UCLA School of Public Affairs Among Charles E. Young’s Lasting Legacies Former colleagues recall the late chancellor and his role in the 1994 consolidation of degree programs

By Stan Paul

Charles E. Young, the former UCLA chancellor who passed away Sunday at his home in Sonoma, California, at age 91, was instrumental in the creation of what later became the Luskin School of Public Affairs.

During a time of budgetary constraints, the long-established schools of Social Welfare and Urban Planning were combined in 1994 with a new graduate department — Public Policy — in one new school. In recognizing Young’s legacy and significance at UCLA Luskin, Interim Dean Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris said it was his vision that made today’s Luskin School possible.

And, as she wrote to the UCLA Luskin community, “placing his faculty appointment in our Public Policy department, he immediately elevated the visibility of our School in its very early days.” Loukaitou-Sideris noted that Young always kept a great interest in “his school” long after his official retirement. “As late as June 25, 2023, he emailed me to express his pleasure and congratulations for Urban Planning having been ranked as No. 1 in the nation.”

Several others who knew Young and his relationship with UCLA Luskin offered their remembrances.

Daniel J.B. Mitchell, professor emeritus of management and public policy, was on the faculty at UCLA at the time of the transition. He said Young supported the final result, but the original idea was different.

“Originally, the idea was to create an interdisciplinary research center — not a school — for faculty with a general interest in public policy,” recalled Mitchell, who served as chair of public policy from 1996 to 1997.

In the aftermath of the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict, and in response to budgetary pressures coming from the state that would require rethinking some programs at UCLA, Young appointed a committee to take on the task. It was headed by Archie Kleingartner, professor emeritus of management and public policy, who would become the School’s founding dean.

“Young expanded the task to include creation of a full school of public affairs. He felt that public policy, particularly aimed at state and local concerns, should have a distinct presence at UCLA, both for research and for the production of professionals in the field,” Mitchell said.

Kleingartner said Young had reached the conclusion in the early 1990s that UCLA could and should do much more in the field of public policy. As a premier university, UCLA had an obligation to provide research and teaching at a high level in public policy, said Kleingartner, noting that although Young’s master’s and doctoral degrees from UCLA were in political science, his personal academic research interest was in public policy.

Young with current Chancellor Gene Block and former Chancellor Al Carnesale.

After the decision on a new public affairs school was reached, top-level attention turned to how to go about creating a public policy entity and what it should look like, Kleingartner said. “The chancellor was interested in something big and impactful.”

A second strategic decision was based on the fact “that very little by way of new funding would be available, that the main resources would have to be found from within the university,” he said. “So, a really big issue was to reorganize in a way that generated savings.”

Kleingartner said the late Andrea Rich headed up the administrative and financial aspects of the restructuring, and he led the academic and faculty aspects.

“But many faculty and administrators got involved because it was quite a complex undertaking,” he said.

At that time, a number of schools and institutes were reorganized as part of the Professional School Restructuring Initiative, or PSRI, and it was done amid a great deal of internal opposition from existing schools, institutes and their faculties. But “the chancellor remained firm despite the extensive opposition.”

The School — with a different name but in essentially its current form — was officially launched on July 1, 1994. That wouldn’t have happened without Charles E. Young, and “I think at this point, most people are quite satisfied with what was created,” Kleingartner said.

Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School, has known Young since Yaroslavsky’s days as an undergraduate in the late 1960s. That association continued during his career as a Los Angeles City Council member and Los Angeles County supervisor representing districts including the Westwood campus.

At a time of declining state support for higher education, Yaroslavsky pointed out that Young “saw what was coming” and took steps to help UCLA remain competitive as a top public university, according to a story posted by UCLA Newsroom.

“Chuck was a bold and visionary leader who catapulted UCLA to one of the world’s great research universities,” Yaroslavsky commented. “Moreover, under his stewardship this university became a consequential player in its own backyard — Westwood and the greater Los Angeles community. As an elected official who represented UCLA for four decades, I never had a better partner.”

Stewardship and partnerships were a hallmark of his work and affiliations on campus.

“Chancellor Young welcomed me personally when I was recruited to UCLA,” said Fernando Torres-Gil, professor emeritus of social welfare and public policy. He recalled Young’s graciousness and interest in his career, which would include a number of leadership roles at UCLA Luskin.

“Since that time, I took great joy in calling him ‘Chuck’ and experiencing the great university he helped to create. Very few individuals have the good fortune to see a legacy grow and flower, and Chancellor Young could enjoy his creation on his many visits to campus post-retirement,” Torres-Gil said.

Read more about the life and career of the former chancellor on UCLA Newsroom.

‘Taking the Raw Edges Off Capitalism’

Dan Mitchell, UCLA Luskin professor emeritus of public policy, wrote an essay for Zocalo Public Square about efforts in 1930s California to build a social safety net for older Americans, with lessons for today’s debates on aging and “entitlements.” The campaigns, which predated the launch of Social Security, included the Townsend Plan, which called for the federal government to give $200 a month to every American over 60, and the Ham and Eggs initiative, which called on the state of California to give $30 to adults over 50 every Thursday. While these efforts failed, their larger ideas would triumph. “Social Security was not inspired by the Townsend Plan, but it was part of the New Deal’s larger idea of taking the raw edges off capitalism through government intervention,” Mitchell wrote. Advocates for the aging population remained a force in California politics for years, fighting battles that foreshadowed today’s struggle over how to divide the economic pie between younger and older generations.


 

Mitchell on the Impact of Coronavirus on California’s Economy

Daniel J.B. Mitchell, professor emeritus of public policy and management, spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle about COVID-19’s impact on the California economy. In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a budget proposal that projected a multibillion-dollar surplus and new programs for housing, health care and wildfire prevention. A revised 2020-21 spending plan, due in May, will need to account for the widespread shutdown of the state’s economy due to concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus. The economy has already suffered a “tremendous shock,” Mitchell said, and the period of rebuilding could last years. “If you create enough disruption, it’s not so easy to go back,” he said. “So you could be looking at a very prolonged period here in California where the underlying economy is not good.”

Daniel J.B. Mitchell

Daniel J.B. Mitchell is Ho-su Wu professor at the Anderson Graduate School of Management and the School of Public Affairs, U.C.L.A. Within the latter school, he chaired the Department of Policy Studies during 1996-97. Prof. Mitchell was formerly director of the U.C.L.A. Institute of Industrial Relations (1979-90) and continues to serve on the Institute’s advisory committee.

During Phase II of the federal wage/price controls program of the early 1970s, Prof. Mitchell was chief economist of the Pay Board, the agency that administered wage controls. He was twice associated with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., including a stint as a senior fellow in the economic studies program (1978-79), and participated in several Brookings-sponsored research projects. Professional activities have included memberships on the Executive Boards of the Industrial Relations Research Association (both national and Southern California), the North American Economics and Finance Association, and the Institute of Industrial Relations Association. Prof. Mitchell is the immediate past president of the North American Economics and Finance Association. He has also served on the nominating committee of the American Economic Association and on the editorial boards of various academic journals. He is editor of a book series on workplace studies published by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. and began a term as co-editor of the journal Industrial Relations in 1997.

Prof. Mitchell regularly served as a member of the Human Resource Forecast Panel while it operated at the Conference Board and later at U.C.L.A. He is a member of the International Industrial Relations Association and chairs one of its study groups (Pay Systems). At UCLA, he was co-director and then director (1999-2000) of the UCLA Anderson Business Forecasting Project. As a faculty member at UCLA, he has created a course on “California Policy Issues” (now co-taught with former presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis), now a core course of the minor in Public Affairs. Prof. Mitchell has served as a consultant to the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve Board, the President’s Council on Wage and Price Stability, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the International Labour Organisation. His publications have generally been in the areas of wage determination, wage-price controls, concession bargaining, flexible pay plans, non-wage employee benefits, use of labor-market data, labor standards in international trade, and other aspects of labor-market analysis. Prof. Mitchell is the author of Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly: Historic Social Movements and Their Lessons for Our Aging Society (M.E. Sharpe, 2000).

The book uses California’s colorful experience with “pensionite” movements of the state’s seniors during the period from the 1920s through the 1940s to draw implications for the upcoming retirement of the baby boom. Prof. Mitchell has two children and resides in Santa Monica, California with his wife Alice.

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

“Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly”
ME Sharpe, 2000