Racial, Ethnic Alliances Mark Student Government : Coalitions Clash in UCLA Political Wars

By almost any measure, Dean Florez is one of the most powerful people on the UCLA campus. He has sole authority to make appointments to more than 100 positions on university committees. He has the power to hire and fire 100 employees. He oversees the allotment of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and for part of this year he has served as chairman of a multimillion-dollar campus corporation.

Yet Florez is a student. He is UCLA’s undergraduate student body president, a position replete with business cards, a suite of offices, a secretary, even a public relations officer.

Student government has become big business at UCLA. And the election of Florez, a Chicano, serves as an illustration of just how dramatically that business has changed. No longer simply popularity contests among fraternity brothers, student elections are now rife with sophisticated ethnic-coalition politics.

In some ways, it is fitting that a West Coast university of extraordinary ethnic diversity would have as its student leaders for two consecutive years members of minority groups. (Florez, a third-generation Mexican-American, succeeded Ron Taylor, an American black.)

But the recent elections are not necessarily a sign of growing tolerance. Indeed, the process of choosing student governments today is one of racial tensions and strange new alliances among ethnic, social and religious groups on campus.

“It’s like Tammany Hall around here--all the wheeling and dealing,” said one faculty member, referring to the legendary New York Democratic Party machine of a century ago.

“But, it’s also the new un-American politics,” said UCLA’s Chancellor Charles E. Young, a political scientist by training. “During the last 15 or 20 years we’ve moved away from the melting pot, the idea of assimilation. We’ve got the opposite now: the idea of separatism, even nationalism.”

Nowhere, said Florez, is the nationalism on campus more evident than in the names student groups use for themselves and for one another.

Jews are, often disparagingly, referred to as Zionists because of their assumed support for the policies of Israel. Most Latinos are “vehemently opposed” to being called Hispanic, Florez said, because that “suggests roots to Spain and Europe, which they don’t want to claim.” The label Latino, meanwhile, is considered too innocuous. The preferred term is Chicano, even though it technically refers only to a person of Mexican descent, simply because it has come to have “certain connotations of political activism,” he said.

And for blacks, Florez said, “the new quiche word” is African, thus rendering the labels black and even Afro-American almost as outdated and politically unacceptable as Negro or colored.

The issues of race and nationalism also spill over into student government meetings.

“You should have seen some of the (student) council’s meetings in the past year or so. They could be really intense,” said Robert Alvarez, a campus activist whom Florez appointed last year to the powerful post of Student Finance Committee chairman.

The subject of these discussions is as likely to be the plight of Palestinians on the West Bank or White House policies in Central America as it is class scheduling or campus parking. Two administrations back, in fact, the student body president, a white male, felt it his duty to take a fact-finding trip to Nicaragua.

“You stay up until 1 in the morning at council meetings, discussing Israel’s right to exist,” said Marcia Choo, a sociology major who is Florez’s chief of staff.

The intensity of ethnic feelings even affects the operation of the student newspaper. Just last month, for example, the editor-in-chief and art director of the Daily Bruin were suspended briefly by a student-run communications board for publishing a cartoon strip parodying affirmative action.

“UCLA is not alone in having racial and religious differences but it is perhaps more intense here for two very simple reasons,” said Raymond L. Orbach, provost of the College of Letters and Sciences.

The first, Orbach noted, is that UCLA is the most ethnically diverse campus of all the country’s major research universities. Its only really close competitor in this regard is Berkeley. More than half of this year’s freshmen are members of minority groups, and about a quarter of the student body is Jewish.

Compounding this diversity, Orbach said, is that the stakes are higher in UCLA campus government than at most other universities. Elected student officials and their appointees are given sole discretion over the allocation of about $200,000 a year, Florez estimates. This means that organizations and clubs, such as the Iranian Student Group, the Asian Coalition or the Gay and Lesbian Assn., must lobby the president and the 18-member undergraduate student council for money just to operate.

In addition, UCLA student officers sit on a variety of committees that determine the allocation of $26 million in student services fees, plus the entire $56-million budget of Associated Students UCLA Inc., the student corporation that runs the campus bookstore and student cafeterias.

The political education of Dean Florez shows the complexity and scale of UCLA’s ethnic-coalition government.

Florez, who grew up in a small town in the San Joaquin Valley and had been a star athlete and a leader in his high school, did not have racism or international politics foremost in his mind when he first ran for student office at UCLA. His platform dealt mainly with “academic reform”--smaller classes for students, more seminars for freshmen and closer relations between faculty and students.

“It is true,” he said with considerably more sincerity than most professional politicians can muster, “that part of me wanted to prove a Chicano could be a good leader,” but not just for “my own people, for all students.”

Strength in Coalition

But it was also true, Florez discovered, that to have any hope of getting elected, he had to rely on the so-called Third World Coalition for support.

Before the campaign was over, Florez found himself in a clear-cut “race” race. His opponent, a white male, had the support of fraternities and various predominantly white groups, including both the Republican and Democratic parties on campus. Florez had the support of virtually all the minority organizations except the Jewish Student Union. Quickly, the rhetoric on both sides--not from the candidates themselves but from some of their anonymous supporters--became mean-spirited and clearly racist.

“Basically what we wanted,” said Alvarez, Florez’s finance committee chairman, “is more political education . . . for minority students, more affirmative action, more money, more power . . . more respect.”

To achieve those goals, Florez said, many minority students would be pleased to have him barge into the offices of the chancellor, declare UCLA a racist institution and, in essence, become a martyr by getting thrown out of school.

In a recent interview in his spacious office overlooking the campus, Florez, dressed in a coat and tie and flanked by his staff members, apologized for his shortcomings in this regard and explained what he does have to offer minority students at UCLA. “I may not be as militant as some minority students would like, but I could give them something they needed. . . . I could get elected.”

Political Advantages

“You see, I’m lucky,” he paused, obviously not entirely comfortable with what he was about to say. “Well, I’m not lucky . But I’m light. I’m articulate. I don’t speak with an accent. . . . Not only could I be the minority representative, the first Chicano in 75 years to be elected, but I also at the same time could slip in a few votes from whites who weren’t paying attention.”

Florez may have dreamed of gaining wide campus appeal, but by the time he took office he discovered what some of his predecessors had already learned: that the war of the races was just beginning. But it was not just dark-skinned students against light-skinned. It was Latinos against Anglos, blacks against Jews, Jews against Palestinians. In other words, the situation generally mirrored what was happening in the world outside the university.

Initially, after the social upheavals and radical politics of the 1960s, minority students at UCLA and elsewhere struggled just to find ways of acquiring power. In the early 1970s at UCLA, the mechanism became the Progressive Coalition, an alliance of Jews, blacks, Latinos and most of the other groups who had been disenfranchised by the usual social and political organizations on campus. By the early 1980s, however, the coalition was already straining under the differences among the groups.

Blacks and Latinos remained at its core, united largely around such issues as affirmative action and greater minority representation. But no longer did blacks and Jews see eye to eye on all issues, especially about the Palestinians who were becoming something of a force on campus. Less charged but no less significant was the growing presence of Asians, who for the first time were becoming active in campus politics.

Third World Focus

Relations became so strained that by the mid-1980s, the Progressive Coalition had fallen apart altogether. It its place, a new Third World Coalition was established and included virtually every minority group on campus except Jews. Pointedly excluded, many Jewish students began to join forces with fraternity members--an ironic move, many on campus are quick to note, because of the well-documented history of discrimination Jews have faced at the hands of the campus Greeks.

Camille Angel, a senior philosophy major, may have been a victim of what appears to be growing intolerance within UCLA’s student government. Until a few weeks ago, Angel, who is a native of Los Angeles and the daughter of a rabbi, was editor of Ha’Am, UCLA’s Jewish student newspaper, a position she resigned recently for what she said were “personal reasons.”

Seated recently in the cramped newspaper offices beneath a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. (which said, “Racism: We have to fight it together”), Angel described what happened to her in December.

The latest issue of her newspaper was just out and had been placed for distribution to students in a kiosk on campus. The kiosk, however, was set on fire and the newspapers torched.

University officials assumed it was a mindless act of vandalism, but a few days later Angel received several threatening telephone calls from a man who told her that “Ha’Am must fold.” A few days after that, someone, apparently a young man by the sound of his voice, came pounding on her apartment door. Later she found a singed copy of the newspaper, splattered with red paint, hanging from her mezuza, a tiny Jewish signpost next to her apartment door.

Administration Effort

Only after serious lobbying by prominent Jewish leaders in Los Angeles and several national Jewish organizations did Chancellor Young issue a statement condemning the incident and promising to create a new “high-level group to oversee all of our human relations efforts among faculty, students and staffs.”

There also have been incidents between Jews and blacks in the last year or so, ranging from the usual campus politicking over office space to racist and anti-Semitic signs and graffiti around the campus.

One of the most uncomfortable incidents for faculty members and administrators took place several months ago at a lunch arranged by the campus Jewish community to promote greater racial and religious tolerance and awareness. Florez, as the new undergraduate president, was asked to select the student participants, which he did. But the black students who were invited were angry that they were not consulted on the guest list in advance. So, in the middle of the lunch, they stood up, denounced their Jewish hosts for not having included any Palestinian students and walked out. The Latino students followed in sympathy--and also grumbled that the lunch was being served by Latino employees.

In contrast with many Jewish activists who contend that the university has not done enough for race relations on campus, their black counterparts charge that the UCLA administration has been far too meddlesome in their affairs.

Black Students’ Views

Dwayne Brown, president of the Black Students Assn., has been at odds with the administration over the role of a campus educational project known as the Academic Advancement Program.

In essence, the administration views the program’s tutorials and summer workshops as a way to provide a “leg up” for educationally disadvantaged students, whatever their race, explained Winston C. Doby, vice chancellor for student affairs.

But Brown and other black activists have tried, often successfully, to use the program to promote political awareness among minority students. “We want to educate freshmen about what racism is and how it is reflected in this institution,” Brown said.

Angry that the university tried to put a stop to their political consciousness-raising, Brown and his followers staged a demonstration last year. Buildings were occupied, a wall was bashed in, and a fight broke out between a black student and a Jewish administrator.

As observers on both sides remember the incident, the administrator informed the protesting student who had broken into a math tutorial lab, “You don’t belong here.” Angered, the student accused the administrator of discrimination. The administrator replied that she, too, knew something of discrimination, saying that six million of her people had died in Germany.

“Don’t shove your six million down my throat. One hundred million of my people died in the slave trade,” the student retorted.

High Level of Anger

“I guess you could say they got sort of historical on each other,” Brown recalled recently. “They had to be pulled apart.”

Similarly, the administration has found itself in the middle of nasty squabbles between Chicanos and fraternity members over the issue of fraternity “theme” parties, such as Phi Kappa Psi’s “Viva Zapata” parties. Ostensibly dedicated to Mexico’s revolutionary war hero, the celebrations were not much more than an excuse to eat Doritos, drink Dos Equis and don sombreros.

“It was disrespectful of the Latin culture,” Florez said. “But can you call it discrimination? I don’t know. Most of the students involved didn’t even know who Zapata was. Can you call ignorance racism?”

Nonetheless, the Latino outcry over such parties has been so forceful and so extended (Latino students camped out in the street on fraternity row for a full week) that the university finally changed its whole relationship with fraternities and sororities this year. It not only outlawed such parties, it brought the houses under direct university supervision.

“Let me tell you, we lost some donors over that decision,” said one high-ranking university official. “There are a lot of alumni who were members of those fraternities and who give a lot of money to the university--or used to give a lot of money--who think the university has no business telling fraternities what to do or what not to do.”

Crackdown on Greeks

Many Jewish students have also reacted harshly to the crackdown on the Greek houses, not because they think the restrictions are inappropriate, but because similar restrictions have not been placed on student political groups.

Under UCLA administrative guidelines, organizations that receive student fees must adhere to certain campus policies, including restrictions against political organizing or religious proselytizing. But if no student fees are involved, student political, religious or social groups can operate with no restrictions from official channels--a policy that Chancellor Young recently said probably should be reevaluated.

While the scramble for power and money may be foremost in most student leaders’ minds, there is at least one issue dividing the various ethnic and racial groups on campus. That is affirmative action.

Blacks and Latinos have long been strong advocates of giving special treatment to under-represented minority groups on the grounds that such consideration is the only way to begin to compensate for past injustices. But for most Jewish students, the distinction between affirmative action and quotas is a fine one. And it was quotas that for years excluded many qualified Jews from the nation’s best universities.

So far, UCLA’s Asian students have been almost totally silent on this issue and have viewed their role as “peacemakers” among the various special interest groups, said Choo, Florez’s chief of staff.

Ready for an Explosion

But many on campus expect the issue of Asians and affirmative action to explode at any time. Investigations by faculty and community groups, not only at UCLA but at other major universities, suggest that qualified Asians may be subject to the same kind of quota system that faced Jews in the early part of this century.

“One thing you have to keep in mind about all this activism and nationalism is who is involved in it,” said Jeffrey Prager, an assistant professor of sociology who teaches part of a new course at UCLA on ethnic studies. “It’s not your ordinary UCLA student. It’s those students who have elected to get themselves involved in student government. Most students on campus today are just as naive, just as indifferent as everybody has been saying they are.”

“But the majority of students are also are a lot happier than student leaders would have us believe,” Chancellor Young said. “If you talk to (ordinary) students, they’ll tell you UCLA is the greatest place. If you talk to the leadership, they’ll tell you it’s awful.”

In a sense, Young said, that is what is happening with all American politics, particularly in California, where ethnic and racial groups are growing so rapidly. “The leadership of the various segments must define their groups . . . and then show them how they are being wronged by the rest of society. . . . Politicians don’t seem to know how to get elected any other way.”

Certainly, that is a lesson students have learned very well, said Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, associate director of UCLA’s Hillel Council. “But that is probably the scariest part. Everybody’s big fear is that these are the people who are going to be the next generation of leaders. If they leave here harboring these hostilities, (the political tensions in the community at large are) only going to get worse. . . .

“UCLA, like the state and the nation as a whole, is at a critical juncture,” she said. “There’s a lot of power up for grabs and there are a lot of groups out there ready to start grabbing. . . . They’ve already started here.”