Henry Yang Announces Plans to Step Down as UCSB’s Chancellor
Credit: Courtesy of UCSB
Story by Rosie Bultman and Joyce Chi || Listen to the story on SoundCloud
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UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang says he will step down from his position at the end of the upcoming school year.
He announced his decision in a campus-wide email on August 14th to, quote, “return to teaching, research, and service as a professor,” end quote.
In the campus memo, he thanked faculty, staff, students, and alumni, as well as the UC Regents and UC President Michael Drake, who announced earlier this month he would also be stepping down at the end of the 2024-2025 academic year.
Additionally, Chancellor Yang thanked his wife, Dilling, and highlighted their work in travelling across the country to recruit students. He highlighted an increase in fundraising and research grants, as well as the prestige of the faculty and the university, including the fact that UCSB was recognized as the first Hispanic-Serving Institution of the Association of American Universities.
The 83-year-old Yang wrote that, quote, “serving as the Chancellor of UC Santa Barbara has been the highest honor of my career,” end quote.
Yang, a mechanical engineering professor who still teaches an undergraduate class each year, began serving as Chancellor in 1994. In his memo, over the course of his first year, he recalled meeting with all faculty members over lunches, quote, “to find a shared vision,” end quote.
Here’s George Thurlow, the former Assistant Vice Chancellor of Alumni Affairs and Chancellor’s Special Assistant for Isla Vista.
THURLOW: When he first came here, he had brown bag lunches with a huge number of faculty, during which he took copious notes. And he still has those notes. He can walk over to his bookshelf and pull out the binders, have all the notes from when he first came. And I think that’s, again, a commitment to the idea that he was going to listen to faculty.
Dick Flacks, a professor emeritus of sociology who taught at UCSB from 1969 to 2006, affirmed that the Chancellor began his career highly engaged with students and faculty. However, he said that this contrasted with Yang’s failures to adequately address housing concerns, and the secrecy within housing processes.
FLACKS: And so the secretiveness on the part of the administration, the Henry Yang’s administration, is again not at all characteristic of how he’s operated until now. But, and so I don’t even have an idea of why there isn’t more open discussion about these issues of housing. And there are really important issues for the community, and that’s the hat I’m wearing when I’m talking about this. But I think they’re also important for the campus.
Furthermore, student activists and grad students don’t feel Chancellor Yang has engaged with them in good faith.
Here is a student activist at UCSB who preferred to remain anonymous.
STUDENT ACTIVIST: ineffectual, doesn’t listen to his students, gives empty platitudes, pushes off the work that is his onto the rest of his staff with less power.
The activist felt that this lack of engagement with students made it hard to create university change.
Janna Haider, a 6th year PhD student, said that she has never met with Chancellor Yang, despite her heavy involvement in the Asian and Pacific Islander Grad Student Alliance.
HAIDER: I have never met Henry personally. Okay, the 4 graduate affinity organizations — the Asian Pacific Islander Graduate Student Alliance, the Queer and Trans Grad Student Union, the Black Grad Student Association, and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in STEM — are supposed to meet with campus administration fairly regularly. We, in my 3 years on the executive board of APIGSA, we never dealt with Yang. We only ever dealt with David Marshall.
However, film Professor Constance Penley, fondly recalls interacting with Chancellor Yang when he first arrived on campus.
PENLEY: I heard the announcement that NASA was going to create a task force on this thought to decide whether there should be another teacher in space. I wanted to be on that task force. So I called Henry Chancellor, Chancellor Yang, I called him and he called me right back. I mean, he was so new to the campus, he called me right back.
So he, I told him that I, you know, I said, I understand you don’t know me. I did send you a copy of my essay and which you might find just too harsh. You might find too feminist, you know, and it’s, you know, description and explanation of everything that NASA did wrong.
We ended up talking for 45 minutes. He was delighted to find that there was a humanity scholar on this campus who knew so much about NASA and the history of the space program. So he agreed to write a letter recommending me to Daniel Golden to be on this new committee for the teacher in space program.
In the thirty years since Chancellor Yang took office, he led the university through the 2001 and 2014 Isla Vista tragedies, the Thomas Fire, the Montecito mudslides, the COVID-19 pandemic, and last year’s protests and Liberated Zone encampment.
During his tenure as Chancellor, UC Santa Barbara increased enrollment from just under 15 thousand undergraduate students in 1995 to 21,500 in 2023. US News and World Report ranked UCSB the 46th best university nationwide in 1996; it currently ranks #35. In 2022, UCSB reached an all-time highest ranking as the 5th best public university in the country.
Susannah Scott, a professor of chemical engineering and the chair of UCSB’s Academic Senate, credits Yang with the university’s rise in prestige and change in reputation from a party school to an elite university. She said that both the Academic Senate and Chancellor Yang have historically agreed that academic excellence should be one of the university’s top priorities.
SCOTT: I think the prestige of the university hinges in part on just hiring excellent faculty…just finding the absolute smartest people that you can and hiring them and giving them the space to do what they want to do.
Another part of it is recruiting fantastic students, and the Chancellor has been a really big part of that. He’s tireless in terms of going to all places in the country to meet with students – and even outside the country, internationally – to tell them about UCSB and encourage the best ones to apply here.
Janna Haider, on the other hand, says that UCSB, along with all the UC campuses, have been over enrolling students.
HAIDER: The campuses also made the decision to over enroll relative to the number of beds physically available. And And course, every student in California who wants an education deserves to have 1, this is a public university. And that creates an obligation on the part of the state and the campus as part of the state. To meet the needs of those students.
Many praised his leadership over the years, including 3rd District County Supervisor Joan Hartmann.
2nd District County Supervisor Laura Capps also praised Yang, who she said she has known for years, as her father, Walter, was a long-time professor of Religious Studies at UCSB. Laura Capps said she especially admires Yang’s, quote, “steady hand and engaged presence” during the 2014 Isla Vista shootings.
Professor and Academic Senate Chair Susannah Scott also recalls Yang’s leadership during that tragedy.
SCOTT: I know that the Chancellor spent a lot of time thinking about what to do and a lot of time talking to people on campus, a lot of time in Isla Vista talking to people there about how to respond. And he spent countless hours with the families of the students who were affected.
THURLOW: The shootings really hurt him personally.
And one of my jobs was to drive him to the funeral. And I can tell you that he was deeply moved by the tragedy.
Laura Capps highlighted her work with Yang on the local housing crisis through their plans to build more housing for students and faculty and to launch a rental inspection pilot program.
Praises from the Santa Barbara county government comes in contrast to statements made by Hartmann in an interview with KCSB News back in April of 2023.
HARTMANN: So it’s a 15 year plan that was from 2010 to 2025, during which time the university projected it would grow by 5000 students. And so the plan was how to accommodate that the growth associated with admitting 5000 new students.
But the piece that we’re focused on today is housing for students and they were to build as they grew and they’ve already reached the 5000 before 2025. So they should have been building housing for those 5000 students.
And they’re 3500 shy, sorry to invert those. So that’s, that, I mean, there’s, that’s 3500 more students bouncing around in Isla Vista, Galeta and Santa Barbara, trying to find housing and competing with each other.
As Hartmann and Flacks mentioned, housing has tainted the Chancellor’s legacy, and students feel it.
Declan Griffin, a graduate of the class of 2023, said that while Yang, quote, “became chancellor with the hopes of inspiring a transparent campus administration,” his recent years have been “marred with opaque bureaucratic dealings,” end quote. Griffin cited the housing crisis and the hit-and-run allegation against Yang, which the university has denied.
PhD student Janna Haider was one of the leading members of the UAW strike for Teaching Assistants in 2022. Haider says that concerns about cost of living were a primary concern of the union, and have not been adequately addressed by the university.
HAIDER: For housing costs, then the vast majority of graduate student employees at the University of California, Santa Barbara in particular, our rent burden. This is 1 of the 2 most expensive cost of living localities. For UC campuses were 2nd only to Santa Cruz. And the fact that this is a campus that has deliberately violated its own long range development plans failed to build adequate. Housing for both undergraduate and graduate students and also does not provide any support to students who have to engage with the housing market outside of campus just indicates that. The campus under Yang’s leadership doesn’t understand that people need to be alive and safe and well housed in order to learn and to teach.
Chancellor Yang faced some of the sharpest criticisms of his tenure with the proposed Munger Hall dormitory. The hall sought to build more housing (it would have housed up to 4,500 students), but drew backlash for its lack of windows and natural light in bedrooms. Plans for Munger Hall were officially cancelled last summer.
Assistant Vice Chancellor George Thurlow says Santa Barbara has had a housing crisis since he attended UCSB in the early 1970s. He views Munger Hall much more favorably than others.
THURLOW: I actually think it was a pretty good project. The window thing was a classic example where if your opponent is allowed to define you before you get out there with your message, you may be in trouble. 12:51-13:08 There’s tons of windows. There’s not windows in bedrooms. But then everybody gets their own bedroom. What I kept telling people was the promise was that this was going to be the cheapest dorm to live in.
Professor Emeritus Dick Flacks is the current chair of Sustainable University Now (or S-U-N), a coalition of groups with the goal of ensuring UCSB’s growth was in line with community needs. Here’s what he had to say about the university’s housing crisis and Munger Hall solution.
FLACKS: And the housing problems were so obvious and people were living in cars and everything. And this has been, we should have by then been developing the dormitory plans that had been originally set forward in the LRDP, Long Range Development Plan. But those plans have been shelled by the Munger Promise to build this huge dormitory that would house all of the students that the original plans had scheduled to house in one giant project.
It was very secretive how this was put together. What Munger’s promise was to this day, I don’t don’t in in of the money. And And issue became pretty obvious after a couple of years that what he wanted to do was build a dorm that he would design. This is a 90-year-old billionaire wanting to be in charge of the design of dormitories for young students.
And I thought all along this was problematic, but but wasn’t until I think it was 2021 that the actual design was revealed to the public. And that led to this really worldwide mockery of the proposal because so many of its features, especially the famous lack of windows in the bedroom kind of thing, but there were many critical problems with Munger.
Flacks and S.U.N. have sued UCSB for their lack of disclosure of documents relating to Munger Hall and campus enrollment.
While there have been issues communicating on Munger Hall, others highlighted his willingness to speak to as many people as possible before making a decision. Professor Susannah Scott said that in fact, Yang’s greatest strength is listening.
SCOTT: I really believe that our Chancellor communicates more with the Senate and listens more to the Senate than most UC campuses have the fortune of doing. // He is on duty seven days a week, 52 weeks a year… He spends so much time making sure that everybody knows what he’s thinking about and everybody’s prepared for decisions that he’s going to make.
Former Assistant Vice Chancellor George Thurlow also talked about Yang’s approach to decision-making.
THURLOW: I found that often, he already had the answer to a question, but he didn’t put it forward until he had heard everybody else’s opinion. And that was very interesting. Like I said, it frustrated a lot of people because it meant decision making was much slower. But decision making was also more collaborative. More people got involved.
Professor Emeritus Dick Flacks further discussed Yang’s commitment to shared governance and his close relationships with students.
FLACKS: I used to give a course every year on the sociology of UCSB. The final session of that class was always a session where the students could put whoever was Chancellor on the hot seat. 4:58 / 5:06 What impressed me about Yang, in comparison with previous Chancellors, was his easy knowledge of many of the students, because the class was made up of a lot of student leaders that he had dealt with.
Professor Emeritus Dick Flacks and Professor Constance Penley talked about another of Yang’s focuses: the environment.
FLACKS: And so one of his early achievements was to veto a plan by mobile oil company to start drilling right near the campus. And that operation by the oil company required UCSB to consent to it.
HENLEY: And so we had a year of meetings. You know, with, you know, all the attorneys from ExxonMobil, all of the environmental organizations, we worked through the Academic Senate. We, you know, it was like a year long struggle. And Henry felt that we had managed to achieve community-wide, faculty-wide consensus against this project. And so once he felt that we had that consensus, he then made the decision to kill the project.
In addition to issues related to housing and the environment, Chancellor Yang has been met with both praise and criticism for his handling of the Pro-Palestinian student protests during the 2023-2024 school year, and his general approach to free speech.
Here’s what an anonymous student activist had to say.
STUDENT ACTIVIST: I think it is patently on its face ridiculous to bring militarized police with budgets in the millions to campus to endanger students of all sorts, whether they’re undocumented, having negative experiences with the police, or otherwise, I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to respond to student protests with police.
I think that throughout the entire existence of the encampment, Chancellor Yang was involved only with himself, not with the good of the students, not with the good of the world. I think he was concerned about perception of him and did nothing to protect that, bringing police onto campus to both that committee Grewett’s Hall, and then to clear up the encampment over summer when there are less students here to witness and to feel upset about that breach of trust with the Chancellor.
The UCSB encampment drew on for 54 days, the longest of any UC encampment. Retired Assistant Vice Chancellor George Thurlow thinks that Chancellor Yang handled the situation well.
THURLOW: This is why the regents love Henry. Henry was able to handle the protests here without there being mass, I mean I think there was one police raid into an occupied classroom, but there was a very very low police presence, and that’s sort of Henry’s style.
Janna Haider, on the other hand, thinks that Chancellor Yang’s so-called style brought more harm to students.
HAIDER: One of my undergraduate students in particular noted that towards the end of her school year, this was her senior year. She was given a leadership award for her activities on campus. 2 days prior to that, she had had sniper rifles pointed at her by members of a police department called to campus by Henry Yang. So I do think that this is a man who, through his combination of interest and donor money and his hesitancy to be seen as doing the wrong thing. We’ll always wait until the last minute, not listen to concerns and take the most drastic step that does the most harm to marginalized students.
Professor Dick Flacks has yet another perspective.
FLACKS: We are the campus in the UC system that responded to the pro-Palestinian protests with with the least amount of police pressure. Maybe there were other campuses as well. But I think that there are important faculty members on this campus who are very concerned and very supportive of the issues raised by the protest. They were they were listened to as far as I can tell by Chancellor Yang rather than listen to regents and maybe and others pressures on the administration to call the police as soon as the encampments went up. You know, the police finally did come. But I think they were more that happened. My impression I could be wrong is that they finally came simply because they did have to show the Regents that that the police were were deployed.
Responses to the 2022 TA strike were also met with criticism. Here’s Janna Haider again.
HAIDER: Where the campus had the most direct interaction with people on strike was in the retaliation for a protected work stoppage and the fact that in the time since the strike, there has been. A push towards micromanaging graduate worker time in ways that hasn’t existed before so as to prevent us from exercising the right to strike ever again.
Free speech was a major theme in conversations around last year’s protests. Some faculty, like Constance Penley, see Chancellor Yang as a champion of free speech.
Professor Penley teaches a class on pornography. She says that her class, and the study of pornography, has grown to be seen as a legitimate study of art and society. However, this wasn’t the case when Chancellor Yang arrived on campus. Though taken aback at first, after speaking with Penley, Chancellor Yang became one of her pornography class’s most adamant defenders.
PENLEY: When my course was, you know, protested, there were letters from all over, you know, every government office, every outside group such as Santa Barbara County citizens against pornography. And all of them writing to the Chancellor to get my course canceled immediately and for me to be fired.
Now, my course in the rigorous film history and theory and criticism curriculum in our department was an experiment in teaching pornography exactly the way we would address any other instance of film and popular culture, any other genre and media industry.
So, you know, he came to understand what it was. He also came to understand, I think, what academic freedom means. And that is the, you know, right and responsibility of a faculty member to be able to conduct teaching and research on whatever subject she deems meriting that study.
Professor Penley believes that while Yang has been supportive of the merits of pornography in academic study, it remains to be seen how he is on Palestine.
Many students who have been involved with protests on campus think that Chancellor Yang has to be more active in his defense of their speech.
STUDENT ACTIVIST: I understand there is a fear of upsetting people politically. However, as a Chancellor of a university whose goal is education, I think that being explicit about facts, although there are debates, a place called Palestine exists, and I think it’s very politically motivated to refuse to mention that, to levy police presence and restrictions on students in order to clamp down on free speech. I think that is cowardly, and that is my experience.
Janna Haider thinks that Chancellor Yang’s stance on free speech over the last few years has to do with concerns around fundraising.
HAIDER: I don’t think that Henry Yang respects free speech at all. I think that again, the thing that the Regents reward him for is his capacity as a fundraiser and that is what he prioritizes, which means that a political speech on campus is at odds with the interests of those whom Yang solicits for fundraising.
Chancellor Yang’s decision to leave his position as Chancellor comes alongside other announcements and departures from UC president Michael Drake, UCLA chancellor Gene Block, and Columbia University president Minouche Shafik after this politically active past school year.
Dick Flacks thinks that Yang decided to step down due to a potentially negative academic senate Chancellor Review.
FLACKS: His five year review just recently was done. And I have a strong feeling that and what that review includes is a lot of faculty chance for faculty to comment confidentially about the chancellor. I’m willing to bet that many of the comments made where it’s time for chancellors to retire.
Academic Senate Chair Susannah Scott did not discuss the contents of the Chancellor Review.
She did say that Yang’s 30 years in the intense and stressful role of Chancellor was an anomaly.
SCOTT: And knowing him, he’s a little bit competitive, I’m sure he’s kind of proud of the fact that he is the longest serving UC Chancellor. So you know, at the same time that I’m sad to see him go, I’m not actually surprised he’s been here so much longer than any other Chancellor that I’ve known. And that’s across the system – in fact, across the country. It’s just not so common to have somebody make such a long commitment to one institution as he has.
While some see his long tenure as an accomplishment, 4th year political science student and Off Campus Senator Paolo Brinderson said, “like many other powerful California public servants like Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, stayed in his position for much too long. I am glad he is finally retiring instead of choosing to pass in office. I hope for a younger more energetic face and leadership that will seriously address student concerns instead of being almost totally absent from campus life.”
And a student-activist speculated on Instagram that chancellor Yang may have been pressured to step down by regents dissatisfied with his response to the encampment. “UCSB’s encampment was the longest-running at 54 days, and certainly no one at the UCOP level or CA government level was happy about that. We knew that from the beginning he was receiving enormous pressure from the regents and the governor to shut us down, yet he did not. It remains unclear whether he actually made the final call to clear the camp, or was forced to. My opinion is that he’s a casualty of this movement, and will be replaced by someone more controllable.”
Former Assistant Vice Chancellor George Thurlow was uncertain as to why Yang decided to step down now.
THURLOW: I don’t think anybody knows, except Dilling [Yang’s wife]. Dilling is so important to this story. She was the stable factor in his tenure. It’s hard not to like Henry when Dilling is around.
Thurlow also says that Chancellor Yang has left a positive legacy at UC Santa Barbara.
THURLOW: We’re going to look back fondly on his tenure. And he was a unique leader, who’s not going to come along again. He was really, really good for Santa Barbara during these three decades that he was there.
Others, like one Instagram commenter, are saying “good riddance,” and, in the words of Declan Griffin, “we can only hope the next Chancellor remains more principled.”
Henry T. Yang, the longest-serving chancellor in UC history, will officially exit his position at the end of the 2024-2025 academic year.
Thank you for listening.
With KCSB News, I’m Rosie Bultman.
This story was also made possible by KCSB’s Joyce Chi.