UC Debates Affirmative Action Policy : Diversity: After 10 hours, regents are poised to vote on ending race- and gender-based preferences. Gov. Wilson and Jesse Jackson square off.

After 10 hours of emotional testimony and debate, the University of California Board of Regents was still struggling Thursday night to come to grips with the explosive issue of affirmative action, as it was poised to vote on the most far-reaching rollback of race and gender-based preferences in the nation.

With 500 chanting demonstrators massed outside, 250 people jammed the regents’ meeting room on the UC San Francisco campus. Seven hundred more watched on television monitors in a separate room, as 70 politicians, students and faculty leaders lined up to address the board.

“Today the eyes of the nation are on California,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson--after leading the audience in prayer and before pleading with the regents early in the day not to weaken its commitment to affirmative action.

But it was Republican Gov. Pete Wilson who set the tone for the debate at the start of the meeting, using his position as president of the panel to portray the issue as one of fairness or favoritism.

“Are we going to treat all Californians equally and fairly? Or are we going to continue to divide Californians by race?” he asked.

Jackson--like Wilson, a potential presidential candidate--urged the board not to drop its policy requiring officials to consider race and gender in admissions decisions.

“The consequence of going backwards is the loss of hope, the furthering of despair, the hardening of cynicism we can ill afford,” Jackson said in an emotional 42-minute address.

Outside, six demonstrators were arrested on civil disobedience charges, and a bomb threat forced evacuation of the meeting room for 40 minutes as the regents neared a vote in the late afternoon.

The threat was only the latest reminder of how emotional the issue has become in California and the nation. And it only served to put more pressure on a board that has been lobbied hard on both sides of the issue.

UC is the first college system in the country to formally consider scaling back its affirmative action programs.

At the center of the debate are two proposals that would require UC to stop using “race, religion, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin” as criteria in its admission decisions, unless applicants could prove that race or other factors had been barriers to their success. The policy change would take effect Jan. 1, 1997.

A similar provision would govern hiring and contracting practices as of Jan. 1, 1996. The proposals, made by Regent Ward Connerly, a Wilson appointee, also recommend that UC increase the percentage of students it admits solely on the basis of academic achievement, and call for a marked increase in funding for outreach programs to better prepare students from underrepresented ethnic groups to become eligible to attend UC.

Wilson lobbied for the proposals and was credited with marshaling support among an anxious board uncomfortable with its spot at the center of a national controversy. A Wilson victory--a vote by the board against its current race-and-gender preference policies--would help solidify his presidential bid and further establish affirmative action as the cornerstone of his campaign.

But the board was far from unified Thursday, as it listened to impassioned and poignant speeches from both sides of the issue.

Fierce Disagreement

Regents were told they should delay their vote and, conversely, that to do so would be to evade their responsibilities. One speaker said affirmative action was an essential tool to protect equal opportunity. The next called it a flawed mechanism that promoted racial separatism, not broke it down.

Everyone urged the board to summon the moral courage to steer UC on the right course, but there was fierce disagreement about what that was. To make their cases, speakers quoted everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Michael Jordan to God.

Advocates on both sides of the issue invoked the name of Martin Luther King Jr., and both bolstered their arguments by recalling his plea that America might someday be a place where individuals would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

As of late Thursday it appeared the vote would be so close that it might come down to a single regent. Of the 18 appointed regents on the 26-member board, 17 have been appointed by Republican governors--five of them by Wilson.

Assembly Speaker Doris Allen, the board’s 26th voting member, was absent. Her office released a statement saying she had flown to Colorado at the request of her mother, who has suffered a stroke. And Allen, reached in Colorado, indicated that she would probably have voted with Wilson had she been present.

Wilson, who serves as the board’s president but who has not attended a regular board meeting since 1992, used the occasion to solidify his image as a fiscal conservative eager to show his support for middle-class taxpayers and their children.

“It takes all the state taxes paid by three working Californians to provide the public subsidy for a single undergraduate at [UC],” he said. “The people who work hard to pay those taxes and who play by the rules deserve a guarantee that their children will get an equal opportunity to compete for admission to this university regardless of their race or gender.”

Wilson’s voice often cracked as he spoke, sounding weaker than it had in recent weeks, as he recovers from throat surgery.

Wilson praised Connerly, who is black, for having the courage to propose “essential” changes to the system that determines who gets to benefit from the education offered by the state’s premier public universities.

Several legislators and other speakers took the podium to argue against affirmative action, but dozens more defended the university policies, which require the nine campuses to enroll a student body that represents the cultural, racial, economic and social diversity of California.

Now, admission decisions are made based on academic criteria as well as geographic location, ethnicity, gender and special talents or experience. No student is supposed to be admitted on the basis of race alone.

Jackson was among several speakers who compared Wilson to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who once stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block black students from entering.

And, despite the fact that he himself is considering a presidential bid, Jackson struck out at Wilson for using affirmative action as a tool in his presidential campaign.

Attacks on affirmative action were “a platform for the governor of Alabama and now, Mr. Governor, it is your platform here,” said Jackson, who scolded Wilson for using such words as “tribalism” in his discussion of the issue. “Connotations like ‘tribalism’ go deep to the heart of racism. . . . But there are larger social and historical forces at work than . . . merely lazy, shiftless ‘tribes.’ ”

UC Leadership’s Support

Haile Debas, the dean of UC San Francisco School of Medicine, reminded the regents that if they dismantled affirmative action they would do so in defiance of UC’s president, vice presidents, faculty, academic senate and the student leadership--all of whom have expressed strong support for maintaining programs that seek to ensure diversity at UC.

“It would be an outrage if 13 or 14 regents, acting alone, destroyed a historic instrument of social progress in a moment of political frenzy,” he said. When he finished speaking, many in the audience rose to applaud him, and Student Regent Edward P. Gomez saluted him with a raised fist.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) said the affirmative action debate should be evaluated within a larger context of what is happening to higher education in California, where years of budget cuts have led to what Hayden called “disastrous downsizing.”

“We need to reframe this debate to focus on the loss of educational opportunity instead of a Darwinian rationing of seats,” he said, calling upon the regents to delay their decision. “One can have legitimate concerns about categorical ‘preferences’ or ‘set asides’. . . . But to prohibit even the ‘consideration’ of race or gender . . . is to depart from reality.”

Later, Hayden told reporters that he found Wilson’s position particularly surprising because the governor had himself considered race as a factor when he chose the five regents that he has appointed since becoming governor.

“The governor has taken race into consideration on each and every appointment,” Hayden said, claiming that Wilson had met with the Senate leadership and “explicitly agreed” to do so to ensure that the board became more diverse.

“To ask the regents to ban the criteria that were employed to choose them is an unbelievable hypocrisy,” Hayden said. “They know it. . . . The governor knows it.”

More than 100 additional people had requested time to speak, but board Chairman Clair W. Burgener told the audience that time constraints prevented everyone from airing their views.

UC officials said six people were arrested outside the building, five for blocking a driveway, one for trespassing. All were cited and released.

At the request of Student Regent Gomez, who argued that the lottery system that determined which members of the public would speak had not allowed for sufficient input from students, four additional students were granted permission to speak at the last minute. All urged the board not to retreat from its current policies.

There were a few moments of levity. When Regent-designate Richard Russell took the microphone, he lamented that because he was only a designate, “I don’t have a vote, I do have a voice.”

Wilson interjected, “I have a vote, but no voice.”

Russell responded, “I guess we’re opposites.”

To which Wilson quipped: “I’m willing to trade.”

Regent Ralph C. Carmona, a supporter of affirmative action who had been working throughout the day to help fashion a compromise that would preserve UC policies, chimed in: “Trade!. . . . Trade!”