UCLA Accused of ‘Apartheid-Like’ Hiring Policy

A group of angry minority leaders charged Thursday that UCLA is being run by “an apartheid-like power structure” that discriminates against minorities in the hiring and promotion of faculty members.

If the university does not take “swift and decisive measures” to improve its minority employment record, it “faces the possibility of class-action lawsuits and legislative remedies” from Asian, black, Latino and American Indian groups, said Stewart Kwoh of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California, which organized the protest. He was joined by representatives of black, Latino and American Indian organizations.

The coalition’s charges, made at a press conference Thursday morning, appeared to catch some UCLA officials by surprise, coming as they did on the heels of a university report showing that the nine-campus UC system has done better than most major research universities in recruiting and promoting minority faculty members.

Under-Represented Groups

According to that study, 4.2% of UCLA’s total faculty are members of under-represented minority groups--that is, black, Latino and American Indian. In the UC system as a whole, the proportion is 4.4%.

Asians are not typically figured into these calculations because they are not considered by the university to be “under-represented” in relation to their numbers in the population as a whole. If they are included, however, 9.6% of the UCLA faculty and 9.9% of the UC system faculty are members of minority groups.

The university has been working “very hard” on minority employment and will continue to do so, said Jeanne Giovannoni, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor for faculty relations.

But the protesters--one of them noting that UCLA is located in a city often described as the “Ellis Island of the West”--interpreted matters differently. Despite its efforts, the university’s record for recruiting and promoting minority groups is “shameful,” contended James Riding In, a Pawnee Indian from Oklahoma who was speaking for UCLA’s Native American Graduate Students organization.

‘Objects of Research’

Minority faculty and students, he said, are thought of as “quaint objects of research” rather than colleagues of equal intellectual abilities. The curriculum of the university is little more than “a white studies” program. And the university power structure resembles a “colonial regime” with an “apartheid-like” policy of giving power to whites but not to blacks and other minority groups, Riding In said.

Speaking for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Mark Ridley-Thomas warned of “new forms of racism” that are taking over universities and said that his and other organizations in the protest would go to the UC Board of Regents to ask for a “full-scale investigation” of the university’s hiring procedures.

Among their contentions is that minority faculty members, besides being overworked and underpaid, are delayed in their promotion reviews and denied tenure at a much higher rate than are whites.

‘Unabashedly Racist’

“It has been my experience that the UCLA administration has been unabashedly racist in its handling of promotion reviews of minority faculty,” said Halford H. Fairchild, a black psychologist who brought a civil suit against UCLA in 1986 when he was denied tenure by the university.

There is also “grave concern” that while some departments have a relatively high percentage of minority faculty members, others have none at all, Kwoh said. Asian faculty members may be well represented in the physical sciences and engineering and management, he said, but there is “not a single Asian faculty member” in the university’s education department.

According to UCLA figures, 5.4% of the full-time, tenured faculty members are Asian, 1.4% are black, 2.7% are Latino and 0.1% are American Indian.