SACRAMENTO – University of California Provost Wyatt “Rory” Hume announced his resignation yesterday just a few hours after the university system's new president settled into his first formal day on the job.

Hume's departure from the No. 2 post will give new President Mark Yudof an immediate opportunity to start building his team from the top. Hume, who also functions as UC's chief operating officer, said he will step down by September. Hume said he will continue working in higher education, but announced no specific plans.

“This is something that I came to on my own,” Hume, 63, said in a brief interview. “The time is right from my personal circumstance and my family's point of view and I felt . . . it was the right thing for the university to let (Yudof) build his own team.”

UC Board of Regents Chairman Richard Blum applauded Hume's work to begin restructuring the president's office and said he was not asked to resign.

“I told him . . . because he was busting his pick as provost, I wanted whoever the new president was to pick his own team, but he was the only one, and there was an understanding with Mark Yudof that he was welcome to stay for up to a year if Yudof wanted to make some changes,” Blum said.

“For whatever reason, I think he probably felt he wasn't really the right guy for the team and resigned. He was not asked to resign.”

Hume was widely considered a leading inside candidate to replace outgoing UC President Robert Dynes, a former UC San Diego chancellor who announced his resignation last summer.

Hume was never an official candidate because Blum and others decided early on that the 10-campus system needed to bring in an outsider to confront a bureaucracy portrayed as bloated and dysfunctional.

Given the university's history of grooming presidents from within, an internal candidate would have discouraged outside interest, Blum said.

“I was determined to hire someone from the outside,” he said. “If we had ultimately changed our mind and said we'll consider someone from the inside, I'm sure (Hume) would have been on the short list.”

Hume was trained in dentistry at the University of Adelaide in Australia. He came to UCLA as a postdoctoral research fellow in 1975. He went on to become president of the University of New South Wales and executive vice chancellor of UCLA. He was a leading candidate to become UCLA's chancellor when he joined the UC president's office.

Yudof, a legal scholar, brings a record as proven manager at two other multicampus universities in Texas and Minnesota. He is expected to lead an overhaul and significant downsizing of the UC president's office.