Battle Over UC Policy Comes at Key Time

Gov. Pete Wilson took the president of the University of California “to the woodshed” last week, an aide reports. “The governor gave him a tongue-lashing.”

From university spin-meisters, however, we hear that UC President Richard Atkinson was “bold” and “stood his ground”--before backing off some Sunday.

Lt. Gov. Gray Davis--like Wilson a UC regent, but a supporter of affirmative action--praised Atkinson for his “gutsy step” in delaying for one year the regents’ ban on racial preferences in student admissions.

“He said, ‘The hell with you, folks,’ ” asserts Regent Ward Connerly, a black businessman who is leading the statewide fight against affirmative action. “It’s the height of bureaucratic arrogance.”

Regent Bill Bagley, a cagey pol maneuvering quietly to save affirmative action--”and the university”--laments that all this “bloodletting simply exacerbates the scar on the body politic.”

So it has gone. Passion and fiery rhetoric involving one of the most emotional subjects of this or any other time--race/ethnicity. Two years ago, the battle was over illegal immigration. This year, it’s affirmative action.

And at present the real action--the critical activity that ultimately could be decisive in California--is not taking place at the university or where the noise is, but inconspicuously around the state in mail boxes and on card tables at shopping malls.

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The drive to stop affirmative action in California government and public universities clearly has hit a road bump. The next three weeks will determine whether the movement can remain on course, including at UC. Its fate is riding with thousands of petition circulators and a million pieces of mail.

At stake not only is affirmative action, but a presumed advantage for the Republican party in the November elections.

Feb. 21 is the deadline for sponsors of the “California civil rights initiative”--CCRI--to turn in the 694,000 voter signatures required to place their proposal on the November ballot. To assure enough valid signatures, they need to collect roughly 1 million.

A year ago, hardly anybody foresaw a problem. Polls then--as now--showed solid public support for the initiative’s aim: To ban racial and gender preferences in public hiring, contracting and student admissions.

But the campaign, launched by two political neophyte professors, stumbled badly. Their crusade did attract astounding news coverage. They spread their message of unfair reverse discrimination. Wilson took up the cause in his failed presidential bid and pushed the regents into adopting CCRI for the university. Yet, the campaign failed to do what any initiative must: focus first on collecting signatures to get on the ballot.

“This looked like a dog’s breakfast from the beginning,” says one political consultant.

In hindsight, much time was wasted trying to coax Democratic legislators into placing the measure on the March primary ballot, where it would be of little value to Republicans. Then-Speaker Willie Brown teased the initiative sponsors, but eventually slammed the door.

Brown figured correctly: CCRI was disorganized and underfunded and would be shunned by big business. The corporate world had its own affirmative action programs and saw controversial CCRI as a public relations nightmare.

“Business has spines of Jello,” Connerly says.

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Connerly recently was recruited by Wilson to lead a CCRI rescue effort. Volunteers were organized; the bounty for signatures increased.

One million mailers now are en route to GOP voters from the state and national parties and the CCRI campaign, seeking signatures and money. The national GOP will follow up with 150,000 phone calls.

Roughly 600,000 signatures have been collected--60% of the goal. “We’re going to make it by the hair of our chinny-chin-chin,” Connerly predicts.

Regent Bagley waits calmly and patiently.

A former GOP assemblyman and adept political climatologist, Bagley will wangle to rescind the UC ban on affirmative action if the initiative fails to make the ballot. If CCRI affected only UC, he says, “the university would be lying out there raw and naked” and some regents might change their previous votes. But absent the “raw and naked” scenario, he realizes, any rescission attempt would be fruitless and would boomerang.

Atkinson’s “gutsy step” was less about affirmative action than turf. And in his boldness--in playing to the campus crowd--he was clumsy. He dared the regents to reaffirm their vote against racial preferences, which they could do this week.

The UC president also has rallied CCRI supporters for the more immediately critical fight: The qualifying of a powerful ballot measure.