The Same Old Story, Naturally

For one raucous day last July, Gov. Pete Wilson converted a UC Board of Regents meeting here into a sound stage for a live political commercial. The man who had promised not to run for president was running for president, and the UC meeting presented a prime opportunity to posture for the cameras and promote his main campaign theme.

On the table that day--by design, not by accident--was affirmative action. Regent Ward Connerly, appointed by Wilson after, naturally, becoming a major financial supporter of the governor, had proposed that race and gender no longer be considered by UC campuses in the evaluation of student applications. Wilson, with a keen eye for divisive issues, to say the least was all for it.

“The people . . . who play by the rules,” the governor said, his chin thrust outward, as if auditioning for a rock on Mt. Rushmore, “deserve a guarantee that their children will get an equal opportunity to compete for admission to this university--regardless of their race or gender. Simple fairness demands that we assure them that all eligible applicants go through the same process.”

From this “historic” point forward, Wilson declared, student integration would occur “on the natural.” This was a phrase that sounded suspiciously like a scripted sound bite. Simple. Catchy. And empty. On the natural, the student bodies would blossom into multiracial bouquets. On the natural, centuries of racism would be wiped away. On the natural, South-Central would become Beverly Hills. On the natural, alienated white males who provide Wilson’s political base would be reminded who was their shining white knight--the political slayer of farm workers, nannies and, now, upstart undergrads up from the ghetto.

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Cut now to last Saturday, and the front page of the Los Angeles Times. There in black and white--the color of current American politics, no?--was a lesson on exactly how university business gets done “on the natural.” The expose documented how some regents who joined with Wilson that July day, pontificating grandly about fair play and level fields, in fact had been conducting their own customized, and covert, enrollment preference program.

Theirs was a beautifully simple arrangement. Regents who wanted to enhance the application of a friend or relative simply would contact a top college administrator. The word then would pass down through the ranks: Please reconsider the application of Billy Beer, who managed a score of 175 on his SATs. We naturally are not ordering any special favors. We merely thought it would benefit the university, not to mention your measly, two-bit career, to point out that Mr. Beer is the son of a good friend of Regent X. P.S. Mr. Beer will be calling next week for his dorm assignment.”

Actually, it is not necessary to make up this stuff. The story itself reported the stellar case of a Fresno developer’s son, a B student who was vaulted ahead of 6,000 more highly qualified applicants to UCLA. It turned out his father was a partner in business with one Leo S. Kolligian, a regent who had sung in the “any preference is an unfair preference” chorus of last July. The son, naturally, was admitted.

In an interview with Times reporters, this young scholar (who was not identified in the article) demonstrated a better grasp on how the world actually works than Wilson and fellow wind-makers: “I needed any help I could get because I knew I was competing on a higher level. We know this is the United States. It tends to be more and more who you know, not what you do.” Naturally.

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In the end, not much of what the article described--beyond perhaps the blinding degree of hypocrisy--would qualify as a genuine surprise to any honest observer of Planet Reality. People in power take care of their own first. That simple fact, multiplied across two centuries of racial and class history, is what prompted affirmative action programs in the first place.

Nonetheless, sometimes it is valuable to go beyond empirical evidence, to document the obvious. This is especially true on the issue of affirmative action, where the emotional fog can blot out all things factual. Wilson may have dropped from the presidential derby, but he remains mesmerized by a dream of life on Pennsylvania Avenue. Thus, he is poised to emerge as the prime campaigner for a November initiative to outlaw affirmative action programs statewide.

In the coming months, he will have plenty of fine things to say about eliminating discrimination “on the natural.” About equal opportunity and simple fairness. Measure such empty wind against the hard reality of the regents’ private affirmative action program. As the anonymous Bruin scholar put it: It’s who you know, not what you do. Always has been. And, if the Wilsons of the land have their way, always will be.