Regents, UC Chief Resolve Dispute

Gov. Pete Wilson announced late Monday that the University of California Board of Regents has canceled a scheduled confrontation with UC President Richard Atkinson over his decision to delay its ban on affirmative action in admissions.

The cancellation of Wednesday’s special meeting of the regents came after Wilson and the entire board received letters from Atkinson reaffirming his commitment to implement the board’s policy. “I have a legal duty as well as a moral obligation to do so,” Atkinson wrote.

At issue was Atkinson’s announcement last week that he was delaying until fall 1998 the implementation of the regents’ prohibition on the use of race and gender preferences as criteria in undergraduate admissions. The announcement generated a furor among many regents, who asked for a meeting to review Atkinson’s performance.

On Monday, a conciliatory Atkinson told Wilson that he and the university’s nine chancellors would be proceeding “in good faith” to carry out that ban, approved in July. He said he believes the policy can be put in place for undergraduates entering as soon as spring 1998.

Atkinson has already announced that the ban on preferences in graduate and professional school admissions will go ahead as originally planned, in the fall of 1997.

The decision to cancel the closed-door meeting, made late Monday by the same 10 regents who had requested it last week, seemed to bring a peaceful end to what had been shaping up as a nasty fight.

Regent Ward Connerly, who spearheaded the ban on preferences at UC, said Monday he expects that in February the board will approve Atkinson’s new spring 1998 proposal. But the sudden resolution of the board’s battle with its president, which some worried would cost Atkinson his job, was still not expected to address the underlying governance problems at UC that have come to light in recent days.

Higher education experts said Monday that the implications of Atkinson’s skirmish with the board reach far beyond the fate of any one president. Fueling the harsh rhetoric, they said, was 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 that policy is a matter for regents only. 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 earlier this 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.

Monday night, Regent Connerly--who has acted as an intermediary between Wilson and Atkinson and who was instrumental in the decision to call off the meeting--said the clincher which led to the rapprochement was a conference call initiated by Connerly between himself, Wilson and Atkinson on Monday afternoon.

“The three of us talked,” he said. “The president and the governor were very cordial. . . . They expressed their mutual respect for each other. Atkinson said [to Wilson], ‘You haven’t gotten the credit you deserve for the work you’ve done.’ The governor said, ‘Well, you’ve done an excellent job as president.’ ”

Soon afterward, Atkinson faxed Wilson his letter, which along with the telephone call, cemented the deal, Connerly said. He praised the UC president for writing what he called such a “genuine” letter.

Just one day before, Connerly had vowed to turn the special meeting this week into a referendum on the nine campus chancellors to find out what role they played in Atkinson’s decision to delay the affirmative action ban.

But, he said, “As I read the letter [Atkinson sent to Wilson], I thought, ‘Here is a man who is strong but also very gracious, and the reciprocal thing [for us] to do is to cancel this meeting.’ We’ve got to heal this board. . . . I wanted to do the right thing.”

Connerly also heard from 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 believed that the meeting was becoming so broad in scope that it no longer qualified for closed-meeting status. That, too, gave Connerly pause, and he shared his reservations with the governor.

“I said, ‘Governor, I’d like to recommend to you that we cancel this meeting. There is a pending question out there about the chancellors, but I’m not sure that we can legally go into that,” Connerly recalled. “I said, ‘This guy [Atkinson] understands that he’s crossed the line.’ ”

Earlier in the day, observers had speculated that the meeting would place Atkinson, the 66-year-old former chancellor of UC San Diego, in a position charged with risks to his--and the university’s--reputation.

Connerly’s promise to focus on the chancellors’ role could have been interpreted as an attempt to make Atkinson “start naming names,” as one source put it. Had he been asked to do that, sources close to Atkinson said he would have refused.

“Dick can’t finger chancellors,” Albert Bowker, a former UC Berkeley chancellor and a longtime friend of Atkinson, said before the meeting was canceled. “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 was not likely to tarnish his name by acting in a way that could be perceived as selling out his own top officials.

Further complicating the situation was 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 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 had been 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.”