Professor of Chicano Studies Lectures on Age Bias in Court : Dispute: Veteran CSUN department head, denied position at UC Santa Barbara, says reviewers acted inappropriately.

Doing what he has done for most of his life, Cal State Northridge professor Rodolfo Acuna lectured a federal court jury this week, standing before blown-up copies of documents and highlighting key phrases he said proved that the University of California refused to hire him because of age bias.

But when UC lawyers cross-examined Acuna on Wednesday and presented him with a similar phrase in a highly complimentary recommendation letter, the Chicano studies instructor said it was not an example of age bias and was being taken out of context.

Rejected for a position at UC Santa Barbara in 1991, Acuna is pressing an age discrimination suit against the university in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleging that the professors who reviewed his application and recommended not hiring him had inappropriately dwelled on his age--59 at the time--and on his widely acknowledged status as a father of the Chicano studies movement.

“ ‘Dr. Acuna was born in 1932,’ ” Acuna said, pointing to a phrase on a UC document that he then marked in bright pink, “and the more I read,” he told jurors,”the angrier I became.”

The sentence came near the beginning of a five-page report by an ad hoc UC review committee written in June, 1991, and headed a section called “Summary of Career.” It went on to say that Acuna “took his Ph.D. in History in 1968 from the University of Southern California, and has been a professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge, since 1969.”

Acuna also underlined a description of him in the same report as “a master spirit who can achieve remarkable things,” telling the jury he viewed that as a derogatory reference to age because it made him sound like a “godlike” and Ghandi-esque figure. Concluding a full day of testimony Tuesday, he also pointed to a phrase expressing concern that his “stature and experience would stand so far above the rest of his colleagues that his position could verge on being dictatorial.”

Turning toward the jury from his poster boards and gesturing with his hands for emphasis, Acuna said of the remark: “It has no substance; it is an insult.”

As Acuna moved from one statement to another that included no open mention of his age, Judge Audrey B. Collins repeatedly reminded him to mark only those phrases that dealt with the issue. When he went on to highlight a sentence saying, “More than ordinarily, then, the future character of the Department of Chicano Studies will be shaped for years into the future by this one hiring decision,” Collins asked:

“And you would consider that to be age-related?”

“Yes, I would,” Acuna replied.

But on Wednesday, as UC attorney Clyde Lockwood cross-examined Acuna, he asked him to recall a portion of a recommendation letter written on his behalf by an associate professor of history at UC-Santa Cruz.

The March, 1991, letter lauds Acuna’s “contribution to the development of Chicano studies,” calls him an “exemplary scholar-activist,” and goes on to say near the end:

“In middle age he is not yet tired, or cynical or jaded, nor yet ready to bask in his laurels. He has, it seems to me, more than ‘paid his dues’ and earned an opportunity to have during his last years a less demanding teaching schedule, less responsibility for program-building, a chance to work with some serious graduate students in the field of Chicano history and studies, and some time to do the more reflective and deeper-probing writing of which I believe that he is fully capable.”

When Lockwood asked if Acuna thought that statement reflected attention to his age, Acuna replied no, and said it was unfair to take it out of context.

UC’s defense team contends that is exactly what Acuna is doing--that his evaluators’ mentions of age were meant only as measures of the length of his career and its accomplishments. Despite his popularity as an instructor and undeniable reputation as a founder of Chicano studies, UC evaluators concluded, Acuna’s scholarship was “thin” and he lacked experience mentoring Ph.D. candidates.

The university’s lawyers believe they have a strong case but say they are concerned about the racial makeup of the eight-member jury, which is composed of four Latinos, one African American, a Filipino American, an elderly white woman, and a young man who is half white and half Asian.

Acuna, now 62, peppered his testimony with Spanish phrases, took care to address the jury directly, and often smiled at supporters who have been filling the courtroom daily since the trial began last week.

During his testimony, he recounted growing up in Boyle Heights during the Depression, the son of a tailor and a housewife who were both Mexican immigrants. Acuna interrupted his college career to serve in the military, he continued, then returned after the Korean War to complete bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees while juggling several jobs to support his first wife and two children.

He joined CSUN in 1969, founding a Chicano Studies Department that has grown from a handful of students to 100 majors and thousands of others taking courses, Acuna told the jury. He also proudly described how he badgered the university’s administration into increasing his department’s funding, thus building his staff from fewer than four full-time instructors to 22 today.

At one point, as the trial resumed after a recess but before the jurors returned, Acuna made a gesture with his fist from the witness stand that drew appreciative chuckles from several colleagues and students.

Both sides in the 3-year-old case have already agreed that if the jury finds for Acuna, he will receive $350,000 in back and future pay. UC, which began presenting its defense Wednesday, was expected to continue calling witnesses today.