When the announcement that Sixth College would be named for UC President Emeritus Richard Atkinson caused controversy, he asked that his name be withdrawn from consideration because he felt that UCSD students had not been sufficiently involved in the decision. This was a statesman-like move on his part, but it should not be the final word.

It took quite a while before Third College was named for Thurgood Marshall rather than for the ideological hotheads’ choice, Lumumba-Zapata-Allende. The job of finding a name for Sixth College needn’t be that prolonged, but it should now be reopened, with adequate consultation of students, faculty, administrators, alumni and friends of the university. If the case for honoring Atkinson is properly presented, it should be enthusiastically received, though there is something to be said for taking ethnic and gender diversity into account, as was done when the roster of UCSD colleges was adorned with the illustrious names of Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt.

In other instances, chancellors have been honored by having buildings designated for them. But Atkinson was the longest-serving of our chancellors, holding the office from 1980 to 1995, a period of major growth. When he left to become UC President — the first UCSD chancellor to be so elevated — this campus was well-established as one of the great success stories of modern higher education. As president of the UC system for eight years, he also served with distinction. This is an extraordinary record of service, which deserves extraordinary recognition. It bears comparison with the contributions of Roger Revelle, for whom our first college was named.

And that’s not all that should be said on Atkinson’s behalf. He has done major academic work in psychology. (Some of this work has been done with his wife Rita Atkinson, so maybe it would be a good idea, for the sake of diversity, to recognize their partnership by naming the college for both of them, following the precedent of the Jacobs School of Engineering, named for Joan and Irwin.) Before becoming chancellor, he was director of the National Science Foundation, one of the government’s major agencies for supporting basic research.

As UC president, he forced a revamping of the S.A.T. when an inquiry he ordered found that it was not as good a predictor of academic success as claimed. He resisted efforts by the regents to end affirmative action (or preferential treatment) in admissions based on race, ethnicity and gender, and when that failed, he reoriented outreach programs to focus on low-performing high schools, shifted emphasis from aptitude tests to achievement tests in admissions, expanded transfer programs from community colleges, instituted “comprehensive review” of applicants and created a new path to admissions called “Eligibility in the Local Context,” making the top-performing 4 percent of each high school eligible for admission to UC campuses — all in order to boost minority enrollment.

As an administrator, Atkinson was devoted to incremental improvement rather than any grand pedagogical passion. When he was up for reappointment as chancellor, then-UC President David P. Gardner came to the campus to interview people about his performance. I was among the faculty members he talked to. I gave Atkinson very high marks on most scores, but then Gardner threw me a curve.

“Does the faculty agree with his philosophy of education?” he asked.

For a moment I was stumped, but then I thought of the right answer. “If he had one,” I said, “I think we’d lynch him.”

Gardner had a good laugh at this answer, perhaps because he too did not have a pronounced philosophy of education. Like Atkinson, he was one of the new breed of administrators Clark Kerr identified as managers of the multiversity rather than educational innovators in the style of Hutchins, Eliot or Meiklejohn. But the truth is that Atkinson was so successful here because he respected the faculty and students enough to let them make their own decisions. He saw his job as one of helping them and listening carefully to them, not dictating to them or imposing his own narrow vision.

It is perfectly consistent of him to have withdrawn his name for consideration. That deference to faculty and student judgment is what made him so effective and also what has made UCSD a great educational institution. It is the reason, above all others, that we ought to have Atkinson College.

Sanford Lakoff is a research professor of political science and was founding chair of his department.