In a controversy that exploded and then subsided during the course of one week, the University of California was thrown into a crisis of governance in late January over the subject of affirmative action.
It began on Tuesday, January 23, when the Office of the President released a letter from UC President Richard Atkinson to UC's chancellors apprising them that the UC's new policy of race-blind admissions, approved by the Regents last July, would be effective for students entering in the fall of 1998, not the fall of 1997 as had been originally envisioned. It seemingly ended late on Monday, January 29, with an announcement -- from Gov. Pete Wilson -- that the Regents had called off a special meeting aimed at "reviewing the performance of the president."
In between, the President wrote to the Regents, saying that he had "erred in not adequately consulting" with them before making his decision; he announced that the Regents admissions policy, SP-1, would be effective for graduate and professional students who enter UC in the fall of 1997; and he announced that undergraduate admissions for the spring term of 1997-98 would be race-blind. However, the president's decision to keep racial preferences in place for fall 1997 undergraduate admissions seemed to hold, though the Regents will have an opportunity to review all of SP-1's undergraduate implementation measures at their February meeting.
Throughout, the conflict had as much to do with governance as with the implementation date for SP-1, with two issues being most prominent. First, Regents and members of Gov. Wilson's administration leveled charges of "foot-dragging" or an effort to "subvert" SP-1 against the president and his administration. Second, there was the issue of what role UC's chancellors may have played in the decision to put off implementing the measure. Indeed, even after having received an apologetic letter from Atkinson, Regent Ward Connerly told the Los Angeles Times that the meeting to consider Atkinson's performance still needed to be held in connection with the chancellors. "If the chancellors are egging the president on [to defy the board], that's something the board needs to address," Connerly said to the Times.
To judge by public pronouncements, the call for the special meeting seemed to end only after Atkinson sent separate conciliatory letters to both the Regents and Gov. Wilson, with the latter saying that "There is no question in my mind that it is the constitutional duty of the Board to set policy for the University, and the role of the President is to implement that policy." So intense was the behind-the-scenes negotiating, however, that the letter to the governor, which included a sentence noting that Atkinson "welcome[d] the special meeting of the Board," was released to the public only hours before the meeting was called off. Had the meeting gone forward it would have represented the first formal scrutiny of a UC president's actions since 1967, when the Regents voted to fire Clark Kerr.
How did such a situation come about? The ingredients seemed to be a lack of consultation on the president's part and a bad miscalculation by him of how his decision would be received by the Regents and the governor. The letter in which Atkinson formally notified the chancellors of the SP-1 change was dated January 19 -- the final day of three days of Regents meetings, during which affirmative action had been a major topic. However, no mention of the decision was made either in public at the meetings or in any systematic way to the Regents.
"It was a bit of a shock," Regent Meredith Khachigian told the San Francisco Chronicle. "The only consultations went on in some very offhand conversations." The Regents weren't the only ones who got late word of the change. The Senate's Academic Council learned of it for the first time on the day the Regents' meetings began, through a briefing from a member of the president's staff. Neither the Council leadership, nor campus admissions officers, nor the chair of the Senate's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), which sets minimum standards of UC eligibility, was apprised of the decision in advance.
When, the week after the Regents' meetings, the president issued the press release that announced the change, some of the Regents accepted it as a reasonable administrative interpretation of Regents' policy. Regent Clair Burgener, who voted for SP-1, said the president's plan was "perfectly satisfactory" to him. Others, who had opposed SP-1 in the first place, were happy with the decision. A large number of Regents, however, were disturbed and some were incensed: the meeting to review the president's performance was called for by no fewer than 10 Regents (out of 26), a figure that does not include the governor, who had said he would attend the session.
The fireworks over governance did not leave much room for discussion about the merits of the president's decision. Admissions officers were said to be pleased with the change, both as a matter of keeping racial preferences in place for another year and as a matter of the change-over to race-neutral admissions. The chair of BOARS, Stanley Williamson of UC Santa Cruz, said that, quite apart from views on affirmative action, there were good reasons for the president's action.
"It's a matter of being able to get all of the many items into place in time," he said. At present, he points out, UC has only a draft of the new race-blind admissions policy, and that the proposed policy includes a significant revisions of both "academic" and "supplemental" admissions criteria. In the normal course of events, high school counselors could begin talking in the spring to high school juniors about UC's admissions requirements, a fact that allows these students to plan summer activities and fall senior-year course schedules around the requirements.
"The historic vehicle for communicating UC admissions changes to high school and community college counselors are the counselor conferences" held every August, which counselors attend by the thousands, Williamson said. If the SP-1 provisions were effective for fall 1997, counselors would get their first in-depth look at the changes in August 1996 and then "have barely six weeks" to talk to students about the changes before application deadlines start coming into play, he said. Beyond this, other Senate leaders familiar with the admissions process have noted that UC's own admissions staff -- who reviewed nearly 70,000 undergraduate applications this year -- have a significant amount of learning to do with respect to the new policy; indeed they may have to devise whole new systems for reviewing applications, since the proposed new criteria take into account a more complex mix of factors.
Where all this leaves graduate and professional admissions is unclear. Atkinson's rationale for agreeing to make SP-1 effective for them in fall 1997 was that the "decentralized nature of the admission process at the graduate and professional level means that less time is required for implementation of the new criteria." With respect to graduate admissions, it's unclear what criteria UC has, since decisions are made program by program, often on the basis of personal interactions. Law and medical schools, however, have been the sites of intense fights over affirmative action, but UC does not even have a draft policy constructed for implementation of SP-1 in connection with their admissions processes.