The first celebration of George Blumenthal’s reign as the 10th chancellor of the University of California-Santa Cruz was held miles from the bucolic coastal campus.
A crowd of about 100 members of Silicon Valley’s elite tech companies, joined by civic leaders and federal officials, welcomed the 61-year-old astrophysicist with enthusiastic applause at a reception at the elegant San Jose Museum of Art.
“Congratulations to the top banana slug!” said Carl Guardino, president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group in a toast to the new leader of a school whose mascot is the slimy mollusk that crawls through the redwood-studded campus. The event was held Sept. 20, one day after UC regents dropped the “acting” from Blumenthal’s title and made him the permanent chancellor.
“He has the right vision for our region,” Guardino said.
Blumenthal’s own words spell out that vision. He calls his campus “the UC of Silicon Valley.”
A longtime UC-Santa Cruz faculty member who is devoted to the classrooms and running campus trails, the Monte Sereno resident has spent much of the past year off campus, building close ties with influential high-tech leaders who will help him help strengthen the university’s role in the valley.
Clear vision
He recognizes that political support and private investment are critical to the school’s ascension as a leading research institution. The campus has a modest endowment – which at $100 million is about 4 percent the size of UC-Berkeley’s – and faces diminishing state support.
And he knows he can offer, in exchange, the region’s most precious resource: bright young minds.
Blumenthal was an influential member of the committee that began planning UCSC’s Silicon Valley initiatives almost a decade ago.
“It’s gratifying to see how UCSC’s presence has grown here,” he told the audience at the art museum reception. “With facilities and programs in the heart of Silicon Valley, UCSC is building new areas of innovation and achievement.”
The campus, dubbed “the most stoned campus on Earth” in 2004 by Rolling Stone magazine – has long had a reputation as a counterculture mecca. But it’s gradually shedding that label as it emerges as a leader in high-tech fields such as molecular biology, bioinformatics, electrical engineering and optics, contributing to prestigious research such as the Human Genome Project and the Hubble Space Telescope.
UCSC’s growth, however, is increasingly constrained by the city of Santa Cruz. So the 15,000-student university’s off-campus sites offer its best chance at expansion.
Over the past year, UCSC added summer school classes at its Moffett Field campus near Mountain View, started construction of the Automated Planet Finder for Lick Observatory and received Microsoft money to offer an entry-level course in computer-game programming.
Blumenthal will push for further valley development. The NASA/Ames campus will ultimately hold 2,000 UCSC students – about 10 percent of the entire university’s future student body as envisioned for 2020.
A tall and lanky man with an unpretentious manner, Blumenthal grew up in a middle-class Milwaukee family. His parents ran a small Venetian-blinds business. He and his elder sister were the first in his family to attend college.
Although he’s a world-renowned astrophysicist for his research into the role of dark matter in the evolution of the universe, he is praised for his down-to-Earth manner.
As chairman of the school’s astronomy department, “he showed he was a very successful scientist and teacher – but that he also has all these people skills,” said friend Joel Primack, a UCSC physicist. With many bureaucratic duties, “it’s a job most astronomers would run away from.”
He faces several significant challenges in expanding the school’s Silicon Valley presence. An important Technology and Information Management program has yet to receive final degree approval. The lease on its NASA/Ames building expires in 2009. And he needs to raise non-state funding to boost a modest $20 million capital construction budget.
First proposed by former Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood a decade ago, growth at the Silicon Valley site slowed during the valley’s dot-com bust and the tenure of Chancellor Denice Denton, who committed suicide in June 2006 after 16 months in the job.
“We haven’t made as much progress here as we could have,” said William Berry, director of the University Affiliated Research Consortium, which supports NASA missions with its work in nanotechnology, biotech, information systems, aerospace systems and earth sciences.
But Berry is heartened by Blumenthal’s frequent and enthusiastic trips to the Moffett Field campus to discuss future plans.
Research triangle
Blumenthal has also been meeting with NASA/Ames Director Pete Worden to discuss creating a corporation that could obtain a long-term lease for a 160-acre research triangle from NASA, then contract with private developers to secure the capital investment necessary to build the park.
“He is a true visionary for education and research,” said Worden, a retired Air Force brigadier general. “With his leadership, UCSC will be a spectacular place to be for science and technology and space.”
Worden welcomes the young faces at Moffett Field. “The average age of our employees is 50,” he said. “We’ve got to start replacing ourselves.”
Blumenthal has spent almost his entire career at UCSC, landing a position on its faculty in the 1970s.
Gregarious, he enjoys the teamwork of science.
“In my field, collaboration is crucial,” he said. “I come into the office – to the consternation of my wife – because I want to interact with colleagues. Some of my best ideas come from casual conversation. I need the give-and-take discussions to get my creative juices going.
Described as unifier
“I’m not someone who can lock myself in a closed room and – if I think long enough and hard enough – come up with a good idea.”
Colleagues say he is skilled at bridging differences between various constituents – a skill that bodes well for future town-gown relations, which until Blumenthal’s appointment as acting chancellor 14 months ago were particularly poisonous.
“He has a unique ability to take a lot of diverse opinions and assimilate them, then lay out a plan,” said UARC’s Berry.
The lifelong Democrat enjoys swapping astronomy news with Worden, a Republican who served in the first Bush White House on the “Star Wars” strategic missile defense program.
“It’s quite fun,” Worden said. “We talk about things like, ‘Where will we find life in the universe, other than Earth?’ or, ‘Several hundred planets have been discovered around other stars – what does that mean?’ “
Yet he is equally comfortable as the sole academic member of Team Silicon Valley, a small group of valley leaders and elected officials organized by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
The leadership group’s Guardino said he was driving his car when Blumenthal called to tell him his appointment seemed imminent.
“I almost hit the ceiling, I was so happy, jumping up and down,” Guardino said. “We salute the regents for getting it right.”
Contact Lisa M. Krieger at lkrieger@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5565.
