Riverside County

Faculty members at UC Riverside remembered Ivan Hinderaker on Monday as a calm man and skilled negotiator who led the campus through tumultuous times.

Dr. Hinderaker, a former Minnesota state legislator and professor of political science who served as UCR's chancellor from 1964 to 1979, died Sunday night at a nursing home in Irvine where he had lived for the past three years, said his brother, Theodore Hinderaker. He was 91.

Dr. Hinderaker was the second chancellor at UCR, and the one who served longest. He led the campus as it began its shift from a liberal arts college with about 3,000 students to a university center with graduate and professional programs.

Faculty members said Dr. Hinderaker had a deft touch in dealing with faculty disputes and student unrest. His political savvy might have helped to keep the campus open during the 1970s, when enrollment was falling and then Gov. Jerry Brown proposed a merger with Cal State San Bernardino.

"I truly believe it was the sheer force of his political will and personality that kept us safe and allowed us time to grow," said Ed Beardsley, former dean of fine arts at UCR and founder of the UCR/California Museum of Photography.

Beardsley said Dr. Hinderaker was able to see the potential for the museum when it was a collection of photo equipment tucked away in the basement of the humanities building.

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"Ivan Hinderaker had this unique vision to see beyond those troubled times, and to invest in ideas he thought would pay dividends later," he said.

Dr. Hinderaker presided over the campus at a time of rising student activism. In 1969, Dr. Hinderaker took criticism when he allowed the flag at UCR to remain at half staff in a protest over a fatal shooting during a demonstration at UC Berkeley.

Later that week, students staged a two-day strike that included an overnight sit-in at the administration building. Dr. Hinderaker told the protesters they could stay if they kept the aisles clear, and he had coffee and doughnuts brought to them, according to a newspaper article at the time of Dr. Hinderaker's retirement.

"He always believed that talking was better than fighting," said Francis Carney, a professor emeritus of political science and history. "The university was always a place where people should be ready to talk and settle their differences."

Some of the college's original faculty members did not support the move to add professional and graduate programs to the campus, and some left for smaller schools, Carney said. But there was no large-scale resistance, in part because Dr. Hinderaker treated the faculty with respect, faculty members said Monday.

"He was a scholar and he could deal with other scholars," said Tony Norman, a distinguished professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences.

Born in Hendricks, Minn., Dr. Hinderaker spent one term in the Minnesota state legislature before joining the Army Air Forces, where he served from 1943 to 1946. He then earned his doctorate from the University of Minnesota, where he taught for one year before coming to UCLA as an assistant professor of political science in 1949. He later became a full professor and department chairman.

He spent one year as vice chancellor for academic affairs at UC Irvine before becoming chancellor at UCR.

In a 1998 interview for a UCR oral history project, Dr. Hinderaker said that at the time of his appointment, the Riverside campus "was sort of regarded in the University of California as ... not 'with it.' "

Faculty members were seen as resisting the university's plan to remake the college, he said.

"And, I just found it difficult to resist that challenge," he said.

After his retirement in 1979, Dr. Hinderaker and his wife, Birk -- a poet and supporter of the arts -- returned to their Corona del Mar home.

Birk Hinderaker died in June 2003, one week after the couple's 62nd wedding anniversary. The couple's only son, Mark, a professor of photography who lived in Australia, died the following year.

Dr. Hinderaker is survived by his brother, Theodore, and Theodore's wife, Laura, of Tucson; his grandson, Blake Hinderaker and Blake's wife, Daniella, of Fremantle, Australia; and daughter-in-law Janice Hinderaker, of Albury, Australia.

Services will be private. The family has asked that gifts be made in honor of Dr. Hinderaker to the UCR Carillon Tower Fund.