UCLA Creates Affirmative Action Course

It’s the latest hot-button issue--the subject of a statewide initiative, planned legislative hearings and ongoing public debate. Now, at UCLA, affirmative action is something else as well: the focus of scholarly study.

In what some are calling a triumph over academic bureaucracy, UCLA has done in a few weeks what usually takes months: created a new course, “The History and Politics of Affirmative Action,” the first in the University of California system to focus on escalating arguments over race- and gender-based preferences.

In lectures this quarter about everything from early suffrage movements to college admissions policies to constitutional law, 20 professors will seek to place affirmative action in historical, legal and political contexts. But the course’s real strength, some say, is that it has what many traditional course offerings lack: up-to-the-minute timeliness.

“I’ve never known anything to happen this quickly at the university,” Ellen DuBois, a UCLA history professor, said of the swiftness with which administrators moved to create the new course. “ ‘Timely’ in university parlance is about a year and a half. No one (creates) a course two weeks before the quarter starts. No one.”

Such haste has a downside, as university officials learned Monday afternoon when the class met for the first time. Because the course was organized too late to be listed on the schedule, most students first learned of its existence from an ad in that morning’s Daily Bruin, the college newspaper. The class debuted in a room large enough for 200, but fewer than 40 students showed up.

But those who did attend were hungry for answers. In a free-ranging discussion, one Asian American student lamented that affirmative action reinforced stereotypes, making people believe that minorities cannot succeed on their merits. A black student countered that before affirmative action, stereotypes flourished because minorities lacked opportunities to excel. Each student saw the issue a bit differently.

“In high school, I got the same scores as the white kids,” one young black woman said. “But they all said I got into UCLA because of affirmative action. Maybe so, but I don’t know.”

Another young woman said she had benefited from affirmative action programs in high school, but felt badly about it. “I’m a mixture of Southeast Asian and white. I’m an immigrant. I don’t feel like the government owes me anything,” she said. “But in high school, my counselor took one look at me and I appeared Latino, so I was given entrance.”

UCLA’s new course comes as the national and local debate over affirmative action grows more intense. A prospective 1996 ballot initiative that would eliminate many state affirmative action programs has won the support of Gov. Pete Wilson, who has made it a plank in his fledgling presidential campaign.

Moreover, the UC Board of Regents is now re-evaluating how such programs work in the UC system. Regent Ward Connerly has called for an end to race-based preferences in UC admissions--a proposal the board may consider in June. In response, UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young last month launched an impassioned defense of affirmative action, which he believes is still much needed.

Scott Waugh, UCLA’s dean of social sciences, said that while he and others had talked about a possible affirmative action course for six months, recent events led him to push for the course to happen quickly.

“Particularly since the university has been targeted by various people as one of the areas where affirmative action has been at work . . . we felt it was important to try to provide a platform for students to understand the issues,” Waugh said. “They are, in a sense, the direct ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘victims’ of affirmative action. They’re the ones who we should communicate to.”

Waugh, one of the course’s three creators, stressed that it is not designed to advocate a point of view. In fact, the class will be taught each week by a different professor. In class Monday, he assured students that no one had to pass a “political litmus test” to take part in the course, because all views will be represented.

Professors agreed, though one worried that students may assume otherwise.

“Especially given Young’s public position on the issue, this will be perceived by a lot of students as his attempt to indoctrinate (them). And that means the conservative students will stay away in droves,” said James Sidanius, a psychology professor who will lecture on his research into the motives for opposing affirmative action. “It’s up to the university to reach out and inform them that this is really not a stacked deck and they really are welcome.”

Several professors said they would not make a secret of their own support for affirmative action. But DuBois, whose lecture will link modern affirmative action programs to much earlier attempts to achieve fairness, such as the black suffrage movement of the 1860s, said it is less important that students agree with her than that they begin to appreciate the topic’s complexities.

“Because affirmative action is something that’s a result of political conflict and compromise, there’s nothing perfect about it--just as there was nothing perfect about the Emancipation Proclamation,” she said. “It’s all right with me if (students) come out with an anti-affirmative action position. I just want it to be more thoughtful and more informed.”

Regardless of their views, students who enroll in the course should prepare to have their assumptions tested, law professor Julian Eule said.

“This issue is more multifaceted and complex than public debate usually reveals,” said Eule, who will lecture on the use of voter initiatives to bypass the legislative process. “If (students) think they have it all straight in their minds, I’m going to confuse them. If they’re already confused, I’m going to seek to heighten their level of confusion, so at least they’re confused about the right things.”