Affirmative Action Ban Still Divides UC

One year after the University of California Board of Regents voted to roll back affirmative action at the prestigious nine-campus system, the fierce tensions that surrounded the controversial vote are still flaring.

“Cooperation and trust have eroded” among UC’s faculty, administrators and regents, said Patrick M. Callan, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center. “Everywhere you look, you see the fraying of the governance system.”

The historic vote pitted the regent board against the UC president, all nine campus chancellors and many faculty leaders who opposed the affirmative action ban. As a result, “the regents have become adversaries to the campuses,” said Alexander W. Astin, director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. “It’s a matter of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ”

The announcement this month that UC Berkeley’s popular chancellor, Chang-Lin Tien, plans to resign was but the latest blow to a university system rocked by continuing dissent.

“I’m worried,” said Clark Kerr, president emeritus and leading scholarly historian of UC. “Who, if anybody, is going to take the lead on putting things back together again?”

In the last 12 months, UC’s three senior chancellors--whose combined service to the system totals more than 100 years--have announced their resignations. Faculty leaders have called for the regents to rescind their vote, and the nation’s largest faculty association has formally censured the university system. UC President Richard C. Atkinson has been rebuked by regents on one side and professors on the other for his handling of the sweeping affirmative action ban.

And the students? In the most recent tally, white and Asian American high school graduates are applying to UC in record numbers, while applications from Latinos have dropped markedly and African Americans show relatively tiny gains.

All this, and the most contentious part of the regents’ July 1995 decision--the ban on consideration of race and gender in undergraduate admissions--is not even in place yet. (It will first affect students applying for entry to the spring 1998 term.)

The strength of the universities’ faculties and the breadth of their research have allowed UC to maintain its sterling national and international reputation, Kerr and others agree.

But they say the bitterness that remains between the regents board and much of the system--and that at times splits the board itself--threatens to make UC ungovernable.

“UC is still in my opinion America’s premiere public university system,” said Peter Magrath, president of the Washington-based National Assn. of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. “But the governing board at UC is not an incentive that would stimulate a person [in a leadership position] to want to stay on. . . . It increasingly seems to want to engage in micro-management. And it’s a divided board.”

To understand those divisions, one need only remember one year ago, when the board ended a tumultuous 12-hour meeting on the UC San Francisco campus with votes on two proposals to ban UC from using race, religion, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin as criteria in its admissions, hiring and contracting.

On admissions, the regents approved the ban 14-10, with one abstention. On hiring and contracting, the vote was 15-10.

In the months that followed, affirmative action supporters disrupted several board meetings, staged campus demonstrations and accused the regents of succumbing to political pressure from Gov. Pete Wilson.

But the regents also suffered from internal tensions, as board members criticized each other on talk radio shows, debated the decision in newspaper opinion pieces and openly sparred in the media.

Within months of the vote, Ward Connerly, the regent who sponsored the UC ban and who worked closely with Wilson to get it passed, announced that he would manage the campaign to put a statewide affirmative action ban, Proposition 209, on the November ballot.

And regents such as William Bagley were expressing regret that UC had needlessly put itself on the front lines of a battle that would ultimately be resolved at the ballot box.

The university system, meanwhile, was hemorrhaging leaders. UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Karl S. Pister, a staunch supporter of affirmative action, was the first to announce his resignation last fall. UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young followed suit in February, making clear that his departure was prompted in part by his frustration with the regents.

And Tien stunned academia when he announced that he too will step down next year. He attributed his decision to a desire to spend more time with his family, but friends say that Tien, the first Asian American to head a major U.S. university, was also frustrated by what he saw as politicization of the regent board.

All this has prompted some to wonder: In the wake of such a hotly contested decision, can UC’s regents, administrators and faculty find enough common ground to address the problems--a leadership vacuum and an expected enrollment surge, among others--that loom in the future?

Atkinson says the answer is yes. “There is no question that on the affirmative action issue, the board continues to be divided,” he said. “But I do not believe that pours over to other aspects of the university.”

Since the vote, the 26-member board has focused primarily on bureaucratic decisions that are essential to keep the university system running. It has approved salary levels, amended UC’s system-wide retirement plan and named Atkinson to replace former UC President Jack W. Peltason, who retired last year.

It has certified environmental impact reports, created task forces and renewed contracts with the three national laboratories at Los Alamos, Berkeley and Livermore. It has made financing decisions and studied the proposed merger of one of its hospitals with a private health care provider.

But since last July, some experts lament, the board has not considered a single key educational policy issue other than affirmative action and has done little to repair its relations with the constituency that traditionally advises them on such matters: the faculty.

In this respect, said Callan of the California Higher Education Policy Center, the regents “are seemingly unable to put the university ahead of their own personal grudges.”

In marked contrast, the California State University Board of Trustees has recently undertaken a joint long-term planning effort with its administrators, faculty and students. The project, called Cornerstones, will formulate a plan to guide Cal State into the next century by reevaluating the degrees it offers, studying enrollment and financing, and setting goals to increase accountability to the state.

Higher education experts applaud the project--which is being coordinated by six trustees, six campus presidents, six professors, three students and three administrators--as precisely the kind of collaboration that gets results.

“It’s a real effort to have shared governance,” said former Indiana University President Tom Ehrlich, referring to the broadly accepted principle under which faculty and administrators work with board members to govern a university. “The University of California could learn something from Cal State.”

Ehrlich, who is now a visiting scholar at San Francisco State University and is involved in the Cornerstones project, says the biggest problem with the UC regents’ vote on affirmative action was not its substance, but its execution.

By approving an academic policy before allowing the traditional deliberative body--the faculty--to study it and offer suggestions on how it could best be implemented, the regents created an atmosphere of disrespect that has spread far beyond the issue of racial preferences, Ehrlich said.

“If the board had said [to the faculty], ‘Look, here’s where we want to go. Over the next year, develop policies to get us there,’ this all could have been avoided,” Ehrlich said. “That’s what shared governance is all about--saying, ‘Here’s the direction. Let’s move there together.’ ”

UC President Atkinson disagrees. The UC faculty did have sufficient input in the decision-making process, he contends. “I have seen no evidence to the effect that they have not been fully involved,” he said.

And if there was a breakdown in communications, he said, the regents were not to blame. “The failure of discussion was not the regents’ but the faculty’s for not asking for a more significant role in the discussions.”

UC is no stranger to the concept of shared governance. In 1920, it was the first university system in the nation to adopt the principle, and president emeritus Kerr credits that decision with launching UC on its “first real steps toward greatness.”

Atkinson insists that that tradition is still firmly in place. But now, said Kerr, a pall of mistrust is clouding the relationship between university leaders.

“The regents have for the first time in history found it necessary to ask a president to say that he’s legally and morally bound to do what they ask him to do,” Kerr said, referring to a letter Atkinson sent the regents in January, in which he acknowledged his “legal duty as well as . . . moral obligation” to obey their mandate.

Atkinson wrote the letter to avoid a dressing down by 10 regents who were angry over his plan to delay implementation of the affirmative action ban.

Some faculty members were disappointed because they felt that the president had buckled under pressure from the regents, instead of standing his ground. And Kerr believes that the letter had serious--if largely symbolic--ramifications.

“The president has obligations to the faculty, the campuses, the total university and the board,” Kerr said. “To assert that one of the elements of this big, complex institution has a priority over the others may be legally true. But it’s always been understood that the president has responsibilities to work with all constituencies.”

As UC begins searching for new chancellors for its two flagship campuses, UC Berkeley and UCLA, experts say the price of this continuing upheaval may become more clear. No one goes so far as to predict that UC will have trouble attracting quality applicants.

“Being chancellor of UCLA or Berkeley is the pinnacle of public higher education,” said Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education. “They’re going to have a lot of good candidates.”

But when the finalists look closely at the jobs, the best contenders may balk.

“If I were approached, I would be interested,” said Magrath of the National Assn. of State Universities. “But knowing what I know, I’d need to have some real assurances about my discretion to provide educational direction and leadership. Any chancellor worthy of his or her salt will want those assurances . . . [because] no job is worth not being able to do it the way you professionally believe it should be done.”

And those assurances may be hard to wring out of a regents board that has yet to acknowledge that problems exist.

“The board has to deal with a very broad agenda, and I think we are prepared to do that,” said newly appointed board Chairman Tirso del Junco. He rejects the suggestion that the faculty has been alienated by the board. “I don’t feel that. The faculty talks to me,” he said.

Del Junco says he believes the board has been able to get beyond the events of a year ago. “You don’t see us month after month dealing with affirmative action,” he said at the board’s monthly meeting this week.

But disagreements over the volatile issue continue to surface and shade even the most innocuous discussions among regents.

At Thursday’s meeting, for example, the board spent 40 minutes discussing the wisdom of ethnic graduation celebrations--parties organized by students from various ethnic groups, paid for (like fraternity and athletic events) with state and private funds and open to all.

Despite administrators’ assurances that no degrees are conferred at the parties, and alumni leaders’ assertions that they inspire loyalty to UC, Connerly and other regents railed against the gatherings, calling them a destructive, divisive force and “a serious public policy issue.”

Given the continuing preoccupation with issues related, if only peripherally, to affirmative action, some experts wonder how the board will perform as it seeks to hire leaders for UC Berkeley and UCLA.

“Can the board set a tone that says, ‘We really believe these are among the most important jobs in higher education. We value highly the skill it takes to do them and we’re going to be very, very supportive’?” Callan asked. “I don’t know.”

Kerr has proposed that the regents take a step toward healing UC’s wounds by establishing committees of professors and regents to “facilitate [a] direct exchange of views” on admissions and governance.

The proposal, developed by Kerr and a group of UC Berkeley faculty, is being considered now by the Academic Council.

“Can we pull ourselves together in an attitude of cooperation? That’s [the question] the university now faces,” Kerr said. “It’s going to take some goodwill on the part of a lot of people to make it all work again. It remains to be seen if there will be that goodwill.”