UC Regents Refuse to Yield on Affirmative Action Ban

After seven months of turmoil over their decision to abolish affirmative action, the University of California Board of Regents on Thursday refused to back down, postponing indefinitely a vote on proposals to revive the policy of race and gender-based preferences.

Ignoring dramatic pleas from students and their professors, who said the delay would only increase tensions between the regents and the faculty, a joint committee of the board voted 12 to 4 to delay consideration of a proposal to rescind their July action, which bans the consideration of race and gender in UC’s hiring, contracting and admissions decisions.

A second proposal, which would have imposed a one-year moratorium on the ban, was then voluntarily postponed by its author, alumni Regent Judith Levin. Looking down the long boardroom table at Gov. Pete Wilson, who had engineered the ban last summer, Levin said pointedly that she decided to delay “in light of continuing and blatant political intervention” into board matters.

Security for Thursday’s meeting was even tighter than before, with more than 250 law enforcement officers blanketing the UC San Francisco campus at Laurel Heights to keep order among the 200 student protesters who stood vigil in the rain outside.

In the meeting room, police were kept busy handling a series of carefully orchestrated protests by students, which climaxed months of marches, sit-ins and picket lines on campuses statewide.

Regents tried to limit speakers to 60 seconds apiece, but one by one, students defied that order, and used their turns to read from a lengthy statement calling for the return of affirmative action.

The regents responded by turning off the microphone, then asking police to arrest each of the student speakers. In all, 11 were taken into custody for disrupting the public meeting.

In the wake of those arrests, the audience registered its disapproval silently. In an apparent effort to show regents what the UC student body could look like without affirmative action, dozens of students of all ethnic backgrounds covered their faces with white paint, then taped their mouths shut with orange stickers that read “Reclaim Your Education.”

Although the regents’ action fell short of a clear-cut affirmation of Wilson’s views, the postponements were a clear victory for the governor. Just as he had in July, Wilson made a rare appearance at the board meeting--this one a joint session of the educational policy and finance committees--to speak against race-based preferences and to urge regents to stand their ground.

“Admission to UC isn’t an entitlement that should be distributed based on some quota,” he said before the regents’ vote. “It’s something to be earned based on hard work and individual excellence. . . . That’s the course we set last July. Let’s not stray from it.”

The joint committee could have voted the proposals down, sent them to the full board for consideration or postponed action. The postponements were widely seen as a boon to supporters of a struggling effort to qualify the so-called “California civil rights initiative,” a statewide affirmative action ban, for the 1996 ballot.

Wilson has been among the initiative’s strongest allies, as has Regent Ward Connerly, who proposed the ban on affirmative action at UC and is now running the initiative campaign, which needs more than 700,000 signatures by late February to qualify for the ballot.

If Thursday’s action was a win for Wilson and Connerly, however, some faculty members warned that it was a major loss for the university.

For months, a coalition of faculty members has complained that their views were ignored during the regents’ debate over affirmative action, violating the widely accepted principle of shared governance that gives faculty a major role in determining UC’s educational policy.

In a formal two-hour presentation Thursday, they told the board that recruitment of top faculty and students is becoming more difficult, not just because of the regents’ rejection of affirmative action but because of the way they reached that decision.

When the regents defied the wishes of UC’s president, its nine chancellors and its systemwide academic faculty council--all of whom recommended against repealing affirmative action--they sent a disturbing message about the way the university system is run, said UC Berkeley anthropology professor Margaret Conkey.

“On matters close to the educational and research core of the university . . . the faculty asks not merely that it be consulted, but that its judgment be respected,” Conkey said.

She called the July vote “the worst breach of prevailing norms of governance at a major American university in over a quarter of a century. . . . A continued failure to repair this breach, the faculty believes, threatens the University of California’s status as the nation’s leading public university.”

The faculty was supported by UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young, who told the board that the issue of shared governance eclipses affirmative action in its significance to the university.

“As important as the issue of affirmative action is, it is not as important as the basic system of governance of this university,” Young said. “If we make decisions in matters of very great concern [without considering the] . . . overwhelming intense opposition, something is wrong. This board has done that in the case at hand.”

After the regents rejected the faculty’s pleas, UC Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel called their vote “a political grandstanding operation,” masterminded by Wilson, who showed up Thursday too late to hear the faculty’s presentation but just in time to vote against their proposal.

Now, 18 of the 26 regents are appointed by the governor, who himself is a voting member of the board, and Karabel said Wilson’s behavior Thursday was proof that the university is not free from political intervention.

Regent Levin agreed, vowing to reintroduce her proposal to delay the ban on affirmative action, perhaps as early as spring, and preferably at a meeting that the governor does not attend.

“There was political pressure” on Thursday, she said. “He was here. That’s pressure enough.”