The Political Trashing of UC Is Shameful : Regents: Forcing a hurried change in affirmative action policy is an abuse of power at the university’s expense.

Now that a confrontation between Gov. Pete Wilson and University of California President Richard C. Atkinson--a showdown that could have cost Atkinson his job--has been averted, both sides are saying nice things about each other and about their mutual desire to do no harm to what was once widely considered the finest public university in the nation.

Unfortunately, the damage has been done.

Worse, it only compounds far greater damage that was done last summer when Wilson and his supporters on the UC Board of Regents first dragged UC to the forefront of the bitter debate over affirmative action by voting to ban race and sex as factors in hiring, contracts and admissions in the nine-campus system.

Now, the impact of affirmative action admissions at prestigious public institutions like UCLA and UC Berkeley is of more than passing interest to state taxpayers and is well worth debating. But the regents didn’t bother to study the complexities of the issue. They rushed--or were rushed --to judgment.

That’s because Wilson put affirmative action on the regents’ agenda last July for purely political reasons. He needed to revive a sputtering presidential campaign and thought an affirmative action fight would do it for him. So he took a simplistic but politically popular stance: Affirmative action is reverse discrimination and I’m agin’ it.

The real issue for California is more complex than simply being for or against affirmative action.

For example, elite colleges, whether public or private, have always been selective about which students they admit. Factors besides grades and test scores, like athletic ability or being related to an alumnus, have always been used to favor some applicants over others. How is that different from affirmative action?

As for Wilson’s timing, even members of the regents with doubts about UC’s affirmative action policies privately acknowledge there is no simple comparison between how affirmative action works at Berkeley as against how it works at smaller campuses like UC Riverside. Wouldn’t it be wise, asked thoughtful but unheeded voices last year, to hold off on such a difficult vote until reliable, independent information was available?

Sadly, such common sense was lost amid a circus atmosphere that, in fairness, supporters of affirmative action also contributed to. Wilson muscled the regents into voting a ban on affirmative action in admissions, but his presidential campaign collapsed anyway.

Meanwhile, UC administrators were left to make sense of a broad new policy directive that would have to be implemented differently not just on each of the nine campuses but also for graduate studies.

That was the conundrum Atkinson was trying to solve when he found himself at loggerheads with Wilson and his lackeys on the Board of Regents. Atkinson had the temerity to act like a real chief executive officer and postpone implementing the affirmative action ban on undergraduate admissions until he had better information on hand, aiming for the fall of 1998. As a gesture of good faith, he ordered the ban to take effect on graduate admissions earlier, in 1997, since that involved far fewer applications.

That got Atkinson hauled into Wilson’s office for a tongue-lashing. Then a leading critic of affirmative action on the regents board, businessman Ward Connerly, called for a special meeting last week “to review the performance” of the already humiliated UC president.

For a while, it looked as if Atkinson was finished. Some insiders expected that he would either be fired at the closed-door session or resign in disgust. (He is independently wealthy and doesn’t need the UC job, friends pointed out.)

That special meeting was suddenly canceled after Atkinson sent Connerly and Wilson letters of apology for usurping the regents’ authority, and they accepted.

But Atkinson has only prolonged his agony with such an abject retreat. For he has handed Wilson another political victory.

Wilson’s presidential ambitions may have been deferred, but he still wants to get a voter initiative banning affirmative action on the California ballot next November, figuring it will help fellow Republicans. The initiative still needs about 400,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot, but its campaign is short of money. Connerly was tapped to revive it in time to meet the Feb. 21 deadline. He and Wilson needed a pawn to play in their political game, and once again it was UC.

Atkinson’s supporters at UC tell me he has survived to fight another day, but I can’t shake the suspicion that he has merely survived to be pushed around another day when it suits Pete Wilson’s political agenda. By not standing up more firmly to the governor, Atkinson has allowed a once-proud institution to be further tarnished.