UCLA Picks Interim Head for Chicano Studies : Education: Some activists criticize appointment of administrator who helped negotiate end to hunger strike.

UCLA officials announced Thursday that an administrator who helped negotiate an end to the highly publicized campus hunger strike last year would serve as interim director of the new Cesar Chavez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies.

But two of the hunger strikers called the move a halfhearted attempt to blunt accusations that the university was not moving quickly enough to honor its agreement with Chicano activists to open the center and hire faculty.

Carlos Grijalva, associate dean for honors and undergraduate programs, said Thursday that his appointment underscored the “urgency to get the center off the ground” but added that he expected to only hold the job until a permanent replacement is chosen by July.

“We really felt that it was important to get somebody who is in the field” of Chicano studies, said Grijalva, an associate professor of psychology whose specialty is the brain’s relationship to stress and psychosomatic disease.

Last spring, Grijalva helped negotiate an end to a 14-day hunger strike staged by nine students, professors and community members in reaction to an announcement by Chancellor Charles E. Young that the school’s interdisciplinary Chicano studies program would not be upgraded to an academic department, as Latino activists had demanded.

Grijalva helped end the impasse by consolidating support for demonstrators’ demands among administrative colleagues, who in turn helped persuade Young to approve a compromise establishing an independent Chicano studies center by September, 1993.

Despite Grijalva’s helpful role, UCLA anatomy professor Jorge Mancillas and UCLA student Marcos Aguilar criticized his appointment Thursday as an indication that UCLA was taking only partial, inadequate steps to create the center, which was supposed to be up and running nearly four months ago.

Aguilar, a sixth-year senior who also participated in last year’s hunger strike, accused UCLA administrators of “playing games with . . . the whole struggle” because, as an administrator, Grijalva would be obligated to defend the Administration in the face of further demands from students or the community.

“They’re using his Mexican last name and yet they know he is an administrator,” Aguilar said. “They are trying to shut people up like that.”

Grijalva, however, said he intends to push ahead with plans to hire four faculty members to work exclusively for the center. He said a trickle of applications has come in so far but he expects more interest before the Feb. 15 deadline.

The hiring of faculty members specifically to teach at the new center was a key issue in last year’s compromise. Activists complained that the traditional program, which at one point was in danger of termination, lacked direction and status. The interdisciplinary approach favored by Young offered an 18-course curriculum--three or four classes a semester--taught by professors from different departments.

Demonstrators wanted Young to create a separate Chicano studies department, a more prestigious designation that confers the power to hire faculty and shape a coherent curriculum. The compromise didn’t go that far, but UCLA administrators say the center will function like a department all the same.

Grijalva said Thursday that hiring the four professors would allow the center to nearly double UCLA’s Chicano studies course offerings, perhaps by next fall.