The University of California Academic Senate spoke with a unified voice in November on the subject of affirmative action as six Senate divisions or representative assemblies voted to call upon the UC Regents to rescind their July votes on the issue.
Senate bodies at Davis, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz all passed resolutions in November that were critical of the Regents' action; these votes came on the heels of a similar vote taken by the Berkeley division in October. Meanwhile, Riverside has scheduled a vote on an affirmative action resolution for December and Irvine's Representative Assembly is expected to consider a resolution at its January meeting.
The UCLA and UCSD divisions also decided to send the resolutions approved at their assembly meetings out for a campus-wide mail ballot involving all Senate members. UCSD expects to conduct its vote in January, UCLA in February. Some Senate members feel that these votes will constitute an important test of the sentiment for or against affirmative action among faculty, since rank-and-file Senate members have had no opportunity to date to cast confidential ballots on the issue.
The November Senate actions took place against a backdrop of preparations by the Office of the President and the campuses to begin implementing one of the Regents' July resolutions. SP-2, which forbids the use of race or gender as criteria in the University's employment and contracting practices, goes into effect on January 1. UCOP had originally intended to bring implementation recommendations for SP-2 to the Regents at their November meeting, but found it could not complete work on the guidelines in time. As a result, President Atkinson said, his office expects to mail a report in December to the Regents on implementation of the measure. The Regents do not need to approve the plan in advance, he noted, though they are free to comment upon its provisions. The implementation plan stands to be modified in accordance with campus experience in coming weeks and months, said Janet Young, a special assistant to the president, but the effective date of change for employment and contracting regulations is January 1.
The Academic Council voted in November to ask the Regents to delay this implementation date on grounds that the five months that has elapsed since the Regents' July vote is not enough time to devise sound implementation measures for a measure as far-reaching as SP-2. This message was conveyed to the board at its November meeting by Council Chair Arnold Leiman, who also updated the board on divisional Senate responses to the Regents' actions. Delivering his remarks as part of the regular President's Report to the Regents, Leiman noted that, of the two measures the Regents passed in July, SP-2, with its 1996 effective date, is the more complex to implement, given the host of state and federal regulations regarding affirmative action in contracting and hiring. One of the issues that deserves careful consideration, he said, is the question of whether an institution's stance on affirmative action might be taken into account by grant-funding agencies.
The Academic Council voted to request the delay in SP-2's implementation after having heard a presentation from the leaders of the ad hoc group The Faculty Committee to Rescind SP-1, SP-2. This group says it now has more than 1,600 UC faculty signatures on the petition it has circulated that seeks to reverse the Regents' action.
What follows is a summary of the actions taken through November 30 by UC Senate divisions or representative assemblies on the issues of affirmative action and shared governance as they relate to the Regents' votes of July 20.