Seen, Not Heard

They did not listen to Tom Sayles. In a long day and night of speeches, what Tom Sayles said to the University of California regents on Thursday stood out. It stood out because of who he is--regent, Republican, former member of Pete Wilson’s Cabinet, former deputy attorney general, native of south Los Angeles, graduate of Stanford and Harvard law, corporate executive and black man.

It stood out, too, because of the way Sayles said what he had to say. He sat with his arms folded across his chest. He did not look at the cameras. He did not look at the crowd. He looked straight at Wilson and the other regents seated at a large rectangular table. He told them, evenly, firmly, that now was not the time to be tossing out admission policies calibrated to open the university to people of all colors. He told them that blaming affirmative action, as some were, for the racial divisiveness loose in the land was “akin to blaming chemotherapy for cancer.”

And he told them a story about himself. A few weeks ago Sayles had gone with his wife and children to look at a house he wanted to buy. He went, as he put it, “to this upscale neighborhood in my upscale car and upscale clothing.” A portrait of success. When Sayles arrived at the house, however, he did not receive upscale treatment. This was the real estate agent’s first look at Tom Sayles, and her eyes did not stop on the fine car or clothes. She told Sayles to wait and then, making sure he would overhear, concluded a curbside conversation with another prospective buyer.

“This is a great neighborhood,” Sayles heard the woman say. “Only whites, and a few Asians, live here.”

*

Sayles paused a beat after telling this story, and he sounded sad, weary, as he resumed: “I am battle-hardened,” he told the regents. “I can take care of myself. But we can’t say the same thing for all the young men and women trying to gain admission into our university.” He spoke of his 80-year-old father and his 12-year-old son, and not wanting to re-create for his son the world endured by his father.

Tom Sayles told them all this, but they did not listen. Just as they didn’t listen to the people who actually inhabit the university’s nine campuses. They didn’t listen to the students, who testified that the only problem with diversity on most campuses was that there still is not enough of it. They did not listen to the faculty or administrators, who said three decades of affirmative action programs actually had made the university a better place to learn. The programs were on whole good. They were working.

They did not listen to predictions from admissions experts that elimination of these programs would drop the number of blacks entering UC Berkeley to about 40--not even enough to field a traveling football squad. They did not listen to reminders that no qualified applicants of any color are turned away from the university even now; the first choice of campus might not always be available, but all qualified students are offered a slot. They did not listen to warnings that they were moving too fast, that the national debate on affirmative action is being framed largely with myth and anecdote, not fact.

“Get the facts before you act,” Assemblyman Phil Isenberg, chairman of a committee that just completed extensive hearings into the issue, counseled the regents. “You don’t have them. Nobody does. If you think you do, you are wrong.”

*

They did not listen to veteran political leaders who cautioned that the regents were about to sink one of California’s most august institutions into the mud of modern wedge politics. They did not listen to the inner city preachers and civil rights activists who said they feared returning to bad old days they remember too well.

They did not listen to the native Californians who wondered when their once-progressive state had become a caricature of the Deep South fiefdoms of demagogues like George Wallace and Orval Faubus.

What they listened to were the instructions of a governor--and thus, the president of the UC regents--who has learned how to win elections through the politics of division. He had appointed many of them, enough anyway to command a majority. They listened to Pete Wilson and, after all the speech-making finally was finished, they gave him by a 14-10 vote a platform on which to build his presidential campaign.

And what effect will this act--”historic,” the governor termed it, with unfortunate accuracy--have on the university these regents are supposed to serve? Well, only the honest ones will admit they don’t know. How can they? They weren’t listening.