Oral History Center University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Steve Lustig

Steve Lustig: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics

at UC Berkeley: 1960 - 2014

Interviews conducted by

John Cummins

in 2012

Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

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Regents of the University of California and Steve Lustig dated June 20, 2015. The

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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Steve Lustig “Steve Lustig: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate

Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960–2014” conducted by John Cummins in 2012, Oral

History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.

iii

Table of Contents—Steve Lustig

Interview 1: January 6, 2012

Audio File 1 1

Educational background as an undergraduate and graduate student at Berkeley —

Doctoral work and teaching in anthropology and public health — Coming to

Cowell Hospital as a consultant in 1983 and becoming executive director of the

Tang Center in 1995-96 — Rethinking the role of the Student Health Services in

relation to intercollegiate athletics — Physician Kerry Patmont and Dave

Maggard — Cathy Tassen — Reporting and funding lines at the Tang Center —

Division of campus counseling resources for general student body and athletes —

Equity of access to care — The Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for

Intercollegiate Athletics — Cindy Chang’s role — Reviewing cases — More

rigidly separate athletic health program, with expensive medical equipment —

Bill Coysh and Steve Gladstone — Health insurance plans — Coordinating and

staffing specialty health clinics — Hospitals — “The usual return-to-play battles”

— Cindy Chang, Sandy Barbour, Steve Gladstone — Assistant Athletic Director

Mark Stephens — Lustig’s various roles and responsibilities on campus—

Concerns at the High Performance Center and the Tang Center — National

scrutiny of sports injuries — Recreational sports at Cal — Organizational

difficulties communicating on issues around athletics, counseling and medicine,

and budgeting — High Performance Center and counseling— The Athletic Study

Center Advisory Committee — Lustig’s role as vice-chancellor — Money — The

early Physical Education Program at Berkeley — George Brooks — New visions

of integrated programs: “Building a Healthy Campus Community” — Campus

healthcare challenges, risk, and the regents — Campus-based healthcare as a

major healthcare delivery system — Sources of funding for the Tang Center —

Grace Crickette’s willingness to disburse funds — The Systemwide Mental

Health Advisory Committee — Campus risk management — Academic

programs for the study of sports medicine — The multi-billion-dollar business of

college football and basketball — The High Performance Center at Cal

[End of Interview]

1

Interview 1: January 6, 2012

[Audio File 1]

01-00:00:01

Cummins: Okay, this is January 6, 2012. This is an interview, as part of the Project on

Intercollegiate Athletics, with Steve Lustig. Steve was the director of the Tang

Center University Health Services for many years and had many other

responsibilities over his period of time at Cal, including being the acting

administrative vice chancellor from about 2004 to 2006. So why don’t we

begin, Steve, with you talking about just how you came to Cal, a little bit of

your background, to set a context.

01-00:00:47

Lustig: Okay. Well, both of my degrees are from Cal, even though I bounced around

to a couple of different schools. I graduated with a bachelor’s in ’66 and took

my doctorate exams in medical anthropology in 1971. I worked in the

community a lot, in community health centers and K-12 program evaluation

sorts of things. I also worked on a stress and cancer research project in the late

seventies in the School of Public Health and the Department of Psychology.

So between the community work and the research work and the academic

work I knew a lot of people at Cal. I also was a TA for a few years in

anthropology after I took my exams.

Then in ’83 I came back to Cowell Hospital as a consultant for organizational

development. They were trying to decide what kind of program the campus

should have if they closed the hospital. And so there was a committee looking

at that and there was another committee looking at the Cowell Hospital

building and whether the facility could be renovated to be an up-to-date

ambulatory care center. So I was hired on a six-month contract in ’83 and I

retired in 2009. [laughter] So it was a long, wonderful run here. It was very

good. So that’s how I got involved in ’83. In ’94 I became acting director, and

in ’95 or ’96, somewhere in there, permanent executive director of the Tang

Center. The Tang Center was one of my projects, putting that puzzle together

and getting it built was my thing.

01-00:02:29

Cummins: So you came in ’83 as an analyst?

01-00:02:41

Lustig: A project analyst to support these two committees, and basically the contract

was once the reports were done on the facility and the programming—that’s

what I thought the project was. During that time the administrator of the

hospital left, and Jim [James R.] Brown, who was the director at that point

reorganized the administrative structure and Cathy [Catherine B.] Tassan took

over reorganizing the clinics and I took over the administrative part at that

point.

2

01-00:03:12

Cummins: And that was full-time?

01-00:03:15

Lustig: That was full-time.

01-00:03:15

Cummins: And then in ’94 you take over as director?

01-00:03:22

Lustig: Right—Jim passed away in ’90 I think it was. Cathy Tassan became director

at that point, and in ’94 she left and I became the director.

01-00:03:32

Cummins: So with regard to athletics can you talk about the issues then that were going

on vis-à-vis Jerry Patmont’s leaving and rethinking the role of the Student

Health Service vis-à-vis intercollegiate athletics?

01-00:03:57

Lustig: Yeah, I think it grew through the eighties with the growth of the athletic

program. The only financial support that was really defined was a 50-percent

physician, Jerry Patmont, who worked a lot with the community specialists to

have a network of people who’d come to games, but actually there was no

internal structure at the university as far as the health of the students went.

And the Psychology Department—there were two pieces to it, one was mental

health support and the other was medical support.

01-00:04:29

Cummins: And so about, I guess, the mid-1980s Dave Maggard also reached out to Jane

Moorman at the Counseling Center to identify someone who eventually

became Bill Coysh, to handle the psychological side.

01-00:04:54

Lustig: Right.

01-00:04:56

Cummins: And then—do you want to talk about the medical side and what was

happening? Did Jerry Patmont report directly to Dave Maggard?

01-00:05:10

Lustig: Yeah, that’s a very good question. The payroll line was the health center. The

reporting line was probably Maggard. I think there was very little control over

Patmont. He basically worked pretty independently.

01-00:05:28

Cummins: Cathy Tassan began to rethink that relationship? Can you talk about that?

01-00:05:39

Lustig: Well, my understanding of it is that Cathy had a couple of meetings—they

probably started with Maggard. But as she was leaving, working with Kasser,

turned it into a full-time position once Jerry Patmont left, which would mean

3

50 percent of the salary would need to come from Athletics. The other 50

percent from the health center would continue, and that would get a full-time

sports medicine physician who would report to the Tang Center, and some

clinics would be set up at the Tang Center. So the initial thing was increase

the physician timing and develop a clinical structure for athletes at the Tang

Center using in-kind support from the Tang Center—supposedly in-kind

support. I’ll get to that in a minute. And basically the cost would be this 50

percent more physician, the only additional cost. That’s not the way it

unfolded.

01-00:06:43

Lustig: So there were a number of problems setting up a clinic like that within a

structure that served thirty thousand other students, fairness being a huge

issue, square footage being an issue, and dedicated financial support being an

issue. So just taking the Tang Center side for a minute, there was a lot of

resistance from the staff at the Tang Center to setting up something that was

that intense for eight hundred student athletes—

01-00:07:15

Lustig: —as opposed to thirty thousand. That they were going to get Cadillac care and

the other students weren’t. So actually it was almost like everybody should be

treated this way rather than nobody should be treated this way. And the staff

didn’t want something separate, where most students had to go over here but

these few students could go over there. So there was a lot of trouble figuring

out where to put it, what hours to have it, and then it needed a receptionist to

support it, nurses to run things, special X-ray stuff. So in fact, in addition to

the in-kind, I think it was in the $150,000 range of other support that was

coming into it because of staffing.

01-00:08:00

Cummins: And by this time was this your responsibility?

01-00:08:01

Lustig: Yes.

01-00:08:08

Lustig: So let me back up a little bit. So Patmont retired; John McShane was hired.

Within the first year he didn’t work out very well. The position at that point

was, I think, 80 percent—the compromise became the sports doc would be in

the sports clinic 80-percent time and 20-percent time in urgent care. And then

an urgent care doc would come in 20-percent time to take that up. That was a

way to increase the musculoskeletal skills of the urgent care staff, by using the

sports medicine doc to bring their skills up. In the meantime Cindy Chang had

been hired as an urgent care doc 80-percent time with 20 percent in the sports

medicine clinic, so she was backing up—came in later than John McShane.

01-00:09:00

Cummins: But they knew each other, I guess.

4

01-00:09:02

Lustig: They did, yes.

01-00:09:03

Cummins: They were at UCLA as residents, I think.

01-00:09:09

Lustig: And oh—somebody with Ohio State. I don’t know where that connection was

or whether it was—

01-00:09:11

Cummins: Oh, she got her MD at Ohio State and then there was a residency I think, a

fellowship—

01-00:09:16

Lustig: Oh, I see, that’s how it connected.

01-00:09:16

Cummins: —she did at UCLA.

01-00:09:18

Lustig: I didn’t remember that. I remember the national association stuff, but not the

UCLA. But John McShane I think had other desires, so anyway, he left. Cathy

helped with that transition, but there still wasn’t a program. There was just—

what to do with the physician was the issue.

01-00:09:35

Cummins: From what I’ve gathered he had come from UCLA and viewed what was

being done at UCLA with regard to sports medicine as light years ahead of

where Cal was. Is that your recollection?

01-00:10:04

Lustig: Yeah—I wasn’t as directly involved with him. I was getting involved because

Cathy wanted me to administer this program, so I was easing into it when

John was here. But I do remember that there was a conflict. He had an idea of

how he wanted to do it, and the group that hired him had an idea of how they

wanted to see it evolve, and they weren’t meshing. That’s as much as I

remember. I think he had a family at that point that did not move up here.

01-00:10:35

Cummins: Oh, I didn’t know that.

01-00:10:36

Lustig: I’m not sure if that’s true. That happened with another doc. So—it could be

him. So then these other pieces began to evolve also, which was the trainers’ relationship to the physician, the trainers’ relationship to the coaches, so the

trainers became a big—the dot connector, whatever you want to call it. And

the strength and conditioning people, including physical therapists and the

psychologists—so that those were all the pieces. I could take those one by one

if that helps.

5

01-00:11:17

Cummins: Okay, and then I’m very interested too in how you dealt with the equity issue

that you referred to, because that had to be difficult.

01-00:11:30

Lustig: [laughing] Yeah, I have to try to think back. Basically, we tried to—well, let

me take psychology, because I think that was the one we integrated the most.

So Bill Coysh became the psychologist you talked about. Bill is a—how can I

say it—he is a problem solver. He loves diving into solving problems. He also

loves making them bigger than they are, so that he can dive in and save them.

So it was very hard to decide, often, what was going on. He’s a tremendous

storyteller, and a tremendous rescuer from his reportage. But that wasn’t the

story I was getting from Athletics all the time. A lot of times they felt he was

mucking around or he was at meetings he shouldn’t be at.

01-00:12:29

Cummins: And this again now would have been in the Kasser period?

01-00:12:35

Lustig: This would be ’93 to ’95 maybe.

01-00:12:36

Cummins: Yeah, so it was right after Dave [Maggard] left. Bob Bockrath replaces him

for a couple of years and then John Kasser comes in.

01-00:12:41

Lustig: Exactly.

01-00:12:42

Cummins: Because what Dave says is that he made it clear to Bill that he did not want

him to be a “sports psychologist.” He didn’t want him involved in improving

the athletic abilities of the players. He was there basically for the student

athletes and coaches, for personal issues that they were dealing with. Now, he

also says that there were many meetings that he attended—Dave would ask

him to come—that certainly went beyond that. But Dave felt it was important

for him to have a full sense of what was going on.

01-00:13:31

Lustig: Okay. So if that was a plan it wasn’t shared by all the coaches. Some of the

coaches didn’t want him there. And in fact—

01-00:13:40

Cummins: I see. Now, would they call you? What was—

01-00:13:45

Lustig: It came to me usually through the head trainer. And Bill was aware of tension,

so he would report that, so between the two things. So on the one hand—it’s

interesting.

6

Let me just pick up on your point there. When Sandy [Barbour] came she said

the problem with the psychology program was it wasn’t high-performance

oriented, that she didn’t want to pay. There was already a counseling program

for students. Why do they have to pay for one already—so that’s what we did.

We took the money—Bill was on full Tang Center payroll. And then the

program from the Athletic Department funded 50 percent more psychologists.

And we put that funding in the counseling center, because we wanted to

encourage the athletes to access mental health things the way everybody else

did. And we trained Chris McClain—and it might have been Claytie Davis,

I’m not sure, as the two psychologists who would get the athletes. So that we

did begin to get a string of athletes going to the counseling center and

accessing that. And then people would come directly in to Bill, so we had to

find an office for Bill, another office.

01-00:15:15

Cummins: Another in the sense that he had one someplace else?

01-00:15:17

Lustig: He was in the counseling center. But when—he applied to be the director of

the counseling center in 1991, and Cathy was fostering him to do that. At that

point Steve [Esteban] Sena was hired and Bill didn’t get the job. And in fact

there was no job. So his job became the sports psychologist, but not as part of

the clinic. He became part of the sports clinic team.

But anyway, he had no office in CPS [Counseling and Psychological Services]

at that point, because the director took over the office. He wasn’t a part of the

staff because he’d been dealing with the ath[letes]. Anyway, it was difficult.

[laughter]

01-00:16:46

Cummins: Another challenge for the director. Okay. But go back to the equity issue,

because Cindy mentions this too. She said—that’s Cindy Chang—that was

one of the issues she had to address with the staff once she took over as the

head team physician. That they just simply didn’t understand, as you said,

why this select group of athletes would get this particular kind of care when

other students wouldn’t.

01-00:17:27

Lustig: Yes, I think that—well, two things happened, and this is really stretching my

memory back. One is the Tang Center—it was a number of different

programs. We had Health Net employees; we had had worker’s comp. And so

one thing was to have the staff see it as one of our programs, not as a little

appendage of the student health program. This was another program. That

took a while for them to get used to that, that this is just something different,

and we have a lot of different things. Each floor has got a number of different

programs going, and this is just one of them. So that was one piece of it.

Another one was to share the skills so there’s a little more rotation through the

clinics. So the whole musculoskeletal thing, that we were trying to up the ante

7

for everybody anyway, so this was a way they could benefit by the program

being in the same space.

We also began to invade more programs, so it wasn’t just the medical clinics.

We had physical therapists involved, we got psychologists involved, so there

was a lot more back and forth going on. So it just became part of the structure,

but also it wasn’t that isolated anymore. We floated receptionists through it

like we did with the employee programs. We rotated people, so that there was

some sense of what it was. I think people understood the timing issue.

01-00:18:59

Cummins: The critical nature.

01-00:19:00

Lustig: The critical nature of getting people back on the field or off the field and how

important it was to the athletes, that this was a critical issue. Cindy also, a

good example, became a resource for other people. An injury would come into

urgent care and they could call her, so that helped a lot. I think that helped a

lot.

01-00:19:22

Cummins: What was your own personal view about the equity issue?

01-00:19:28

Lustig: I actually didn’t like it. I wanted to make it work.

But it really did expose the inequities of the athletic program and the rest of

the student body. I was also on the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for

Intercollegiate Athletics for about ten years, which was completely useless at

that point.

01-00:19:47

Cummins: And did John Kasser set that up then?

01-00:19:49

Lustig: I think it started in the eighties.

01-00:19:53

Cummins: It started earlier, okay. And who would be on that committee?

01-00:19:58

Lustig: Horace [Mitchell] was on it and—who’s the chemistry professor?

01-00:20:04

Cummins: [William A.] Lester, who must have been the faculty—

01-00:20:07

Lustig: Lester chaired it a lot, and it seemed to be, the meetings seemed to be

whatever people wanted to fill up the time—

8

It wasn’t very functional in those years. I know they’ve restructured it and

keep trying to make it more functional. And Derek [Van Rheenen] would give

a lot of reports on the Athletic Study Center, and we worked a lot with the

Athletic Study Center also to try to support the athletes from an academic

side.

01-00:20:36

Cummins: So yeah, it just—

01-00:20:36

Lustig: It opened that world, in a way.

01-00:20:41

Cummins: Yes, exactly, and it’s just one of those issues. It’s not the only one where there

is this issue of equity.

01-00:20:52

Lustig: The amount of money, no matter how much we worked it out, there was an

investment of the general student body’s money that was supposed to go

toward general community health that was getting diverted into the athletic

program.

So that I kept trying to fix. The rest of it was somewhat beyond my control,

but I tried to make that work.

01-00:21:20

Cummins: And on issues—did you ever get involved in issues of return to play, where

say Cindy Chang would say this athlete is not ready to go back, and the coach

thought he was or she was? Did they ever get to your level to complain?

01-00:21:42

Lustig: Only a few times, and I can’t remember what sport or what players, but it

would have gone up through the AD.

01-00:21:50

Cummins: And then the AD would be in touch with you?

01-00:21:52

Lustig: Right, so Gladstone a couple times, Kasser a couple times, Sandy for different

reasons. It had more to do with Pete Dietrich than Cindy.

01-00:22:08

Cummins: Okay.

01-00:22:11

Lustig: The—so I could go any way from here. Pete just diverted me for a second, but

I want to go back to the structure of the program because it became clear that

the physician couldn’t function unless the head trainer reported to her, because

the coaches turn to the head trainer for the interface with everything. The head

trainer reported to Athletics, so the next step was to get the trainers to report to

9

the Tang Center. And Kasser was pretty amenable to these kinds of changes. I

don’t know what you found in the other interviews.

01-00:22:50

Cummins: Well, Cindy said that. Cindy said that—and John. I interviewed John too, and

he talked about the fact that he thought that overall the relationship was really

terrific. Cindy talks about the fact that there was a committee, and Chris

Dawson talks about that, that met with—Bob Driscoll I think was on it and

Cindy and Chris Dawson. I’m not quite sure who else. But that they got

together and every week they went over various cases. Everybody knew what

was going on.

01-00:23:25

Lustig: Right.

01-00:23:26

Cummins: It was very supportive, and then that changes with Kasser’s departure.

01-00:23:34

Lustig: Right.

01-00:23:35

Cummins: What were some of the other issues? So the trainer then did end up reporting

through the Tang Center then?

01-00:23:44

Lustig: Right.

01-00:23:45

Cummins: And that was because John was amenable to that?

01-00:23:47

Lustig: Yes. All the trainers, all the payroll was transferred over there. Strength and

conditioning did not, that stayed in Athletics. We were hiring more physical

therapists at that time, so we assigned physical therapists. Bill, the reason he

was located where he was was we made him more of an administrator of the

program. And so physical therapy, strength and conditioning, the trainer—

coordinating all of that interface with Athletics and with the Tang Center was

something we were trying to nurture and to take over. And Cindy—the other

complication in this when Kasser left was the head [team] physician reported

to the chief physician, who was Pete Dietrich at this point.

01-00:24:41

Cummins: Yes, so didn’t report to you. Cindy didn’t report to you, she reported to Pete

Dietrich.

01-00:24:47

Lustig: Right, right. I met with her regularly at the beginning, and then Pete sort of

took over the program. And partially that’s because I had too much else

10

evolving on campus at that point. And I thought that—and Pete loved the

program, I think, and especially the clothing. [laughing]

01-00:25:10

Cummins: Yes. What Steve’s referring to here is the paraphernalia, the Cal gear.

01-00:25:18

Lustig: The Cal gear, yes. So this became a problem, because I was not kept up to

date with the program. Bill would fill me in because I continued to meet with

him. Cindy periodically, but she was very loyal to her reporting line. So it

became, especially with Sandy’s arrival, problematic on a number of levels.

She and Pete did not get along, and I think the reason, quite honestly, was Pete

never followed through on anything. He was a good glad-hander and a very

good physician, but she didn’t trust him and he didn’t trust her, and the

combination of the two things would mean that periodically Sandy would

want to meet with me about the program. Actually, I think we should put

Steve Gladstone back in.

01-00:26:19

Cummins: Yes, so we can go back and forth. If you want to continue on it—because I’ve

taken a mental note—we’ll go back to Gladstone. But yeah, go ahead,

whatever you want.

01-00:26:27

Lustig: Well, just I think that the problems—it was hard for me to land on what was

evolving as a problem for this program. Sandy clearly had a vision of what

she wanted to do with Cal Athletics, and it was a high-performance-oriented

program. She thought that the Tang Center was duplicating things that the

students’ registration fees were already paying for, so that why should they be

paying any money to the Tang Center? She wanted the trainers back reporting

through her line of authority, she wanted psychologists who were high-

performance oriented. If they have mental health problems they can go over to

the counseling center. So a much more rigid athletic, separate athletic health

program, including goo-gobs of expensive X-ray equipment, things like that,

that—why would you do that?

01-00:27:22

Cummins: Right, and apparently this MRI machine was a very big deal.

01-00:27:25

Lustig: Big.

01-00:27:27

Cummins: That it ended up they did not get.

01-00:27:28

Lustig: Yeah, yeah, huge. And so Bill, once Bob—well, I’ve got to go back to the

Bob Driscoll—so John Kasser leaves, and this team is still meeting and

Driscoll’s a finalist.

11

01-00:27:48

Cummins: Yes, that’s for the new AD position.

01-00:27:49

Lustig: For the new AD position, which would be around 2001.

01-00:27:57

Cummins: Yes, Gladstone was AD from 2001 to 2004, and then Sandy comes in 2004.

01-00:28:03

Lustig: Okay, okay, I had the dates a little off. So Gladstone gets the job and this little

team gets dismembered pretty much. Chris Dawson leaves, Driscoll leaves.

Bill is, by this time, incredibly paranoid about the job.

01-00:28:25

Cummins: Bill Coysh.

01-00:28:26

Lustig: Coysh.

01-00:28:28

Cummins: Paranoid about his role?

01-00:28:30

Lustig: About his role, his position, his welcome, which was not big. Gladstone—it

was an interesting relationship with Gladstone that developed with Bill.

Because on the one hand he didn’t want Bill around, but he was going through

a messy divorce and marital problems with his new young thing and used Bill

as his counselor. But [he] also didn’t want Bill involved in—it was very, very

complicated. So I actually met more with Gladstone than I’d done with

Kasser, although Kasser was very easy to work with and pretty open to

whatever the university wanted to develop. It was interesting. Gladstone, as

we know, did his own thing, but it became very difficult because the team that

had met weekly and coordinated everything—

01-00:29:28

Cummins: Disappeared, right.

01-00:29:28

Lustig: —was no longer there. He was running roughshod, he didn’t want Bill around

a lot. But he used Bill—and actually some of the coaches were beginning to

use Bill as a personal counselor. He did have students coming in and out, but a

trickle. And I think that was partially the coaches were—

01-00:29:52

Cummins: Discouraging.

01-00:29:52

Lustig: —with Gladstone, kind of discouraging that intervention from psychologists

maybe. Cindy was sort of wending her way through this with a lot of battles

12

with different coaches going on and little support from Gladstone, I think.

That’s what I remember.

01-00:30:37

Lustig: Pete’s beginning to be at work less and less at this time.

01-00:31:31

Cummins: Right, Pete Dietrich.

01-00:31:34

Lustig: They’re spending a lot of time together, the two of them, Pete and Bill, a lot of

time together. So I’m just pouring that in because that colored my perceptions

of always—what am I hearing, what do I decide, what’s real, what do I act on,

what don’t I act on? It became complicated, and about the same time I move

in the vice chancellor role, and Bill starts reporting to Claudia [Covello]. Pete

leaves or is about to leave. So just within the Tang Center there’s a lot of

turnover and a lot of doubt about who’s managing this and what’s our

relationship with the new AD, Sandy.

01-00:32:18

Cummins: So that’s all going on right as Sandy comes in then.

01-00:32:20

Lustig: This is all going on about the same time.

01-00:32:23

Cummins: When you look at what happens to Athletics, because you reference it, first of

all a lot of people leave, so there’s a major turnover. There’s also, again, the

shift back, the connection with Rec Sports, the reporting line is severed again.

It’s a separate department; it’s not part of the intercollegiate athletics

operation. Kasser believes very strongly that that was a mistake. It should

have stayed under one unit. It functions much better under those

circumstances. There were lots of issues surrounding Gladstone with the firing

of Chris Dawson, Kevin Reneau. There was the Karen Moe Humphreys

lawsuit, so it was incredibly tumultuous. And at the same time, issues within

the Tang Center in that interface, so you must have had your hands full.

01-00:33:34

Lustig: Yeah, I was just thinking there’s one more variable. The change in healthcare.

So this is an external influence, but the Old Blue network of volunteer docs

dried up. The reimbursement rate changed. They were having trouble with

their practices. It was a younger crew. So keeping the network of people

together who were volunteer[s], and in exchange they’d get tickets to the field

or something like that, was drying up. So we needed to add another half-time

FTE sports physician and used that in a number of different ways. So the

specialist network that supported the one doc became problematic and a lot of

effort to keep together. So just another tumultuous piece of—

13

01-00:34:33

Cummins: And Cindy—I asked Cindy about how she managed to do everything that she

did—and this gets later when she leaves and she has a very big concern about

whether that level of care is going to be maintained. But she says, in so many

words, that she was working just an enormous number of hours. Because if

you’re dealing with eight hundred student athletes, just as a beginning—so

I’m interested in your views on that. And then also whether you think, based

on your experience, that if there’s an intercollegiate athletics program, a big-

time program that is located on a campus that has a medical center, does that

make any difference? And is it possible to build relationships with UCSF in

this regard, that could be more formalized, as opposed to this network that you

mentioned? So there are some issues that you may want to discuss.

01-00:35:43

Lustig: Yeah, I can start at the end and work back. I’m not sure what a relationship

with UCSF would look like, because I’d see it down the line more. When you

need more specialty care for an injured athlete, could you use UCSF more

than Sutter or Alta Bates? Would there be a better relationship with the

specialists? Is that—

01-00:36:11

Cummins: Yeah, in other words, would there be doctors over there that would be willing

to be a formal part of—say additional hands, basically. So instead of your

hiring a half-time person, or in addition to that, there were people at UCSF

who saw a benefit to doing this. So, for example, when I asked Cindy that she

said that she was always leery of that because they had their own agenda.

01-00:36:43

Lustig: Me too, yeah.

01-00:36:45

Cummins: They would set up their own practices and they would then broadcast that they

were physicians for Cal Bears, et cetera, and helped there. And so she was

always leery of that. And then it came up in this interview with George

Brooks, where he talked about the fact that there are residents, that there is a

residency. I’m not sure of this because I— But that there is some program in

sports medicine—

01-00:37:19

Lustig: At UC Davis. It’s Davis, yeah.

01-00:37:22

Cummins: Okay, or at—okay. I don’t know about UCSF or whether they’ve started it,

but whether you could bring residents over who would be extra hands. So

that’s kind of what I meant.

01-00:37:35

Lustig: Well, I could go two ways on that. One thing we tried to work on was the

student health insurance plans and whether we would get a higher level,

speedier care from UCSF as a part of the UC network, than we were getting

14

from Sutter, which was overpriced. And we didn’t have the same network

anymore because of the way healthcare works now. The doctors don’t relate

to the hospitals or to the health plans the same way, so how to make that work

better? We did look at UCSF, but they have research agendas, so they really

weren’t that interested. We were looking at ways we could—I’m not

answering your first part of the question. The second part, we were trying to

figure out if you taxied people to the city, actually it was cheaper to use UCSF

than to use Alta Bates.

01-00:38:31

Cummins: Really??

01-00:38:33

Lustig: So we looked at that for a long time. So Cindy’s point is on the front end

rather than the back end. We had looked at the back end. On the front end,

very few UCSF docs were interested in volunteering or looking at games. The

local docs were the ones that wanted to be a volunteer and stick it on their

card. And so we had to be really careful who we used and whether they’d be

part of a team and not just come to one game a year and then advertise that

they were docs for the team.

01-00:39:08

Cummins: Now, how did you manage that? In other words, how many doctors were there

like that? How did you coordinate communication? That would, again, be

another big job that Cindy would have to do I suppose, right?

01-00:39:22

Lustig: Yes, Cindy did it, and you know, I can’t remember whether Kathleen Ferris

helped with that or not.

01-00:39:26

Cummins: And she is?

01-00:39:29

Lustig: She is a nurse practitioner who coordinates the specialty clinics. The way we

solved the space problem was we put the athletic programs in the specialty

clinic area, so we treated it as a specialty clinic.

01-00:39:42

Cummins: I see.

01-00:39:43

Lustig: And that’s on the first floor. That’s where we had about—if I remember the

number—thirty-five doctors on contract that came in and did dermatology,

orthopedics. In the mornings, if you could wait and it wasn’t urgent, you could

come to the Tang Center for a specialty clinic. It was much cheaper for us to

do it that way, because we had them on contract, very low pay per hour. They

could see three or four patients an hour. The patients didn’t have to go out to

the community, and the insurance plans didn’t have to pay huge amounts of

money. So I think there were thirty-five doctors, but the clinics weren’t

15

used—that one area was open in the afternoons and some of the mornings

when there weren’t clinics, so we used the same space and the same staff but

kept them on longer. So Kathleen coordinated the specialists, and I think

worked with them around booking the athletic time also. But that was really

another Cindy time sink, and Bill somewhat—it was mostly a physician

who—keeping those networks going.

01-00:41:02

Lustig: There were twenty-something on that network, twenty-something doctors. I

can’t remember how many and stuff like that.

01-00:41:08

Cummins: Wow. And do you have a sense of if—for example, Cindy talks about the fact

that she did sports medicine, both at Ohio State and at UCLA. I just had the

impression that it was much easier to coordinate if you have a medical center

right there. Is that necessarily the case do you think, or not? Does it make it

easier?

01-00:41:48

Lustig: It probably makes it faster.

01-00:41:51

Cummins: Faster, yeah.

01-00:41:51

Lustig: In the sense that because we didn’t have—you mean at the hospital center?

01-00:41:55

Cummins: At the hospitals, yeah.

01-00:41:56

Lustig: So we had then to schlep the athletes, or they needed transport to specialists or

to hospitalization. Now, Alta Bates is close enough, a mile away, that I’m not

sure, because the docs—I know Pete and Cindy did visit athletes in the

hospital. If you had a big campus like UCLA, you had to go a distance

anyway to get to the hospital. So I think you could get quicker turnaround on

referrals to specialists. I’m not sure the hospitalization would be as big a thing

for us, because it’s so close, but the specialists you could get coordinated

probably better.

01-00:42:41

Cummins: And if you had a sports medicine program at a medical center, which they

must have at Ohio State and at UCLA, you would think that would help,

because those were people that would be training and then you could count on

them, in a way, to do just routine kind of—

01-00:43:02

Lustig: Right, and cover games and all that.

16

01-00:43:03

Cummins: And cover games and things like that, yeah.

01-00:43:05

Lustig: So I know we did use the Davis program, which was a sports medicine

program and had residents. It was often hard to get them, because they had

competitive options also to be residents, so it was a big deal if we could get a

resident from Davis, and then we’d usually try to keep them if we could.

01-00:43:29

Cummins: Right. And part of that residency, does that require supervision?

01-00:43:34

Lustig: Yes.

01-00:43:37

Cummins: Which is another job that Cindy would have to be doing.

01-00:43:37

Lustig: Right.

01-00:43:38

Cummins: Incredible, really.

01-00:43:40

Lustig: She was quite remarkable. What a worker.

01-00:43:43

Cummins: Absolutely.

01-00:43:44

Lustig: Meanwhile having kids—I just have no idea how she did it.

01-00:43:51

Cummins: Absolutely. So what was your sense of how she was perceived by

Intercollegiate Athletics? Because obviously that becomes an issue later under

this high-performance-center initiative. And it certainly—based on all the

interviews I’ve done, it seemed to work really well under Kasser, then that

changes under Gladstone. There were concerns about the fact that—there was

some friction there about return to play even before Gladstone became AD, so

that was heightened, obviously, once he becomes AD.

01-00:44:41

Lustig: Right. I would say that’s very accurate. There were the usual return-to-play

battles, but they were mitigated by Kasser’s support for the program and a

little bit by Bill, who would intervene and soften conflicts when they

occurred. I think part of it was Cindy maturing also. She is like a bull in a

china shop. She’s very aggressive and very competent and very competitive,

so how to work with the coaches I think was a learning experience. So I think

it got better and then worse. Worse because of a change in model, number

one.

17

01-00:45:31

Cummins: Under Sandy.

01-00:45:33

Lustig: Under Sandy. And having Gladstone as a[n] AD didn’t help either. It did

begin to become a big problem with Gladstone, because the coordinating team

fell down and she had to pick up more work when that went away, because

they were case managing.

01-00:45:56

Lustig: So there were no case managers.

01-00:45:59

Cummins: And I got the sense that eventually it got better under Gladstone, that there

was a learning curve here on both sides and that eventually it got better, and

then the big change when Sandy came in.

01-00:46:18

Lustig: Well, Gladstone—and I could be not remembering correctly, but he met with

me more than any of them did. It was maybe a coach’s approach. I want to

meet with the coach, and that was the coach and these were the players. I

don’t know what it was, but when he had a problem with Bill I’d have to meet

with him. When he had a problem with Cindy I’d meet with them. So that’s

the way he took it. Cindy felt, at the beginning, not supported by him because

he was a coach, and therefore he would be as resistant to what she had to say

as the coaches would be, and where was her support going to come from? So I

did get called into some of those, and some of it was, “Well, if you would

communicate it this way you might not get that reaction. If you communicate

it this way you might”—

01-00:47:07

Cummins: That’s you speaking.

01-00:47:07

Lustig: So that was the facilitator—yeah. And that worked.

01-00:47:12

Lustig: And it did get better under Gladstone over the three years. He began to respect

her a lot.

01-00:47:21

Cummins: And did, when you say issues, I can understand the return-to-play issues with

Cindy. What were the issues vis-à-vis Bill? Just a general characterization of

what they might be. Was it that he was too involved with the actual program?

I don’t know what that would be.

01-00:47:46

Lustig: I think Gladstone was the one who felt he was— how can I say this— Going

back to Gladstone’s hire, and Bill worried about his value. I think that also got

better when he started using Bill for his own personal problems.

18

01-00:48:37

Cummins: So did that improve, as Cindy’s did, over time?

01-00:48:43

Lustig: It improved, but as I said, Bill was also developing other—

01-00:48:47

Cummins: Yeah, had other responsibilities. Exactly.

01-00:48:52

Lustig: I think with Sandy one of the things that happened was Cindy’s got a lot of

pride. The fact that she wasn’t consulted and was seen as an enemy—she’d

come and talk to me a lot about how she understood the model they were

after. She understood Cal and what would work and what wouldn’t work. She

wanted to be cooperative, up to a point, but even that wasn’t being sought or

respected and so that pissed her off, pretty much.

01-00:49:23

Cummins: Well, and then George Brooks mentions the same thing vis-à-vis these labs at

the [Simpson Student-Athlete] High Performance Center, et cetera.

01-00:49:28

Lustig: Right.

01-00:49:30

Cummins: I had responsibility for Athletics at that point in time. But I never really saw

any of this which is a whole other question. But a more clear separation of

intercollegiate athletics from the rest of the campus is really what it’s

sounding like, so that it’s this separate fiefdom. Everything’s going to be

separate. Was that your sense?

01-00:50:07

Lustig: Yeah, definitely. Well, I was thinking before when we were talking that one of

the ah-has, when I got more involved in the nineties, was not only how

separate it was but how privileged it was, and what it got away with that the

rest of the university couldn’t. That it really was a separate train on a separate

track that was running in a parallel—running in the same universe but really

was something completely different and had its own academic support

structure. It had its own medical support structure, had its own social support

structure—it was like a separate universe, completely. And I think one of the

things we were successful in doing—and actually there were, I think, a

number of other wedges that happened around student programs that—it was

more integrative when Kasser was there.

01-00:51:04

Cummins: Separating out Rec Sports, even though that happened before Sandy came in,

and the long history of conflict, you would think by bringing them together

that would improve somewhat. John Kasser certainly thought it did and then

boom, we’re going to separate them out again.

19

01-00:51:26

Lustig: We’re going to separate them out again. So it is a return to this as a separate

universe, and we have our ways of doing things. She had a very different

model, not just staff, but the whole health care model was different.

01-00:51:38

Cummins: In what sense was that?

01-00:51:43

Lustig: There was an athletic insurance policy that supplemented the student

insurance policy. I can’t remember all the details of it, but in their attempt to

cut costs they were always after this piece that was athletic medicine. So you

remember all the budget issues.

01-00:52:07

Cummins: Yes.

01-00:52:07

Lustig: They would always haul up this expensive program, which I think the whole

cost, if I’m remembering, was around $500,000-$600,000, something in that

range.

01-00:52:16

Cummins: To pay for the supplement?

01-00:52:18

Lustig: No, that was for the Sports Medicine Program.

01-00:52:22

Cummins: Oh, what they were paying. I see.

01-00:52:26

Lustig: And a piece of that was the insurance plan, which we had to keep because the

risks were much higher than the general insurance plan. If you combined the

two you’d have the general student body paying more in order to cover the

eight hundred students who were at risk for different kinds of injuries than

they were. So that was always a battle to keep that afloat. But it was just

another example of Sandy’s approach, of saying students pay reg fees and

they should get this and that and we shouldn’t be paying for it. This is where I

want the money to go, to the high-performance initiative, and I’ll take it from

you and put it over here. I think Bill and Cindy felt that a lot, and very little

respect for what they were doing as a program.

01-00:53:23

Cummins: From?

01-00:53:23

Lustig: From Sandy.

01-00:53:23

Cummins: Oh, I see, yes, yes, exactly.

20

01-00:53:29

Lustig: And actually the whole administration. We also had—who was the guy that

was here for only a couple of years and worked for Gladstone, assistant AD.

01-00:53:39

Cummins: Oh, Mark Stephens?

01-00:53:41

Lustig: Mark Stephens. Able to retire with a lifetime pension for hardly being here.

That whole thing really galled people also.

01-00:53:54

Cummins: Right.

01-00:53:54

Lustig: So I don’t know, it was a—

01-00:53:57

Cummins: Well, he got a settlement, Mark. I don’t know that he got any retirement,

because he wasn’t here long enough, actually, to retire. But he did get a

settlement.

01-00:54:09

Lustig: I thought they gave him time and said he was doing special projects.

01-00:54:12

Cummins: He was, that was part of it.

01-00:54:15

Lustig: That was part of his settlement, okay.

01-00:54:16

Cummins: Yeah, but I don’t know. I’ll have to go back actually and look, because I had

to sign that. That was one of the—

01-00:54:21

Lustig: [laughing] So sorry.

01-00:54:22

Cummins: Yes, not at all. That was just one other indicator of that period of time.

01-00:54:30

Lustig: Right, mopping up after Gladstone. Yeah, I think that it’s—my mind just

wandered in other directions. Now we’ve got Brad; Claudia has got Brad.

01-00:54:45

Cummins: And say who that is. Brad—

01-00:54:47

Lustig: Buchman. So 2004 to 2006 I was in the interim role and really turned all of

the Tang Center programs over—

21

01-00:54:56

Cummins: Interim vice chancellor.

01-00:54:57

Lustig: Interim vice chancellor, so I met with them regularly to keep up with the Tang

Center, but I was more out of the day-to-day what was going on. And then in

2006 I moved back into the Tang Center, but in a separate role because I was

then associate vice chancellor for a number of departments, Tang being one of

them, and Claudia was running the Tang Center by then. So except for

consulting with me about things that were going on or Bill checking in, I lost

track of the program, except for getting Brad Buchman up here. Now Brad

was the medical director of UC San Diego Student Health Center, a former

athlete at Cal, a former football player. Terrific guy medically. We knew him

from annual conferences and our own network of UC health centers, and so

we were thrilled when he came up here. Number one—because we thought

he’d be a good medical director, number one. And we thought he could handle

the sports medicine people, and he has proven to be that although it is sucking

up a lot of his time.

01-00:56:10

Cummins: He has two responsibilities then. He has the Pete Dietrich and the Cindy

Chang responsibilities. Is that correct?

01-00:56:17

Lustig: No, there’s another sports doc. There’s Jeff Nelson and somebody else who

are splitting that role.

01-00:56:28

Cummins: Okay, and Cindy’s still doing some sports medicine. I think she has either

basketball or volleyball—one or the other, women’s. So she hasn’t entirely

stopped doing that.

01-00:56:43

Lustig: No, and Brad’s got the occupational medicine program too, so it’s the medical

director for the Tang Center. But the athletic role—

01-00:56:50

Cummins: But he doesn’t see student athletes, would he? Or would he? Does he continue

to do some of that?

01-00:56:56

Lustig: I think he might, but not in the clinic, probably in an urgent—Sandy likes

working with him. He’s very easy to work with. He’s not territorially

threatened. He just wants to make things work well. I think he’s become a

good bridge, from my understanding, cooled a lot of tension between the two

departments. I don’t know if that’s come up in the interviews at all.

22

01-00:57:22

Cummins: Well, the issue—I know that one of the most sensitive issues was the reporting

line, because Sandy wanted this whole thing to report to her. And Cindy

fought that and won, basically. That’s one way to put it.

01-00:57:54

Lustig: So the sports doc still reports to the Tang Center. I think that lasted, and I

think it lasted—it worries us about the High Performance Center in the sense

of accreditation of your medical facilities. Do they meet community

standards? So we did the same thing—this is a little tangent but I’ll come back

to it—with counseling. So when I was leaving we developed these programs

out in the field, so there’s now psychologists all over campus. There are some

in the Grad Division, there’s another little office up on Bancroft. We’re going

to put in a couple in Engineering, trying to get them more integrated with the

student service network and more of a community mental health model. But

they all report to the Tang Center, so they’re under the licensing of a senior

psychologist and under the accreditation of the APA, American Psychological

Association, which accredits that unit. So we wanted the same thing with all

the medical programs. So for instance, when they come and inspect the Tang

Center we took them to the training quarters also, so that they fall under this

accreditation. I don’t think that’s settled yet on the High Performance Center,

where they’re going to fit in. But the trainers went back to Athletics.

01-00:59:18

Cummins: On the reporting line.

01-00:59:21

Lustig: On the reporting line and the payroll.

01-00:59:22

Cummins: That could be a significant problem because of the coaches going directly to

the trainers.

01-00:59:30

Lustig: Right.

Well, it’s going to isolate the Tang program and enhance the high-

performance program.

01-00:59:47

Cummins: Right. Now apparently the NCAA doesn’t have a rule that says the head team

physician should report independently. It leaves that up to the institution, and

many of these kinds of things are left up to the institution by the NCAA

because of their home-rule policy. But based on what I’ve learned, the big

preference is to have the reporting line be separate because of the obvious—

01-01:00:26

Lustig: Conflict.

23

01-01:00:27

Cummins: —conflict of interest. And the other ADs that I’ve talked to certainly would

support that. Dave Maggard and John Kasser, et cetera.

01-01:00:39

Lustig: I think that has evolved more in the last ten years, as being a clear division

that’s necessary. And I think given all the national scrutiny that’s going on

right now—

01-01:00:47

Cummins: With concussions.

01-01:00:49

Lustig: It’s going to become more public that that division has to exist.

It was interesting though. The Rec Sports piece is kind of like a whiplash to

Rec Sports. It integrated, things were beginning to work somewhat, then it

separated—and then wars over square footage and funding started. I think Rec

Sports has recovered. It’s pretty swamped.

01-01:01:32

Cummins: Yes, and there was an article in the Daily Cal just in the last few months about

the possibility of another student fee referendum to increase the space for Rec

Sports. John Wilton, the new vice chancellor, thinks that that’s really

important, should be done. And in this Daily Cal article they talk about Rec

Sports working in conjunction with the Tang Center on matters related to

nutrition, even cooking, things of this kind. That kind of fits within this model

that I’ve been thinking about, that if you want we can talk about.

Before we do that however, I want to say something and get your comments

about the fact that we both had this responsibility. You were the interim vice

chancellor in that same period of time that I had responsibility for

Intercollegiate Athletics. I was very unaware of this shift, this high-

performance initiative shift. When I look back on it, before Sandy came there

were only a few months there when Gladstone was the AD. I would go to their

meetings, his senior staff meetings. He included me, et cetera. So when Sandy

came in I asked her, I said, “I’m willing to do it, but this is your operation.” And she said, “Oh no, I would prefer that you not come.” So then in that

environment you have to rely on what’s being reported to you in the standing

meetings between—and this issue never came up. So issues—say, for

example, everything we’ve talked about vis-à-vis the Tang Center—never

came up. I was never even aware of it. We were spending basically all of our

time dealing with budget issues. You, as the interim vice chancellor had ten

thousand things to do. It’s an interesting indicator, from an organizational

point of view, about the difficulties of communicating on these issues.

01-01:04:21

Lustig: And what gets filtered.

24

01-01:04:24

Cummins: And what gets filtered, exactly. I’m sure that that’s as true today as it was

then. There are lots of issues that I have heard about that I doubt very much

Sandy Barbour is going to be bringing to John Wilton. And so it creates this

dilemma, where when final decisions are made by the chancellor on budgetary

issues or things of this kind, there’s this whole underlayer which is highly

significant from a values point of view that never gets addressed.

01-01:05:04

Lustig: Oh, that’s a really good point. How did my awareness of this— First of all, I

was never sure—let’s take Sandy’s world view as an AD—where the Sports

Medicine Program fit. Was it at that level for her? Or were the twenty-seven

teams and all their problems at that level for her, and this was something that

was a part of the support network, like a student service program? I knew she

knew it was important to keep the health of the athletes—I’m not saying that.

But I’m not sure whether on her radar it was a problem yet. I understood from

my staff at Tang, soon after she came, that she had the idea of a high—we

weren’t sure what it was—a high-performance sports thing. And the facility

emerged later as an issue.

01-01:05:56

Cummins: Yes, yes.

01-01:06:01

Lustig: And there was some nervousness about what that meant. She did try to explain

it to me a few times. That’s where the psychology thing came up, with the

reverse of Maggard, that she wanted a high-performance counseling, not

psychological. That the athletes weren’t being trained for high performance,

they were being—et cetera, et cetera. So she was trying to explain what she

meant by it, but the evolution of the model and what it was becoming took

probably another year or two. So I was out of the loop by then, and I was back

at Tang when Cindy or Bill would come in and say, “How should we deal

with this? They’re running on this track and we’re not having this

conversation. Why aren’t they asking us? What are they going to do with

medical records? Do they realize I have medical records?” Just—what were

they thinking was the thing.

01-01:07:02

Cummins: Well, I’m on the Athletic Study Center Advisory Committee, and we had a

meeting just a few weeks ago. The first item on the agenda was an MOU, a

proposed MOU, between Athletics and the Athletic Study Center on how gifts

would be addressed. So this has to do with making gifts to the Athletic Study

Center that would count as part of the points system vis-à-vis seats for

basketball, football, et cetera. First of all, the MOU said that that was going to

be changing. In other words, if you contributed to the Athletic Study Center as

an alum you wouldn’t get any credit for your seats. And second, they would

mention on their website the Athletic Study Center as a possible source of

giving by a donor, but they wouldn’t manage those gifts. And essentially, they

25

would charge the Athletic Study Center a fee for those—okay, $10,000 a year,

this was the MOU. So you can imagine Christina Maslach, incoming chair

again, I think, of the Academic Senate is on the committee, Russ Ellis, Ed

Epstein is the chair, et cetera. People were stunned by this, and in typical

university protocol, people were holding back but thinking, what’s going on?

So Russ, in typical Russ Ellis style says, “I think we’re being way too nice

here. This is insane! This is ludicrous.” The Athletic Study Center exists for

the purpose of assisting intercollegiate athletes, and yet they’re going to be

charged for essentially nothing. So I sat there and I thought again, this is one

of these patterns, or fits the pattern of this almost complete isolation.

01-01:09:40

Lustig: We’re a separate entity. Yeah.

01-01:09:46

Cummins: Very puzzling.

01-01:09:48

Lustig: Very puzzling. That is really puzzling.

01-01:09:50

Cummins: Now that has been rescinded as a result of a letter from Ed Epstein, who chairs

this, to Sandy. But the fact that it could even happen is what is so—

01-01:10:05

Lustig: That’s a good group, Ed Epstein, you, Russ Ellis, Christina.

01-01:10:09

Cummins: And here’s a group that’s committed, trying to help, trying to make this

connection! So it’s such a puzzle. It’s absolutely such a puzzle.

01-01:10:22

Lustig: Well, that’s a little like the Sports Medicine Program.

01-01:10:24

Cummins: That’s what I mean.

01-01:10:24

Lustig: It’s another hub that’s supporting the program.

And diddling with—it’s a small piece of a huge budget problem. But they go

after the small pieces and leave the bigger piece alone.

01-01:10:41

Cummins: Yeah, exactly. But again, in terms of—I think about John Wilton now having

this responsibility, who—he’s a very smart guy and based on my

conversations has very good values, et cetera. But you’re sitting there often—I

doubt that he knows these kinds of thing. They don’t get to his level.

26

01-01:11:07

Lustig: But I’m wondering what—if I reverse the question, how would it have helped

you to have known some of this?

01-01:11:18

Cummins: Yes, it’s a very good question.

01-01:11:19

Lustig: What decisions could have you made?

01-01:11:23

Cummins: Yes, and as you were talking about it just a few minutes ago, in terms of your

own role sitting there as the vice chancellor, and then you get pulled in and

Bill’s talking to you and Cindy’s talking to you, and I’m sure you’re

thinking—oh! Because you’ve got all these other issues to deal with and

you’re thinking—wait a second. That’s the dilemma, that’s the dilemma that

you’re in. And so I was thinking right then and there. Yeah, what difference

would it have made?

And that of course gets right to the issue of why I’m doing this work, because

I’m so curious about that very question. The fact that I knew very little about

the history of intercollegiate athletics—knew nothing about these kinds of

dilemmas. Sports medicine was something I’d hear as an aside. Over the

couple of years I had Intercollegiate Athletics, it was all money, money,

money, at a very high level, with no real feel of the nuances and what this all

meant. So I think—I don’t know what I would have done or exactly what

difference it would have made at that point in time. But one of the reasons I’m

doing this work and writing this book is to illustrate it so that the next person

who is the vice chancellor or whomever, that has this responsibility, at least is

aware of these kinds of dilemmas.

And this gets then to what I had mentioned earlier, about can you re-

conceptualize it? So in looking back, historically, I think an argument can be

made that even at the turn of the twentieth century there was a better

understanding of the mind-body connection than there is now. And that when

you look at what happened over this hundred-and-ten-year period—we had a

Physical Education Program at Berkeley. The Physical Education Program, in

the early years, was run by doctors, by MDs.

01-01:13:47

Lustig: Yeah, it was a pre-med major a lot of times.

01-01:13:50

Cummins: Yes. And when students came into the university they got some kind of

physical assessment. Measurements were taken and heart rates and things of

this kind.

27

01-01:14:03

Lustig: You went through the yellow and white lines on the floor through Cowell

Hospital.

01-01:14:07

Cummins: Exactly. That’s all gone. It all disappeared. We no longer have a Physical

Education Program, period. The only connection to activity in sports is this

very small program that Derek Van Rheenen runs in the School of

Education—that’s it. And you have these anomalies where you have

somebody like a George Brooks, who is a renowned international

kinesiologist, but gets isolated in Integrative Biology because his work is not

valued on the campus. The biology focus on the campus is at the molecular

level.

01-01:15:21

Lustig: Yeah, he’s really isolated.

01-01:15:22

Cummins: And yet, the courses he teaches are the most popular with the students. When

you look at what’s happened in the School of Criminology or in the Music

Department or the [Haas] School of Business that are very highly focused on

theory as opposed to performance, what happens is you get, say in the Music

Department—the students go outside the Music Department and they create

the UC Jazz Ensemble and the Choral Ensemble, et cetera. They become

student-run. There are parallels here with what has happened vis-à-vis

Intercollegiate Athletics. Because at the time that they were considering

merging all of these disparate biology-related departments is the same time

that ESPN and cable television come in, in the eighties. It’s the time that

intercollegiate athletics budgets explode, literally. It’s the time when coaches’ salaries go through the roof and when enormous amounts of money are spent

on a very small number of students vis-à-vis their health, and it’s these

intercollegiate athletes. Rec Sports gets very short shrift vis-à-vis money,

resources, et cetera.

01-01:17:05

Lustig: Which is where the majority of the students go.

01-01:17:07

Cummins: Which is where the majority of the students go. So is it possible to

reconceptualize this? So could you, for example—and I had this conversation

in the interview with George Brooks. Could you create or tie into the mission

of the university the concept of a healthy university? In other words,

Berkeley—the focus at Berkeley is on health. The other thing that happens

from the eighties is this explosion in obesity and health-related problems. At

the same time that we’re doing away with physical education, public schools

are doing away with it, et cetera. So what would it look like if Berkeley did

this?

28

So at least in George Brooks’s view, he said without a commitment of a lot of

resources you could actually go back, you could actually assess all incoming

freshmen in the way that they used to do this. You could offer it to faculty,

students, and staff if they wanted it, so that they could come in and be

assessed. I did that when I started here in the early seventies, and he did the

tests on me, getting the VO2 measurements and on and on. You could tie that

into, say, a three-unit course on healthcare and nutrition, et cetera. You would

have the ability to monitor students over time because you would have the

baseline data on them, so that if they went to the Tang Center, they could get

assistance in terms of nutrition, et cetera, through Rec Sports/Tang Center.

But you’d have to create a new vision for what we were about. Do you have

any thoughts on that?

01-01:19:15

Lustig: Yeah, that was my model for the Tang Center.

01-01:19:18

Cummins: Was it?

01-01:19:20

Lustig: It was called Building a Healthy Campus Community.

01-01:19:22

Cummins: No kidding!

01-01:19:23

Lustig: And that was the title of our strategic plan, and I was on a panel in Chicago—

01-01:19:28

Cummins: Do you have that plan?

01-01:19:29

Lustig: —on building a healthy campus community.

01-01:19:34

Cummins: Amazing.

01-01:19:34

Lustig: Fascinating. I can look it up and see if I kept any of that stuff.

01-01:19:38

Cummins: Because I’m going to meet with Steve Shortell (Dean, School of Public

Health). I just set this up. I want to get his views on this now too.

01-01:19:45

Lustig: No, definitely—so my whole approach to Tang was a community health

model. So it wasn’t the building that was important, it was the impact of the

building on the campus. So that’s why we changed the whole model when

Tang opened, and there’s so much going on on campus. So probably 40

percent of our programs are out of the building.

29

So psychology is now out. The medical we’ve not done as well as we wanted

to, taking it into the dorms and things like that, which we wanted to do for

immunizations. But we do a lot of—the whole health education model is a

campus-based model, and there’s a lot more work with students and Rec

Sports around health education stuff. A lot more work with the city. So we’ve

become a major link with the city and the county around health. I always

thought the campus was too isolated. I think that has helped a lot, because we

can get to the student families, we can get to the employees. The employee

program is expanding them as part of the model, because they were much

narrower.

01-01:20:49

Cummins: What would your thinking be on the ability to tie this into the mission of the

university? In other words—

01-01:21:05

Lustig: I would love that!

01-01:21:05

Cummins: —you take it at the highest levels and say this is the direction we’re moving.

What are your thoughts about the cost involved? Would you agree with

George Brooks that—because he was talking FTE.

01-01:21:20

Lustig: Yeah, well—mass screenings—it wasn’t just Berkeley that stopped, nationally

they stopped. They basically didn’t produce—

01-01:21:28

Cummins: Benefits?

01-01:21:29

Lustig: Benefits. The cost benefit wasn’t high enough. The screenings actually didn’t

pop out as much as people hoped it would, as far as preventive early notice of

kinds of conditions.

Well, a diversion for a minute. I don’t know if you’ve been following the

regents around the student health side. We have the broadest program, so

Berkeley’s program doesn’t look anything like the other campuses. They’re

all slowly merging, somehow, their counseling and their medical—but often

in separate buildings. It’s just a reporting line. So this kind of trying to

integrate the mind-body emotional health, et cetera, is only—I think

Berkeley’s ahead on that.

01-01:22:19

Cummins: Good.

01-01:22:19

Lustig: Having the employee health part as big as we’ve got, and all the education and

the counseling and the nutrition and wellness programs for employees, that’s

very Berkeley. It doesn’t exist on the other campuses. It may be in the HR

30

department, but it’s a very different approach. So this whole model was to

improve the health status of the community, a public health model.

But about the Bob Kevess issue at Berkeley—do you know this one? The

physician who—

01-01:22:59

Lustig: —is involved with some of the students. He doesn’t work there anymore. He

resigned last year.

01-01:23:10

Cummins: He was involved in this possible indictment? Is he the one?

01-01:23:15

Lustig: Right.

01-01:23:14

Cummins: Yes, okay.

01-01:23:19

Lustig: Right. So that’s one of the problems that made it to the regents. Another one

was a problem with—I think at UCLA, where a student died or had a

diagnosis that went haywire in the wrong direction. And that Health Service

director did a very poor job of talking to the regents, which triggered the

regents—who’s monitoring student health centers? And one thing I always

kept—I got a relationship going with Michael [V.] Drake, because when he

became vice president, whatever it was.

01-01:23:59

Cummins: Yes, for health services.

01-01:24:01

Lustig: For health services. I had just worked that motion to get student health

insurance mandatory to the regents level, and he had to present it. So he and I

spent his first week together preparing this policy which became a major

policy. So because of that I kept a very strong—and Cathy [Tassan] and Jim

[Brown] also [had] a good relationship with Conn [Cornelius L.] Hopper, who

had health services under him.

01-01:24:32

Cummins: The same responsibility.

01-01:24:37

Lustig: Or it became stronger through a woman named Catherine Nation in Michael

Drake’s office. So we had a dual reporting line, student services and health.

We were also the only one that reported administratively. The others all

reported to the student service side. Berkeley reported to the administration

side.

31

01-01:24:49

Cummins: Interesting.

01-01:24:53

Lustig: So everybody kept trying to move us back, and we’d present arguments of

why not. And basically the model was different, yada yada. Anyway, because

of all this trouble, our case and this one at UCLA, the regents called for

review of all student health services, which could be a disaster from a

financial perspective.

01-01:25:15

Cummins: Really? A disaster in what sense?

01-01:25:18

Lustig: From their point of view, the risk the university is running, because of how

they’re currently managed, is too high to tolerate anymore. So part of this is

true and part of it’s an overreaction. But student services at student health, for

a long time, was a wellness center, and over the last twenty years became the

major source of healthcare for students. Students arrived with more problems,

et cetera. We all know the profile. And some of the places did better than

others. But the UCLA director was let go of. This is a report that’s supposed

to be at the regents meeting this month, is what I’ve heard. It’s going to call

for a major overhaul of how they’re managed.

01-01:26:11

Cummins: Wow!

01-01:26:11

Lustig: They want the reporting to the health center, the health czar at OP [Office of

the President], a strong reporting line. They don’t consider it a student service

in that sense. And so it’s going to call for major, I think, investment. Who

pays for that? I don’t know. Berkeley, I think, looks pretty good. I suspect it’ll

be painted with the same brush because it’s a general report not about each

campus. But I know that Berkeley had the first review and they were very

impressed with it.

01-01:26:48

Cummins: Good.

01-01:26:49

Lustig: So taking it back to your question, I think it might be helpful, actually,

because it says this campus-based health care is a major healthcare-delivery

system and it needs to be managed like a major healthcare-delivery system.

And the campus needs to increase its profile in order to do that somewhat. So

it could be an opportunity to have a much broader model. UCLA did things

like they built the new health center and stuck the health education department

down the quad in a separate office, and the counseling department somewhere

else. The psych department is in the medical center, so there’s not even an

integrated model internally, which we worked really hard to get an integrated

model. We have educational programs that are open to the campus and

32

community, and that has helped bring people together too. We had—I had—

they’re still going. So I think there’s tremendous opportunities, but Tang has

been cut by millions of dollars. I ended up with about sixteen funding sources,

and that’s why I kept all the programs too, because you could bill them, you

can charge for them, and it has worked and Claudia’s doing a great job

managing all that, but it’s complex.

01-01:28:13

Cummins: Very complex.

01-01:28:15

Lustig: The costs to keep it going. The other thing you were verging on was a Rec

Sports—

01-01:28:21

Cummins: Connection.

01-01:28:23

Lustig: Connection. Which—we worked pretty well with Rec Sports, but they’re also

very—it’s a business. They’re more of a business.

01-01:28:32

Cummins: Yes, it’s a business, right.

01-01:28:34

Lustig: So there’s things that we might want to do that they want to charge for. So this

whole wellness issue is becoming a problem. Not a problem. But Grace

Crickette has an office, she’s the vice president for risk management or

something at OP, very, very clever businessperson, and risk is her middle

name. So she developed a pot of money which is really from savings on

workers’ comp, so it’s employee-centered. You can apply for it, so UC’s

getting $2 million/$2.5 million a year. It’s really surplus from our workers’ comp tax, but it funds all sorts of programs on campus, including things at

Rec Sports. We’re also doing a lot of the wellness programming for

employees out of it at the Tang Center.

So I was on, up till last spring, the Systemwide Mental Health Advisory

Committee which still meets. But it’s in the student service side, which is

extremely isolated at OP. No one pays it much truck. It’s cut down to forty

people now and it doesn’t do a very good job anyway. So she came to the

meeting of health service directors and everybody distrusted her. I’m the only

one that would work with her, and she said that she could free up $10 million

for the same kind of program to reduce the risk of mental health stuff on the

campus, so come up with some creative proposals. No follow-up. Not a drop

of follow-up.

01-01:30:19

Cummins: You’re kidding me! Follow-up on the part of the individual—

33

01-01:30:24

Lustig: On the committee, on the health services. The minute she left huge distrust.

“It’s the risk management side. We defend the students. We don’t want risk

management in our face.” Things like that. I said, “No, no. I can work with

you. I can make this work.” Then, because of the risk issues around these

cases, OP comes in with these investigations, in which they’re going to slam

health services and make them change, and then we’re supposed to go back to

Grace and apply for money. But here’s an example where you could do a

really creative preventive program—that’s what she wants to fund, around

mental health crises. Funded by her, right now, who’s diverting some money

from something else for it—or was willing to. The source of funding was

unclear. But part of the problem is the creativity—you would need different

types of managers of health programs on campus to make that vision work,

absolutely.

01-01:31:30

Cummins: The other part of that is to—I’ll send you this paper I did that focuses on

studying sports. Because the history of that is that once, at Berkeley, Physical

Education goes, as I said, then there is no connection at all, the little that there

was. But at the same time again, in the mid-eighties at various colleges and

universities you see these sports management programs start at the

undergraduate level and then at the graduate level. And there are probably—

there are several hundred universities now that offer this, or colleges, mostly

small. But Michigan and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have big

programs, which is very interesting to me.

01-01:32:30

Lustig: In sports or training people to be sports medicine professionals?

01-01:32:32

Cummins: It’s a combination. So Michigan has the biggest program and it’s actually a

school, so it’s a school of kinesiology, so you can study kinesiology. You can

be trained to be an athletic trainer and then go and get a master’s degree there.

You can study sports management through this same program, and they still

have a physical education component that certifies physical education teachers

for the schools, so they have a comprehensive program. The University of

North Carolina-Chapel Hill has the athletic trainer component. It has a

kinesiology component. The director just got the MacArthur Award, a

“genius” award, for his nineteen years studying concussions, and he’s not an

MD. He’s a PhD, which is interesting. And they have one other component.

But they also have much more involvement with intercollegiate athletics and

rec sports in these programs.

So anyway, I’ll send you that paper, because that—as I see the writing of this

book, this is where it’s going. The point is going to be that we have allowed,

and we’ve made decisions that have actually fostered the isolation of

intercollegiate athletics, downplayed rec sports, and never thought

conceptually about how all this fits together. And if you could do that, then a

34

lot of the contentiousness surrounding intercollegiate athletics would start to

dissipate, because it would be fully integrated. That’s the argument.

01-01:34:45

Lustig: You just reminded me of another tangent. Friday Night Lights—do you ever

watch this on Netflix?

01-01:34:53

Cummins: Yes, exactly.

01-01:34:55

Lustig: I thought of that when I was watching this—how to integrate it? Well, does

that decrease the cost any? How do you dial back this multi-billion dollar—

01-01:35:05

Cummins: Yes, that’s a very big question. One thing you could do, because a lot of the

cost is driven by football and basketball—it’s really the big time—is to

somehow separate them. So that maybe you contract out big-time football and

basketball, because they’re so antithetical to any concept of amateurism as we

currently think about it. You license the name—Berkeley, the Golden Bears,

whatever. You lease your facilities, the stadium in particular, which is a huge

cost, and you have it run that way. There are universities that have done a

version of that. Florida is one, Virginia Tech used to do this. There are

dangers in doing it. There’s concern about Title-IX implications if you

completely separate it. If you could completely separate it you would

essentially be setting up a minor league for the NFL and the NBA, which is a

role that big-time programs play anyway. You could continue, I think, to

maintain school spirit because you’re still playing on college campuses, et

cetera. But it would be clear—this is business over here. It’s what it has

become anyway. You’d just be calling it what it is. This is a business. You

could also pay the players then. You could also, if you could remove it from

the NCAA, so that it was functioning as a business out here but still had a tie

somehow to the university. That’s very difficult legally because of tax

implications and on and on. But if you could do that then you could take the

minor sports, the Olympic sports, et cetera, and say yeah, there’s real value to

doing that.

01-01:37:18

Lustig: And then the students are more integrated.

01-01:37:21

Cummins: They are more integrated, the student athletes in the non-revenue sports.

01-01:37:22

Lustig: Into the campus and the academic world.

01-01:37:26

Cummins: And they’re—the money is in the football and basketball, so that would be

one way to do it, and there’s lots of obstacles.

35

01-01:37:37

Lustig: Did contracting out the—I know the advertising and the management of

events.

01-01:37:41

Cummins: ISP and—

01-01:37:44

Lustig: Did that work to save money?

01-01:37:45

Cummins: Yeah, I think it has generated revenue. It’s all part of the revenue picture.

When you look at what is happening just now in the Pac-12, and it just

happened with the TV contract and the expansion of the number of teams to

twelve, it’s all driven by media. It’s building a media base and Nielsen ratings,

et cetera, that generates more advertising, that pushes up the value of the

contracts. So now the current commissioner, Larry Scott, who just was in

Shanghai because he wants to play games over in Shanghai, builds that

market, et cetera—so what that has to do with an academic program is—

01-01:38:38

Lustig: Hard to see.

01-01:38:40

Cummins: Hard to see.

01-01:38:41

Lustig: Yeah. I was thinking when you mentioned Derek’s area, with the Athletic

Study Center and the Sports Medicine Program—are there other hubs like that

that support all of the teams?

01-01:38:56

Cummins: They’re the two most obvious. I don’t think there are.

01-01:38:59

Lustig: So academic and health—it would make sense. It would make sense. Because

that is a window, these few programs that touch all the sports and have a view,

what’s that like.

01-01:39:19

Cummins: Is there anything else that you would like to—

01-01:39:22

Lustig: I don’t think so. I’m trying to filter through your healthy campus community

what our models would look like and where intercollegiate sports would fit

into that. I can see where rec sports would, and I can see, like you said, where

most of the sports could become part of that model.

01-01:39:44

Cummins: It would be, in a way—and this is of course at the very elemental level of

thinking, but these are the highest-performing athletes, okay? So what can you

36

learn from them, and what can they learn from being studied? It fits into what

Sandy Barbour wants to do. It would just integrate it into the campus. One of

the issues there is whether the coaches would want these athletes to be

spending their time doing that, or how much would they lose control of these

athletes by integrating them into a more research-based/learning-based

approach to what they’re doing. It’s similar, as I said, to what Sandy wants to

do. But even there, in this high-performance initiative, there are a lot of

coaches that are very unhappy with it because they feel that they have been, in

terms of the way it has been managed and handled and brought in, their view,

is similar to your view or George Brooks’s view. Nobody consulted us about

this, and then people come in and tell us that we’re not high-performing, that

we’ve got to do x, y, and z, when in fact, some of us have produced national

champions. It’s that same kind of issue, so they’re not very happy about it.

Again, this issue of how do you manage this, how do you coordinate it?

01-01:41:35

Lustig: The whole consultation issue at the university could also bog you down. But

there is that propensity to always bring people in from the outside, because

they’ve got to be better than anybody you had inside. Not always true.

01-01:41:49

Cummins: Right. Yeah. [laughing]

01-01:41:50

Lustig: I don’t know if you want to do it at the Student Athlete High Performance

Center though. I think it’s good that there’s a lot of new offices, but they can’t

afford the equipment probably, right?

01-01:42:02

Cummins: I don’t know how—the weight room is the size of a football field. I don’t

know if you’ve walked in there and seen it, but it’s quite—it’s very, very

impressive. No question about that. I think it fits within Berkeley’s attempts,

since you’re going to build these buildings, to do them right, make sure they

last for a long time, which I’m sure the stadium and the High Performance

Center will. But whether it’s just going to add further to the isolation—I don’t

know. It’s a major concern. See, the academic part of Intercollegiate Athletics,

which is supposed to be the driving element here, is also part of the high-

performance initiative, but they can’t articulate what it means. And if you look

at the space issues in the Student-Athlete High Performance Center, the

amount of space given to the Athletic Study Center is—

01-01:43:14

Lustig: It’s not a football field.

01-01:43:16

Cummins: Thanks very much, Steve.

[End of Interview]

37