Occidental College

For a generation of students who share every detail of their personal lives in text messages, MySpace pages and other online postings, the college admissions chase is offering a lesson that some things are best kept private. Last December, when Brown University's early admission decisions were released online, students in one classroom at North Hollywood High's highly gifted magnet program could be heard applauding. In another, there was silence, followed by the sound of someone crying.

Jonathan Veitch, former dean of the New School's Eugene Lang College in New York City and scion of a prominent Hollywood family, will be the next president of Occidental College, the liberal arts campus in Eagle Rock that Barack Obama attended for two years. Veitch's hiring at Occidental, announced Friday and effective July 1, comes after several years of leadership instability at the 1,868-student campus, which has had four presidents since 2005.

Robert Skotheim was at first amused when he was invited to become president of Occidental College, even for just 18 months. "I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of," he recalled. After all, the former professor of American history had been in happy retirement for six years in the Seattle area after heading the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino and, before that, Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash.

On his historic run to the White House, Barack Obama spent two years at Occidental College, the basketball-loving future president spending countless hours honing his game on the Eagle Rock campus when he wasn't studying. A self-described gym rat who played basketball regularly on the campaign trail -- he even played for two hours on election day last week in Chicago -- Obama is fondly remembered by those who once challenged him on the Occidental courts.

Memories of 1980 at Occidental College's Haines Hall have the standard fragments of the era: stereos blasting the B-52's through the dorm, pot-fueled bull sessions about the revival of draft registration, late-night cramming for economics exams. That otherwise private nostalgia took on public significance this month when a former Haines Hall resident from Hawaii known at the time as Barry announced that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for president of the United States. U.S. Sen.

A former "shock jock" at the Occidental College radio station has settled his defamation suit against the school. Jason Antebi, 25, who sued Occidental in September 2005, a year after he graduated, alleged that he was defamed when a lawyer for the college yelled at him in a hallway for his on-air remarks and said he was racist, sexist and an anti-Semite.

After only 17 months in the post, Susan Westerberg Prager announced her resignation Monday as president of Occidental College amid reports at the Eagle Rock campus that she had clashed with the school's board of trustees over not being an aggressive-enough leader. Prager, 64, a former dean of UCLA's law school and the first female president at Occidental, said that she had not been fired from heading the 1,877-student liberal arts college.

The day after Occidental College's president of only 17 months resigned, faculty and students expressed a mixture of anxiety about instability at the Eagle Rock campus and hope that the next president would stake out a higher public and fundraising profile than Susan Westerberg Prager did.

Occidental College has announced that its interim president for the next 18 months will be historian Robert Skotheim, the former president of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Skotheim will serve from Jan. 1, 2008, through June 2009, when a permanent president is expected to take over the Eagle Rock liberal arts college, which has 1,877 students.