UC Chief Shows Boldness in Rejecting SAT

The distinguished, white-haired gentleman who wants to scrap the venerable SAT as an admissions requirement has not made bold action the hallmark of his presidency of the University of California.

Richard C. Atkinson usually proceeds with deliberative caution. He grows quickly uncomfortable at the first stirrings of discord. He works hard at keeping a lid on controversy.

So how did it come to pass that this careful man found himself standing in front of 1,000 college leaders Sunday, challenging them to break from the decades-old tradition of relying on SAT scores to help pick their freshman classes?

“When it’s your last job, you are freer to say what you really believe,” Atkinson said in a post-speech interview. “You can stand up for what you think is right.”

After a wobbly start to his presidency in 1995, Atkinson has begun to hit his stride, top educators say. It has come just as he sees the end of his career, as leader of the nation’s most prestigious public university.

Atkinson, 71, had planned to announce his retirement this July, informing the regents that he would stick around for another year while they line up a successor. But at the urging of Gov. Gray Davis, he agreed to postpone his plans for at least another year.

Working on borrowed time seems to have emboldened Atkinson’s presidency. He spent Monday making the rounds of the morning television talk shows, arguing that the nation’s universities can--and should--do better than the SAT as a college entrance exam. Next he must win over his faculty and the Board of Regents, which governs the university.

“It’s great to see the leader of the most important public university in the country taking a courageous stand on an enormously complex and controversial national issue,” said Barry Munitz, former California State University chancellor and now president of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

“It’s more than refreshing,” Munitz said. “It is significant for someone who has been relatively quiet on complex policy issues.”

In part, it’s Atkinson’s nature to avoid stirring up a commotion. He often second-guesses himself when speaking to reporters and worries aloud that he said something that will get him in trouble.

His caution also comes partly from being publicly humiliated by former Gov. Pete Wilson and conservative UC regents early in his tenure when he tried to delay the ban on affirmative action. The regents’ controversial vote on that issue came just before he took office.

More academician than politician, Atkinson had failed to clear the idea with Wilson before word leaked out about his intentions.

Soon he found himself headed for a showdown that could have cost him his job: a special meeting called by the UC Board of Regents to review his performance.

The fracas recalled an earlier showdown when Gov. Ronald Reagan fired former UC President Clark Kerr, purportedly for being soft on student protesters.

Unlike Kerr, Atkinson survived the incident with letters of apology. Since then, he has “governed with an attitude of careful conciliation,” said Kerr, who is writing a history of the university.

When Wilson returned to the UC Board of Regents two years later to halt health care benefits for the partners of gay and lesbian employees, Atkinson remained largely silent despite his support of such domestic partner benefits. Both the governor and the UC president are regents.

He voted against Gov. Wilson, who angrily snapped a pencil in half when he lost by one vote. Atkinson wilted in his chair and cradled his face in his hands.

He appears to have found a new public confidence with the new governor. Atkinson, a kind, scholarly type, was one of the few regents who treated Davis with respect when he was lieutenant governor and a member of the Board of Regents.

In turn, Davis has become one of Atkinson’s champions, showering the university with money during budget season but not interjecting the university into controversy.

“Davis has been much less interventionist than Wilson had been,” Kerr said. “That makes it much easier for the president to handle and set his own agenda.”

In the last two years, Atkinson has made the university’s admission policies a top priority, including reviewing the role of standardized tests. That’s a topic in which he has uncommon expertise.

A cognitive psychologist, he is so widely respected for his research on memory and cognition that he was one of the few psychologists ever to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

During his career as a professor, three years at UCLA and 16 at Stanford, he developed one of the first computer-assisted learning programs for schoolchildren.

He also co-founded Computer Curriculum Corp., which he turned into a small fortune when it was bought out by a larger company. He and his wife of 49 years, Rita, a psychologist, co-wrote a best-selling psychology textbook.

Atkinson has been a distinguished visiting scholar at Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT for the College Board, and was founding chairman of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment.

He also spent five years as assistant director and then director of the National Science Foundation (appointed by President Jimmy Carter), until he became chancellor of UC San Diego in 1980.

After 15 years in San Diego, he was elevated to president of the nine-campus system.

“If I were going to rely on anyone to work out admissions policies and testing, I’d pick Dick Atkinson,” said Kerr, an elder statesman of higher education. “I expect a lot of people to listen to him. He’s so bright and it’s his own field of expertise.”

When Atkinson decided to take on the SAT, he did not attack it for the usual reasons: the stubbornly persistent racial and gender gap in average SAT scores. African Americans and Latinos do not do as well, on average, as their white and Asian American peers. Women, in general, do not score as high as men.

Instead of reexamining any cultural bias, he raised another fairness issue: that the test was designed to measure an ill-defined notion of “aptitude” for college instead of measuring what a student has learned.

Still, when pushed, he acknowledges that he believes substituting the SAT with another test tied to college-preparatory courses should help--along with other admissions changes--to increase racial diversity on campus.

“We have to convince the public that our admissions policies are indeed fair and there’s no barrier for kids who don’t have the background to do well on the SAT and yet somehow accomplish great things in high school,” he said.

Since the Board of Regents voted to abolish affirmative action, which resulted in dramatic drops in blacks and Latinos accepted to Berkeley and UCLA, university officials have come under increasing pressure from lawmakers in Sacramento to make sure the public university is open to all types of students.

The tension is likely to mount as the racial composition of the state changes. Demographers expect high school graduating classes within six years to have more Latino students than any other ethnicity.

Regent Ward Connerly puts it more bluntly: “Dick has been under a lot of pressure from these race-preference advocates in Sacramento who have told him, quote: ‘Get more of my people into the university; I don’t care how you do it.’ ”

Under Atkinson’s stewardship, the university continues to tinker with its admissions policies.

First, UC officials reworked the admissions formula to downplay the SAT by giving more weight to the so-called SAT II achievement tests in math, English and other subjects.

Then, the university launched a new program that guarantees a place at one campus--not necessarily the first-choice campus--to students with grades that put them in the top 4% of their individual high school senior classes. It doesn’t matter how these students score on standardized tests.

Now, he wants to jettison the SAT and shift to a more “comprehensive, holistic way” of picking aspiring students, such as looking at their achievements in the context of educational opportunities.

“In a perfect world,” he said, “there would be no formulas.”