to revert to the kind of class-based system that is common in many other countries.

"We try to have a society, a pluralistic democracy – not only a democracy but one where there's no prior status granted to anybody on the basis of religion or connections or ethnicity – and this distinguishes the United States from all other countries in the world. We have never presumed that somebody's status or class entitled him or her to more than one vote.

"Okay, now how does this connect with universities? I think it's pretty obvious. As long as higher education is the primary ingredient in bettering oneself in economic status and in personal freedoms, personal influence and self-fulfillment ... we have to be careful that the opportunities for everybody are there. This is our job ... and if we don't do it, we're setting up a class-based or money-based society where only the privileged will have those opportunities."

Cicerone knows that neither he nor his wife, who grew up in working-class Hawaii, would have succeeded in an America like that. It is important to him to keep open the road he himself traveled, the one that is open to smart students who work hard. He sees students like that at UCI and says, "It's Americana. It really is."

Cicerone knows that one part of his job as chancellor will be to find sources of funding. The state-supported share of UCI's total budget has been declining for years to about 24 percent today. "The states still believe they own the public universities – and they do, and we report to them, and they're proud of us. But are they paying the bills? No. And in every state it's the same."

California, with what Cicerone believes is the finest system of public higher education in the country, may be the best place to begin trying to persuade the public that good universities are worth paying for. The UCI chancellorship gives him access to "a national pulpit to talk about the challenges facing higher education. When we remove opportunities from upcoming generations that present and past generations have had, I have to stand up and scream – to get people's attention and present the facts.

"To be among the best, UCI must gather resources to hire and retain the highest quality faculty and to greatly expand facilities for research and teaching. University-based research is a great foundation for undergraduate and graduate instruction – and more – in the best tradition of American public universities, it establishes a firm foundation for the country as a whole. I'm especially concerned about our need for several new buildings to accommodate our growing enrollments and our expanding research.

"We should try to be as comprehensive as possible in our undergraduate offerings and we should build our strengths in graduate and research programs, because their quality needs to be as good as the best universities anywhere."

His own visibility in this, Cicerone believes, should be minimal. "My theory of administration is pretty simple: Keep it simple. I've really learned there are people who are good at administration and business and I'm relying on them. We have a lot of them here.

"If I do my job right, you won't even remember who the chancellor is."

–Merrily Helgeson

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