The Roots of UCLA’s Back-Channel Admissions

Revelations of back-channel influence in UCLA admissions policy have driven one more wedge between the University of California and its primary constituency, the people of this state. Not that long ago, Californians read about the lucrative benefit packages that UC presidents and vice presidents accorded themselves, together with the acceptance of high-fee honoraria by UC officials, contrary to the intent of state law. Now the taxpayers must endure the disenchantment of learning that some 200 admissions at UCLA, during the administration of Chancellor Charles E. Young, were back-channeled.

Most national polls rank UCLA among the top-10 U.S. universities in terms of its resources, faculty, research record and student body. Yet, true greatness in a university is more than a matter of such statistics. It involves a stable, nonnegotiable institutional identity upheld by administrators, faculty, students, regents and elected officials alike. Sadly, UCLA has not achieved that level of institutional independence. But the revelations of preferential admissions for the wealthy or politically connected--if honestly acknowledged, confronted, then forsworn--can set the stage for institutional growth that will put UCLA where it believes itself to be: in the ranks of those universities that have helped fashion American culture and character.

An important university like UCLA must obviously give admission preferences to a percentage of its incoming undergraduates if its academic program is to sustain a diversity of talents and curriculum. An applicant proficient in Latin and Greek but whose math SAT’s sag can be accepted on the basis that, more immediately, the classics department needs students and, in more long-range terms, a great university should promote the study of the classics. Conversely, a math genius can be forgiven the fact that he or she is not also an Eagle Scout or a high-school valedictorian. The public, in general, understands and accepts such selectivity, which is why any great university is allowed to exercise preferential admissions for athletes.

Gross adjustments in admissions standards merely on the basis of political influence or wealth, however, to include wealth conferred on the university by donors, strike at the core of the American myth, which many believe is also the American ethos. It just isn’t fair, even if only 200 back-channeled admissions are involved. We are all expected to pay for the University of California through our taxes, even those with modest incomes and no hopes whatsoever of having a son or a daughter admitted to UCLA. The question of advantage is even more galling in the case of influence-driven admissions to graduate and professional schools. These programs, elite by nature, are reserved, by the Master Plan for Higher Education, to UC alone and can frequently offer one-way tickets to lifetime employment.

Private institutions have more latitude in the matter of preferential admissions. They are, however, governed by a powerful market force--reputation. Each year, private institutions are scrutinized as to the median board scores of their incoming classes. Too many below-par preferential admissions, and the ranking of a private institution plummets, and fund-raising becomes more difficult.

Why have back-channel admissions been allowed to develop at a public university? Part of the answer is the public/private nature of UCLA. As a public university, deriving its charter from the establishment of the University of California in the state Constitution, UCLA is vulnerable to pleasing the elected officials who authorize its budget. Nor can any surviving UC president or chancellor ignore the wishes of the regents, a body of appointed officials enjoying 12-year terms.

The public budget of UCLA, on the other hand, is increasingly unable to pay the bills; hence, UCLA must turn to private support as it makes, of necessity, the transition from a public university to a publicly supported university to a publicly assisted university. But such a dependence on private wealth makes UCLA vulnerable to the blandishments of the plutocracy.

Did a sense of unachieved status at UCLA help create the admissions scandal? No one struggled more heroically to bring UCLA into being than UC Regent Edward A. Dickson. Reading his memoir “University of California at Los Angeles: Its Origin and Formative Years” (1955), or Ernest Carroll Moore’s “I Helped Make a University” (1936), one learns just how difficult it was to establish the University of California at Los Angeles.

Cal Berkeley, the mother campus, feared competition to the south. Not until 1919, after much debate, did the university establish its Southern Branch at the campus of the Los Angeles Normal School, on Vermont Avenue. Not until 1923 did the board of regents allow a full four-year program, again after much debate. Even after the Southern Branch became UCLA and moved to its Romanesque quadrangle in Westwood in 1929, it still had to fight for recognition. It took until August 1933 for the regents to authorize graduate studies at UCLA, but only at the masters’ level. It took another three years for the PhD to be authorized, and another two years after that, June 1938, for the first PhD to be awarded.

In the 1930s, UCLA functioned as a commuter school, a Los Angeles version of the City College of New York, vital with the excitement of upwardly mobile students, many from the Fairfax area, at a time of intense intellectual and social challenge. It was a liberal campus, with an early presence of African American students. By the late 1930s, many who did not like this liberalism and the university’s ethnic inclusiveness were castigating UCLA as the “little red school house.” In the postwar era, at the height of the anti-communist scare in the late 1940s and early 1950s, UCLA was a prime target for the red-baiters, led by state Sen. Jack B. Tenney of Los Angeles, chairman of the California Un-American Activities Committee. Indeed, UCLA Provost Clarence A. Dykstra can be said to have literally lost his life from the pressure of being under constant attack from the red-baiting right.

For all its growing academic distinction, UCLA entered the 1960s with a heightened sensitivity to the power of elected officials to invade and disrupt the university, together with a lingering CCNY-style conception of itself as a local university in local service. Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy presided over the transition of UCLA from regional to national to international stature; yet, one suspects that even the expansions and aggrandizements of the Murphy years could not fully dispel from UCLA an institutional memory of the time when it was either being deprived of its existence (to 1919), or kept in a secondary status (to 1936), or baited and investigated mercilessly (through the early 1950s).

Those days, however, are over. Secure in its earned identity as a world-renowned university, UCLA should feel neither beholden nor intimidated by any constituency, public or private. The demands of fund-raising cannot be used to create back channels to admission. UCLA is not for sale. Those who donate to UCLA should do so because it enhances the psychological and moral stature of a donor to endow a professorship or build a building serving one of the great creations of Los Angeles, its universally acknowledged university. Nor can UCLA argue that it is being forced to grant privileges to the wealthy as it undergoes privatization. However important private sources of funding continue to become, UCLA can never buy back the investment of public treasure in its land and buildings paid for by the sweat-equity of California taxpayers.

Elected officials, for their part, must abstain from influencing admissions at UCLA in the very same way that they abstain from back-door interference with the proper operation of any other agency or department of the state of California. Such a tradition of noninterference is a legacy from the Progressive era, and it has kept the state almost completely free of corruption in the administration of its agencies and departments. The regents, for their part, having banned affirmative action, must not seek to exercise a covert form of affirmative action themselves--an affirmative action of political power and influence linked to wealth--that mocks the philosophy of equal rights for all Californians, which the regents have so boldly proclaimed.

Let UCLA, finally, especially its chancellor and administrative staff, rise from this revelation of shabby dealing and embrace a higher code of conduct based upon a more secure, less grasping and less intimidated self-identity. The campus and quadrangle of UCLA were created in the mid-1920s as a form of utopian statement. The founders of that era, the take-off decade of L.A. history, fashioned a gleaming Spanish city on its hilltop, toward which the City of Angels, then moving westward along Wilshire Boulevard, might direct itself in its progress toward the sea. As the most important achievement of that decade, UCLA will always be a primary icon of the city’s identity. Only in this case, that icon is also one of the most complex and glorious of human institutions, a university.

This means that UCLA will forever remain one of the two or three reference points in and through which Los Angeles knows what it is and evaluates its merit. This dynamic, nonnegotiable connection means that UCLA can never recede into privacy, much less private dealing. UCLA is crucial to the public culture--and the public conscience--of Los Angeles.