Bob Dynes, intent on his BlackBerry, squeezed into his airplane seat and raced to catch up on e-mail before his Friday night flight to San Diego took off. He brushed aside a flight attendant's warning to switch the device off -- "Oh, right, OK" -- then resumed his furious tapping as she disappeared down the aisle.
But she sneaked back up on the man just named to head the nation's most prestigious public university system and caught him, hunched over, doing the "BlackBerry prayer," as he puts it. She sternly ordered Dynes to surrender the device. He did so, red-faced.
"Here I'd just been appointed the president of the University of California. I'm 60 years old and I felt like a third-grade kid and the teacher had caught me with a note," Dynes said last week, laughing.
A focused, disciplined man with a quick, self-deprecating sense of humor, Robert C. Dynes, chancellor of UC San Diego, is certain to need all those qualities as he takes the helm of UC's 10-campus system this fall.
With 190,000 students, UC is facing an enrollment boom at the same time it confronts deep budget cuts stemming from the state's $38-billion budget shortfall. It is struggling to maintain racial and ethnic diversity on its campuses under restrictions imposed by the state's ban on affirmative action. And, within months, it must decide whether to compete for the right to continue running Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nuclear weapons design lab it has managed for 60 years.
Reflecting on his new role last week, however, Dynes, an experimental physicist who entered academia from industry little more than a decade ago, sounded undaunted, even upbeat.
"OK, I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna here, but there have always been problems," he said in an interview in his UC San Diego office. "The University of California has faced different challenges at different times, and it has always come through strong. The fiscal issues worry you, and they should, but they're not unique. And you come through them just fine if you keep your head screwed on right."
Appointed June 11 by the university's Board of Regents, Dynes said his own head has been "buzzing" with thoughts of the new job, even as he continues to carry out other duties, from shaking thousands of hands at UC San Diego's seven commencement ceremonies to presiding over campus budget discussions.
