THE STATE : Politics Rears Its Disruptive Head in UC--and Students Suffer : CAMPUS CORRESPONDENT

In January 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan summoned UC President Clark Kerr to a private meeting in a UC Berkeley conference room. Six hours later, the popular and effective Kerr was fired as punishment for his soft stance on the Free Speech Movement.

In response, a shocked Faculty Senate decried the “repressive political atmosphere” and worried about its effects on the quality of higher education in California. Students felt betrayed by what they considered Reagan’s bald political aspirations. The Daily Californian, the campus newspaper, went so far as to ask: “Just who runs this university, anyway?”

Almost 30 years later, the UC system faces the same question. This time around, the cause of the trouble is not student protests or a war in Vietnam, but affirmative action. Again, politics has reared its disruptive head in the realm of education, with consequences as troubling as those surrounding Kerr’s ouster.

The tug-o’-war began last July, when the UC Board of Regents voted to eliminate race and gender preferences in admissions and hiring. Regents were immediately accused of using the UC system to further the political ambitions of Gov. Pete Wilson. After all, Wilson and his Republican predecessors had appointed many of their closest allies to the board and his presidential campaign was in need of a boost.

The controversial change in policy sent the nine UC campuses into a frenzy. All nine chancellors opposed the resolution, as did every student government. Activists called for non-compliance, culminating in a huge systemwide walkout on Oct. 12. Most important, the Faculty Senate called for the regents to reverse course, contending that their decision violated the concept of “shared governance,” in which regents, UC president, chancellors and faculty strive for consensus before major policy changes are set in motion. Enter Richard C. Atkinson.

Five months ago, in the midst of the furor spawned by the regents’ affirmative-action decision and accusations of political pandering, Atkinson was chosen the new UC president. His first big job was to implement the new policy and draft guidelines that would replace race and gender preferences with socioeconomic criteria.

Most introductory political science professors know that if a bureaucracy opposes a new policy directive, that policy will most likely go nowhere. Thus, it wasn’t all that surprising when Atkinson announced that he was delaying full implementation of the regents’ policy, until fall 1998 for undergraduates, to allow his bureaucracy to come up with suitable alternative guidelines. Like the regents’ action in July, politics loomed in the background: While chancellor at UC San Diego, Atkinson was a staunch supporter of affirmative action.

Wilson and especially his point man on the Board of Regents, Ward Connerly, contended that, as members of the majority, their policy-making powers were being usurped by the UC president. Atkinson’s task, they insisted, was not to interpret their new policy but to enact it, as his job description mandates. Connerly and nine other regents called for a special meeting to review Atkinson’s performance--the first such meeting since Kerr’s fateful summons in 1967.

The threat was obvious and it worked, just as Connerly and Wilson had hoped it would. Atkinson officially apologized for overstepping his bounds and vowed to step up implementation of the new policies by one semester. The meeting was called off.

The squabbling among the high brass of the university will no doubt continue until the new socioeconomic guidelines are implemented, if ever. Yet, the problem of who is actually running the University of California is one that will probably never be resolved.

Doubtless, the regents’ action in July was, in part, motivated by Wilson’s desire to energize his presidential campaign. But Atkinson’s decision was no less political. The difference is that the regents have the state Constitution on their side.

The state of California gives the regents full power to set policy and conduct all business relating to the university. The UC president, even though he sits on the board as one of its non-appointed members, is delegated the responsibility of enacting the will of the body as a whole. In this case, Atkinson had no right to go over the regents’ head, and after realizing this, he retreated.

But the larger issue here is the consequences that this political battle will have for the university as it prepares to educate a new generation of students. After all, the regents’ new policy also calls for more outreach programs to help increase the eligibility rates of underprivileged high school graduates, programs that cannot receive proper attention while the office of the president irons out its “bureaucratic problems.”

It will be the students who suffer most for the drawn-out arguments among Wilson, the regents and Atkinson. And the problem couldn’t be happening at a worse time. The regents have given the university an opportunity to fix a systematic race bias and replace it with a program that will reward underprivileged students of all races and place them on the road to success. What’s now needed are leaders who will steer our university into the next millennium, not stall it in the fast lane.