Wilson Cancels Showdown Between Regents, Atkinson

Gov. Pete Wilson announced late Monday that the UC Board of Regents has canceled plans for a special meeting called to discuss President Richard Atkinson’s handling of the university’s new affirmative action policy.

Wilson said he had received a letter from Atkinson saying that he and the university’s nine chancellors have “not only a legal duty but a moral obligation to implement policies set by the UC Board of Regents.”

Atkinson’s letter convinced him, and the 10 other regents who asked for Wednesday’s special meeting, to cancel their request, Wilson said.

Atkinson faxed the conciliatory letter to the regents early in the day acknowledging that he bungled his decision to delay a ban on affirmative action in undergraduate admissions.

Nevertheless, the president was still being summoned until late in the day Monday to a special closed-door board meeting Wednesday, which observers said could place him in a position charged with risks to his--and the university’s--reputation.

Regent Ward Connerly, who spearheaded the board’s effort to ban racial and gender preferences, has promised to make the meeting a referendum on the role of UC’s nine campus chiefs in the decision to delay, placing Atkinson in the uncomfortable position, as one source put it, of “naming names.”

If he is asked to do that, sources close to the 66-year-old former chancellor of UC San Diego say he may refuse.

“Dick can’t finger chancellors,” said Albert Bowker, a former UC Berkeley chancellor and a longtime friend of Atkinson. “I don’t think he can do much more than he’s done in the letter. . . . Personally, he has absolutely nothing to gain.”

Bowker noted that Atkinson, a multimillionaire with a sterling academic reputation, “needs the job like a hole in the head.” Known as a stubborn loner, the president is not likely to tarnish his name by acting in a way that could be perceived as selling out his own top officials.

Sources say it is highly unlikely that Atkinson would quit. He campaigned for the UC presidency for years and was only appointed last summer after the regents’ first choice backed out. But, Bowker said, “he could be pushed” out.

Close observers of academia, meanwhile, said the implications of the current battle reach far beyond the fate of any one president. Fueling the harsh rhetoric, they say, is a fierce contest over who is in charge at UC, not just today, but in the future.

“Fundamental questions are now being raised about how the university is going to govern itself and [about] the willingness on the part of many people to push this institution to the point of crisis,” said Patrick M. Callan, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center in San Jose. “The whole governance system of the university appears to be coming unraveled.”

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who is chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Higher Education, agreed.

“There’s a good deal of curiosity in the Senate about who runs the university,” said Hayden, whose committee plans to hold a hearing on the governance issue next month.

Wilson, who made the abolition of affirmative action at UC a centerpiece of his failed presidential bid, has made it clear in recent days who he believes is in charge. The Board of Regents sets policy for UC, he said last week, and that “is not a duty that can be delegated.”

But many UC faculty members disagree. In recent months, the academic senates at all nine campuses have called on the regents to rescind their decision to roll back affirmative action on the grounds that the decision violated the traditions of shared governance--the accepted principle that universities should be run cooperatively, with decisions shared by trustee boards, administrators and faculty.

Faculty organizers freely admit that there is disagreement among professors about the merits of affirmative action. But on the issue of cooperative governance--under which decisions on admissions have been delegated to the faculty for decades--there is near unanimity.

The governor is simply wrong, professors told the board in a passionate presentation last month: The regents can delegate authority to the faculty and have been doing so for years.

“The regents have to realize that the faculty are closest to this process,” Larry Wallack, a UC Berkeley professor and co-organizer of the faculty’s effort to persuade the regents to reconsider, said Monday.

Further complicating the situation is the struggling campaign to qualify the so-called “California Civil Rights Initiative,” a statewide affirmative action ban, for the November ballot. The governor backs the measure and recently recruited his friend, Regent Connerly, to run the campaign, which needs to collect about 400,000 more signatures by Feb. 21 to qualify for the ballot.

Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, who like Wilson is a UC regent because of his governmental position, said Monday that the furor over Atkinson’s clumsy handling of the affirmative action ban is being exaggerated to keep the issue in the public eye.

“This issue was born in politics when it jump-started Pete Wilson’s presidential campaign,” Davis said. “Once again, politics is at work to resuscitate the CCRI initiative drive. . . . It is appalling. The very fact that the meeting is taking place is an embarrassment to the university and a potential humiliation to our brand-new president.”

Midday Monday, several regents were trying to persuade the governor and other key regents to cancel Wednesday’s meeting. Among them was Regent Bill Bagley, the co-author of the Bagley-Keene Open Meetings Act--the state law that preserves public access to government--who said he believes that the meeting may now be so broad in scope that it no longer qualifies for closed-meeting status.

“If we’re going to start talking about the whole damn system and how it works, that’s not executive session,” he said. “I will not sit there and be a participant in a meeting that I have legislated will be illegal.”

But Connerly seemed as determined as ever to hold the private meeting, though late in the day he attempted to paint as friendly what has for days been antagonistic.

“It’s not a confrontational meeting,” he said. “It’ll be a good meeting.”

Atkinson too tried to put the best face on the session. In a letter to Wilson, released late Monday, he said he welcomes the special meeting and hopes that it “can enable our board to resolve some of the misunderstandings which have plagued us in recent days.”