UC Regents Joust Over Preferences Dispute

In their first public interplay since they cobbled together a tenuous truce, four University of California regents took to the airwaves Wednesday, engaging in an occasionally pointed exchange about their squabble with UC President Richard Atkinson on a radio talk show.

Calling in to KCRW-FM (89.9) in Santa Monica, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis endorsed the petition, signed by 47 Democratic legislators this week, that calls on Regent Ward Connerly to refrain from voting on UC’s affirmative action policies because he now heads the campaign to qualify the so-called “California civil rights initiative” for the November ballot.

Connerly responded by implying that Davis--a likely candidate for governor in 1998--is himself the politically motivated regent.

“One thing that should be said [is] that Davis is a very active member of the [regents’] board and takes a lot of positions on a lot of issues,” said Connerly, who has headed the campaign for the statewide anti-affirmative action measure since November. “And no one, certainly I, would ever question whether it’s because of future aspirations.”

So it went during the 40-minute show.

The regents talked of the need to heal the badly divided board and addressed each other with supposed warmth--Connerly called Regent Bill Bagley “a gentleman,” and Regent Ralph Carmona called Connerly “my friend.” But beneath the politesse, there was some of the familiar jockeying for position that has become the regents’ trademark in recent days.

Since last week, when Atkinson first announced his plan to delay the regents’ affirmative action ban for one year, regents on both sides have sought to control the situation. On Wednesday, in the wake of Atkinson’s written pledge to uphold board policy--probably by spring 1998 for undergraduates and fall 1997 for graduate and professional students--the spin doctors were still hard at work.

Bagley kicked off the show by subtly taking credit for his fellow regents’ decision to cancel a planned closed-door meeting to review Atkinson’s performance.

“They canceled the meeting because it would have been a 10-minute . . meeting,” Bagley said, explaining that a law that he co-authored as a legislator protects the public’s right to attend governmental meetings, and Connerly’s desire to make the meeting a referendum on the nine campus chancellors was too broad in scope to qualify as a closed session. “That’s how come the meeting was called off.”

Connerly was next, and while he praised Bagley for helping to bring the situation to a “harmonious” conclusion, he argued that legally the meeting had been on solid ground.

“The reason we decided to cancel [was] as a good-faith gesture to move on to the other business that affects the university,” he said.

Connerly defended himself and the other nine regents who called for the closed-door meeting, suggesting that without the threat of review there would have been no “letter from the president backing off” on his intention to delay the affirmative action ban.

Carmona, who is a regent by virtue of his position as vice president of the UC Alumni Assn., accused Connerly of leading a movement that has “created a real cancer in the whole governance system of the university. There are major concerns, and they’re not going to go away.”

Connerly dismissed Carmona, noting that his 12-month tenure on the board is about to expire. Connerly, by contrast, is in the third year of a 12-year term.

“Ralph will be gone in about four months, and the rest of us will have to deal with these issues,” Connerly said. The “cancer” to which Carmona referred was not created by affirmative action’s opponents, he said. “It’s being created by those who use this system of preferences in the wrong way.”

The most heated moment came when Connerly responded to York Chang, UCLA’s undergraduate student body president, who had blasted the board for “threatening administrators . . . telling faculty senates to shut up, arresting students for speaking longer than 60 seconds and on the whole, turning the UC system into a political campaign billboard.”

Connerly responded that students “don’t have any right to whine . . . when they try to filibuster the meeting” by signing up to speak in huge numbers during the board’s public comment session.

“We have had meetings where some of the students have called us names, and threatened our lives publicly and then they say we are only giving them 60 seconds,” he said. “Christ, we’ve been listening to them for about five solid months.”

Atkinson and UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young were invited to speak on the program, but both declined. Atkinson will appear at a meeting of UC’s outreach task force in Berkeley.