UCLA Rejects Plan for Chicano Studies Department : Education: Plea by Latino activists to elevate status of program is turned down after 3 years of controversy.

After three years of controversy and study of the issue, UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young announced Wednesday that Chicano studies will not be elevated to an independent department at the Westwood campus. Latino activists, who long had been pushing for the change, reacted angrily and promised to continue their efforts.

Young insisted that the current status of Chicano studies as an interdepartmental program for undergraduates is most effective because it brings together expert faculty from different fields on campus. He also announced a new policy aimed at giving Chicano studies and other interdisciplinary programs more power in decisions involving the hiring of professors.

UCLA’s commitment to Chicano studies “was never in question,” Young said of the program, which enrolls about 50 students as majors. “The only question was what structure would be most effective.”

However, Vivien Bonzo, co-chair of a committee that had lobbied for full departmental status, denounced Young’s decision as “characteristic of the failure of the UC system to respond to the needs of the ethnic communities.” A restaurateur who also heads the Olvera Street Merchants Assn., she cited the demonstrations last week by students clamoring for the establishment of an Asian-American studies program at UC Irvine.

Young’s announcement was an ill-timed reminder of the struggles of the Chicano rights movement, Bonzo said, because many Chicano activists are attending today’s funeral for farm worker union leader Cesar Chavez. She predicted that Chavez’s death will shock people into renewed activism in pressing UCLA for the respect and autonomy that departmental standing brings to an academic subject.

Three years ago, a UCLA faculty committee found the Chicano studies program to be weak and recommended suspension of admissions of new students in the major. Fearful that the program would be abolished, campus activists won a commitment from campus officials to strengthen it.

Since then, the future of Chicano studies at UCLA has been the focus of much detailed study and political maneuvering. And enrollments in classes have grown significantly, with several hundred non-majors taking at least one of the 18 courses offered this year, officials said.

Scott Waugh, UCLA’s dean of social sciences, said Wednesday that the budget crisis facing all nine UC campuses came up during the discussions about Chicano studies. Yet Waugh said that the final decision against departmental status was not based on financial worries.

The program’s 1992-93 budget was $251,000. The figure does not include the salaries of tenured faculty who teach Chicano studies courses but who are based in and paid by departments such as history and sociology, Waugh said.

Faculty hirings now are made by specific departments. Young’s plan would allow interdisciplinary programs to share in those hiring decisions, a move intended to ease the awkwardness professors sometimes face in seeking permission from their department chairmen to teach a Chicano studies class.

But UCLA history professor Juan Gomez-Quinones said such shared arrangements will still give departments a veto over hirings. “We figure the matter is not satisfactorily dealt with. For us, satisfaction would be getting a department,” said Gomez-Quinones, who teaches Chicano studies classes.

David Lopez, the acting director of the 20-year-old Chicano studies program, described the joint hiring idea as “a consolation prize” that may prove unworkable and may frighten away potential new professors.

Young said he hoped Chicano studies activists on and off campus will work with him to create “the premier program of its kind in the country.” If academic departments do not cooperate in allowing professors to hold joint appointments, the chancellor promised to review his decision.