IRVINE : UCI Students Lobby Regents on Housing

UC Irvine student activists seeking campus housing for gay, lesbian and unmarried couples took their 2-month-old protest to the University of California Board of Regents meeting in Los Angeles Thursday and won a qualified commitment to study the issue.

About a dozen placard-waving UC Irvine students, joined by an equal number of UCLA students, had stationed themselves strategically between the regents’ meeting hall and a nearby luncheon area. And UCI officials inside the meeting room had conveyed the students’ desire to speak to them about the issue.

The tactic worked. Several regents, including former congresswoman and Los Angeles county supervisor Yvonne Braithwaite Burke and regents’ Vice Chairman Meredith J. Khachigian of San Clemente stopped to speak to the protesters.

“This matter will likely come before the Regents Committee on Educational Policy,” predicted Regent Yori Wada of San Francisco. “And I’d be inclined to support it,” he added, after protest leaders asserted that current UC housing rules violate the UC system’s policy against discrimination.

“I think there is an inequity that exists and we will have to examine the issue,” said Burke, now a lawyer in Los Angeles.

But she added that changing the legal definitions of marriage and the family are matters more properly addressed by the state Legislature and the courts.

Khachigian asked student leaders whether there was support for unmarried student housing on campus. When told that more than 800 signatures were collected on petitions supporting such a change in housing policies, she said, “I think I’d have to do a lot more studying on this issue, but I’m willing to study it.”

Students hailed the impromptu meeting as a success.

“I was impressed with their courage--those who stopped to ask why we were here, those who said they would examine the issue and those who expressed support for our position,” said UCI student Jacqueline Sowell, 30.

“I feel they’ve consented to a dialogue on this issue,” she said.

UCI students first attracted public attention with a recent march on the chancellor’s office and a 10-day vigil outside the campus administration building in cardboard lean-tos dubbed “Shantytown.”

The protest was in reaction to Chancellor Jack W. Peltason’s decision in January to strictly enforce rules for family housing on campus.

Peltason has said he is committed to equal treatment of individuals regardless of their sexual orientation and contends that student housing policy is determined by state law.