More Than Ever, UC Needs Goodwill : Affirmative action: It’s now up to the chancellor, president and faculty to uphold the spirit of it.

In 1975, a year after I became an assistant professor, I discovered that I had been hired under a new plan called affirmative action. It didn’t bother me. At the time, my department’s claim to diversity was that the all-white male faculty came from different Ivy League colleges. Besides, I also felt qualified. Since they were going to hire some woman, I knew I had faced some pretty stiff competition.

I was also relieved. When I graduated from college, one of my professors told me that history was a man’s discipline, and since I would never get a job, I should do something else. I didn’t, and I was glad to prove him wrong.

Unlike Clarence Thomas or Ward Connerly, I have never felt a compelling need to denounce the policy that opened up closed doors to me. Nor do I feel apologetic or ashamed that I was hired as an affirmative action candidate.

Middle-class women were best positioned to take advantage of affirmative action programs. Once the barriers were lifted, we leaped into male-dominated professions and occupations.

Never a law, affirmative action began as an executive order. As a policy, it required an attitude of goodwill. It survived because a majority of Americans agreed that women and minorities had been disproportionately excluded from educational and employment opportunities.

That consensus started to erode when Ronald Reagan, running on a feel-good campaign to bring back the ‘50s, became President and gave Americans permission to voice their hidden doubts about the desirability of such equality. Reagan stirred up memories of a time when women and minorities knew their place and mostly stayed there. Ever since, affirmative action has been in jeopardy.

Let’s be honest. As a policy, affirmative action was sometimes exhilarating and often infuriating. At its best, it required us to look beyond our normal networks, to search beyond the usual suspects and to include those qualified persons who had been excluded. At its worst, affirmative action could be wielded as a bludgeon by administrators who mechanically implemented dubious policies that ensured their own advancement but often sabotaged the spirit of affirmative action.

The trickiest part was not in hiring faculty but admitting students. Sure, there were some mistakes, even disasters. But I have encountered too many white, blond, functionally illiterate native-born students to be concerned with the few “affirmative action” students who were equally unprepared to enter the University of California.

The regents have taken their stand and the governor, setting a new record for shameless opportunism, has forfeited his claim for national leadership. In contrast, President Clinton, in one of his rare displays of political leadership, sought national reconciliation when he declared that we must fan the spirit of affirmative action, even as we examine some of its questionable practices.

Now it is our turn. We don’t need the regents to keep the spirit of affirmative action alive. University faculty and administrators still have the right and responsibility to admit and hire the best and the brightest from diverse backgrounds. We still have the obligation to advertise widely, to search for hidden talent, to discover students and teachers whose diverse backgrounds make the university a more cosmopolitan and enlightened institution.

In the end, affirmative action was--and always will be--a question of attitude and political will. It is now up to the president, chancellors and faculty of the University of California to demonstrate that, even without official sanction, we will retain our commitment to the spirit of affirmative action. We can do no less.