What follows is an adaptation of remarks delivered to the UC Regents in January by Martin Trow, a professor in Berkeley's Graduate School of Public Policy and a former chair of the Senate's Academic Council.
Let me begin by saying that on the issue of affirmative action no one can speak for the faculty of this University; not myself, and not even, or perhaps especially not, those who claim to do so with the greatest passion. And that is because attitudes and sentiment among the faculty are divided very sharply, and almost down the middle, on the substantive issues that your policy of 20 July spoke to. Here I do not have to call on my impressions or anecdotes. Just a few weeks ago, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research conducted a well-designed telephone survey of 1,000 members of the Academic Senate of the university.
These voting members of the Senate were asked whether they favored granting preferences to women and certain racial and ethnic groups, or whether they favored promoting equal opportunities in these areas without regard to an individual's race, sex, or ethnicity. A wide plurality (48 percent) favored the latter policy; only 31 percent favored the granting of race and ethnic preferences. When the question was put differently, in the form of "Do you favor using race or sex as a criterion for admission to UC?" the findings show a bare majority of 52 percent in favor of retaining these criteria.
Given these results, the question may arise in your minds, as it has in mine, of how it is that meetings of campus Senates on all nine campuses can have passed resolutions condemning the Regents' actions of last July, while the survey just described shows the faculty pretty evenly divided on the issues. There are several reasons. For one thing, the University over the years has developed a strong climate and organizational structure in support of its policy of racial and ethnic preferences: from the President's Office down, every campus, every college has administrative offices and Senate committees to plan and enforce preferential policies; every department has an "affirmative action" officer to monitor its behavior. All the chancellors, with I suspect varying degrees of enthusiasm, supported the policies of group preference, as also the provosts and deans on every campus, who didn't become provosts and deans unless they did. But there was and is no equivalent organization of people and energy devoted to criticizing the old policies or trying to reform them. Even professors with tenure do not like to run afoul of their deans, much less their chancellors, all of whom can on occasion be very clear about their preferences, though not always on paper.
In addition, there is always the danger for critics of these arrangements of calling down on themselves the charge of "racist." No matter how unwarranted and unfair, it is an awful epithet, and can affect one's relations with one's colleagues and students -- indeed, one's whole life and career. Intimidation is perhaps too strong a word, but it is not far off.
Let's look for a moment at the resolutions passed at the meetings of the campus Senates. They are all votes of those attending, and we know that such meetings are ordinarily not well attended, and those who come are disproportionately those who have very strong interests in the outcome. In this case, for reasons already suggested, they tended to be members ideologically committed to the existing policy of preferences. There had not been a broad or deep discussion of the new policies throughout the faculty, and thus no way of distinguishing between the policies themselves and the procedures that led to their enactment.
Opponents of the new policy could not find anything like a consensus behind a condemnation of the substance of the Regents' action, for reasons suggested by the Roper survey. But in response to the cries of outrage against the Regents' action, the Senate members who were not themselves opposed to removing group preferences could find consensus where it is always easiest to find it: in condemnation of the procedures that led to the decisions. There is always a favorable response in the faculty to the cry of "inadequate consultation," both because consultation is the Senate's chief avenue of influence on decisions in the University and also because it is often a well-founded complaint.
But complaints about "inadequate consultation" are not always so well-founded. It is not uncommon in a system run largely through consultation, discussion and compromise for some who do not gain their ends through consultation to complain that therefore the consultation was inadequate -- confusing consultation with agreement.
Was consultation with the faculty adequate? It is my understanding that Regent Connerly did discuss his plans (though not the exact wording of his resolutions) with the then-Chair and Vice Chair of the Senate in the months before the July meeting. But those discussions, if I am correct, did not involve the President, who had already declared his firm opposition to the proposed changes in policy, and perhaps was unwilling to do anything that might increase its chances of passage. So there were not the extended discussions with faculty representatives that might fulfill our expectations about the right kind and degree of consultation on such an important issue. There are real costs to a deep and public split between the President of the University and the Regents, and this was one of them: the blocking of the chief channel of communications between faculty and Regents.
If my own views are not already apparent, let me make them clear. I think the new policy is a good policy, but gravely compromised in the timing and nature of its passage. I am not disturbed that this should have been an initiative of the Regents; on the contrary, the Regents have the responsibility to determine the fundamental nature of the University and its broad relationship to the society which supports it. This is a fundamental issue of public policy; retaining the old preferences would have been a Regental action as much as was abolishing them. No one else could have taken this action; not the president (any president), nor the chancellors and certainly not the Academic Senate.
On the substantive side, I believe that it is now time for the University to move on to the question of how best to implement an affirmative action policy that does not provide categorical preferences, but serves the whole community, ensures access to all without regard to their race, ethnicity or sex, and continues to reflect the diversity of the population of the state. If this is not to be empty rhetoric, it will require a University commitment to primary and secondary schools, and especially to those schools that send us few students, as deep as our commitment has been historically to agriculture, industry, and the professions.
A full text of the analyses prepared by Martin Trow and other faculty who appeared before the Regents is available from the Academic Council at (510) 987-9458.