TIME TO TEACH : UCI DEAN TELLS WHY HE QUIT

Asked why he recently resigned as dean of UC Irvine’s School of Fine Arts, Robert Garfias responded with humor.

“There is a joke,” Garfias said, speaking Thursday by phone from his vacation home on Maui, “that the job of a dean is to try to prevent the half of the faculty that opposes him from converting the half that’s neutral from opposing him, too.”

Pressed about whether departmental turbulence had prompted his decision to step down two weeks ago, five years after he took the job, Garfias, 54, said that was not the case.

“There was turbulence all along the way,” he said. “But that comes with the territory, and it had nothing to do with my decision to leave.”

Garfias said he resigned effective July 1--he has agreed to stay on until his deanship expires on Jan. 1--to devote more time to teaching and research in his specialty, ethnomusicology, the study of the creative processes of various cultural and ethnic groups.

But others say that Garfias, whose academic status led to his appointment earlier this year to the National Council on the Arts, the federal arts agency, left after faculty members expressed unhappiness with his management style.

Critics described that style as detached and unresponsive to faculty ideas and opinions.

Garfias resigned two weeks before hearing the results of a review by University Chancellor Jack W. Peltason. Based partly on faculty evaluations, the review would include Peltason’s recommendation about whether Garfias should be kept on as dean for five more years.

Peltason declined Thursday to comment on the review, saying university policy requires confidentiality for personnel matters. But the chancellor praised Garfias as “a distinguished colleague who worked with due diligence on behalf of the school.”

Still, in interviews with six faculty members and key administrators with the School of Fine Arts, even those who praised the dean as a scholar and a man found some fault with him as an administrator. These critics, who said they will have to continue working with him in the fall, asked not to be identified.

An administrator who worked closely with Garfias and admires him said: “There were many complaints about his personal style of management. He worked everything in a kind of chain of command, and he espoused the philosophy that things should not go directly to the faculty, but from him to the chairs. . . . He didn’t let the faculty or the chairs feel like they were part of the decision-making process.”

Still, the school of the arts grew during the time Garfias held his $83,000-a-year post. From fall, 1982 and fall, 1986, the number of fine arts majors grew from 607 to 678. The number of full-time-equivalent faculty posts grew from 43 to 52.

Garfias also presided over the planning for a $1.7-million, two-story, 8,545-square-foot fine arts annex to be built next year on the campus. It is expected to include theater rehearsal space and dance studios.

Garfias said planning the building was one of the efforts during the past five years of which he was proud, as he was of his status as one of the few Hispanics to hold a high post at a U.S. university. He also said he believed he had helped the school establish better ties with the community through dance and theater programs open to the public.

“I think I did a lot while I was there, and I feel good about it,” he said. Explaining that he planned to teach ethnomusicology at UC Irvine after January, he added: “I never planned to be dean forever.”

Before coming to UCI in 1982, Garfias was vice provost at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Garfias said he plans to continue living in Irvine with his wife, Marcy, and daughter after he returns from Hawaii in about a week.