Angela Davis Again at Center of UC Storm : Education: Republican lawmakers cite radical past of Santa Cruz professor, say she doesn’t deserve $75,000 appointment to create academic courses. System president refuses to rescind award.

Angela Davis, whose membership in the Communist Party prompted one of the biggest controversies at the University of California in the 1960s, is once again at the center of a rhetorical firestorm.

The unlikely reason: the 51-year-old UC Santa Cruz professor has received a prestigious professorial award that some Republican lawmakers think she doesn’t deserve.

Several legislators have demanded that UC President Jack W. Peltason rescind Davis’ appointment to the presidential chair, which will provide the $67,800-a-year professor an additional $75,000 over 2 1/2 years to develop new ethnic studies courses, among other things.

A few lawmakers have even suggested that if Peltason does not back down, the UC system may face harsher scrutiny in upcoming budget hearings.

“This issue would not cause me to take an act of retribution, but it would cause me to seriously question (Peltason’s) judgment as he puts proposals before us,” said state Sen. Tim Leslie (R-Carnelian Bay). “. . . I’m going to have a lot less confidence in what he’s putting forward.”

Davis has been a professor of “the History of Consciousness,” an interdisciplinary graduate program at UC Santa Cruz, since 1991.

She may be better known, however, for her earlier stint at UCLA, where she taught philosophy until the UC Board of Regents dismissed her in 1969, alarmed by her political views and her activity on behalf on a group of black prison inmates known as the Soledad Brothers.

A year later, guns belonging to Davis were used in a shootout in the Marin County Courthouse that killed four people, including a judge, two San Quentin convicts, and the young man who had smuggled the guns into the courtroom.

Davis was charged with murder and kidnaping and fled, ending up on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list. She was captured two months later in New York and returned to California for trial. In 1972, a jury found her not guilty on all charges.

She went on to resume her teaching career at San Francisco State.

It is Davis’ past--not her more recent scholarly work or the proposal she wrote to apply for the presidential chair--that has some legislators riled.

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“At a time when we’re trying to reconcile racial and gender differences, here’s a person who’s made a career of exacerbating those differences,” said state Sen. Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino), the second-ranking Republican in the upper house. He compared honoring Davis to celebrating a professor “who happened to have a side life as a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. I see her as the leftist equivalent of that.”

Leonard was the first legislator to ask Peltason to rescind Davis’ appointment. In a recent letter to the UC president, he asserted that Davis “has proven herself an anti-Semite and a racist throughout her life” and called her appointment “an affront to liberal thought and to those educators and California taxpayers who believe that the UC system should provide quality education.”

Last week, two more lawmakers sent similar letters. State Sen. Maurice Johannessen (R-Redding) urged Peltason to let “decency” prevail by stripping a “counter culture castoff” like Davis of her award. Assemblyman Steven T. Kuykendall (R-Rancho Palos Verdes) said that if the appointment stands, “it will tarnish the prestige and integrity of the UC system.”

On Friday, Peltason issued a statement reminding his critics that the presidential chairs, established in 1981, are designed to encourage new or interdisciplinary programs and to enhance the quality of existing ones. Of the eight proposals that were submitted at UC Santa Cruz, Davis’ proposal was deemed the one most likely to “enrich undergraduate education and scholarly activity,” Peltason said.

“I would have no reason for revoking my decision other than the fact that the appointment is, for some, a controversial one,” Peltason’s statement concluded. In an interview, he added, “I don’t go out of my way to create controversy. On the other hand, a university cannot avoid making academic judgments because they are controversial.”

In appointing Davis, Peltason said he accepted the recommendation of UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Karl S. Pister. “I have no grounds to second-guess the academic judgments of academics and I don’t apply political judgments,” he said.

But some legislators said they wished Peltason would assert himself more forcefully.

“If the president of a great university system is nothing more than a rubber stamp . . . then why do we even have him?” asked Sen. Leslie.

Not all Republicans are up in arms about Davis’ appointment. Assemblyman Bruce McPherson (R-Santa Cruz), whose district includes the UC Santa Cruz campus, said some legislators seem to be confused about what Davis will receive. The $75,000 stipend is neither a raise nor a bonus, he stressed, but is earmarked for particular programs.

He said he was satisfied that Davis’ proposal had undergone a rigorous review process, and he criticized legislators who would use her appointment as ammunition in the upcoming budget battle.

“I’m sure I don’t agree with everything she says,” McPherson said. “But if we get into fooling around with academic freedom, we put the whole system in jeopardy because we turn into dictators ourselves. . . . I know she’s got a real checkered past. But she was found not guilty, too. So let’s not convict her.”

Davis, meanwhile, has tried to stay out of the fray.

“I don’t think I have to basically defend my right to receive this appointment,” she said last week.

Davis said she will use half the $75,000 stipend to create a Research Cluster on Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict, which will develop curricula and host conferences.

Some $12,500 will be spent on research into the criminalization and incarceration of women. And the remaining $25,000 will go toward the salary of a faculty member to replace Davis while she works to develop a Ph.D. program in African American studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Davis said she believes the recent attacks are part of a “concerted assault against multicultural education,” and she admits they have given her “a very bizarre sense of deja vu .”

Davis told a group of Mills College students in a recent speech that when she learned she had received the presidential chair last month, she realized that “the last time I had heard from people at that level within the University of California, it was when I was informed in 1969 that I was fired.”