UC Chief Seeks to Heal Breach With Regents

Seeking to avoid a planned showdown that could cost him his job, University of California President Richard Atkinson has sent a conciliatory letter to Regent Ward Connerly acknowledging that he mishandled his decision to delay the ban on affirmative action in UC admissions.

“I recognize the board’s role in establishing university policy and erred in not adequately consulting with the regents before deciding to postpone,” sources quoted the two-page draft letter as saying. A final version of the letter is expected to be forwarded to the entire Board of Regents today.

Connerly, the regent who spearheaded the ending of race and gender preferences at UC, refused Sunday to reveal the letter’s precise contents. But he called it “a step in the right direction” and expressed confidence that the board’s problems with the president would be resolved.

Still, it was not enough to persuade Connerly to cancel a special, closed-door meeting of the board, scheduled for Wednesday, that 10 regents requested last week to review Atkinson’s performance.

“There are certain issues that have emerged that can only be resolved by a meeting with the president--namely, the role of the chancellors in all this,” Connerly said, referring to the chiefs of the nine campuses.

“If the chancellors are egging the president on [to defy the board], that’s something the board needs to address,” he said. “The meeting is on.”

Last week, Gov. Pete Wilson summoned Atkinson for an angry, private meeting from which the 66-year-old former chancellor of UC San Diego emerged red-faced but resolute. Wilson appointed Connerly to the Board of Regents, and they are working together to qualify the “California civil rights initiative,” a statewide affirmative action ban, for the November ballot.

Connerly’s decision to shift the meeting’s focus from a referendum on Atkinson to an analysis of the conduct of his chancellors took UC officials by surprise, sharpening the divide between the politically appointed regents and the career administrators of the university system.

A source involved in the UC negotiations said Atkinson and his advisors were working under the assumption that the special meeting would be canceled if Atkinson was apologetic and expressed his commitment to implement the policy that the regents approved last July.

“They were assuming that if the letter was agreed to, the meeting would be off,” the source said. “They are surprised to learn . . . there will still be a meeting.”

The source said the talk among UC’s top officials late Sunday was “over whether this is salvageable. The line between what the president is willing to do and what some board members are asking is getting thinner and thinner.”

Sources confirmed that Atkinson’s draft letter suggests that he and the chancellors are united in their commitment to follow the board’s lead.

“I will be working closely with the chancellors and other colleagues on the campuses,” the letter reportedly says. “Let there be no doubt that this will be accomplished in accordance with the policy set by the regents.”

But apparently that is not strong enough to satisfy Connerly, who is alarmed by reports that the chancellors may have pressured Atkinson to act in defiance of the board. The Wednesday meeting is still necessary, Connerly insists, to discuss “what should be a reasonable expectation on the board of how the president’s deputies are going to conduct themselves.”

Regent Glenn Campbell, who was among the 10 regents who demanded the special meeting, said Sunday that he too felt that it should not be canceled.

“If Ward says we have to have a meeting, we’ll have a meeting. But if I was Atkinson, I wouldn’t be very happy,” he said.

But other regents were disappointed and accused Connerly of trying to turn the meeting into a witch hunt.

“If he intends to change the meeting . . . and turn it into an inquisition on the actions of Atkinson in relation to his chancellors, that’s completely unacceptable,” said Regent Roy Brophy. He said Connerly was declaring, in effect, “You’ve corrected the thing, but now we want to see who we can punish for it.”

Once Atkinson sends a letter to the board, Brophy continued, he “should not be required to go any further than that. Once he’s made an attempt to compromise, he shouldn’t be forced to denigrate the office or himself over this kind of nonsense.”

Ironically, as some of the regents prepare to grill Atkinson on how the university should be governed, the issue of affirmative action itself has receded to the back burner.

Connerly and another source involved in the negotiations confirmed that Atkinson’s draft letter proposes a compromise date for when the ban on preferences in undergraduate admissions should take effect: the spring 1998 term.

That date is six months earlier than the plan Atkinson announced last week, which would have first affected undergraduates entering UC in fall 1998. Also last week, he announced that the ban on preferences in graduate and professional school admissions will proceed according to the original schedule, affecting students who enroll in fall 1997.

Wilson has maintained that the policy takes effect in 1997 for graduate and undergraduate students. Nevertheless, Connerly said Sunday that he believes that the governor, if asked, will join with the entire board in accepting the spring 1998 compromise for undergraduates.

More than affirmative action or the difference of a year’s time in the effective date, then, the central issue has become who is in charge of the university. While Atkinson’s letter was cause for optimism on this front, Connerly said, it remained too vague in certain key areas.

“Left unresolved in all of this is whether the president simply erred in not consulting a broader range of regents or whether he erred in not coming back to the board and saying, ‘I need more time,’ ” Connerly said.

“This goes to a style of governance. It is not appropriate in our view for the president to say, ‘I’m going to make some decisions on policy and I’ll tell you about it, or I’ll pick select regents to tell.’ ”

Atkinson was appointed by the regents last summer. He could only be fired by a majority vote of the 26-member governing board, which includes Atkinson, Wilson and 18 regents appointed by Wilson or previous governors.