What follows is an adaptation of remarks made to the UC Board of Regents in January by Margaret Conkey, a professor of anthropology at UC, Berkeley, on behalf of the Berkeley Steering Committee of the Faculty Committee to Rescind SP-1 and SP-2.
I address today two main points of history and principle: shared governance and political intrusion. To place these issues in context, we must go back to what happened on July 20. On that date, an impassioned debate about the contentious issue of affirmative action took place; by day's end, the University of California had become the first -- and six months later still the only -- major institution in the nation to eliminate affirmative action. However, what was virtually lost in that debate was the threat that this precipitous decision posed to a far older principle: that of shared decision-making by the faculty, the administration and the Regents on matters of fundamental university policy.
Though some would prefer that we simply accede to this violation of principle, the truth of the matter remains -- that a narrow majority of the Board overrode the considered educational judgment and the expressed will of both the faculty and the administration. On July 10, the Academic Council formally articulated the faculty position that:
That same day, the President, Chancellors, and Vice-Presidents of the University unanimously urged, "in the strongest possible terms, the continuation of the May 1988 Board of Regents policy."
When we are addressing matters fundamental to the educational mission of the university -- such as setting of criteria for student admissions and faculty hiring -- a norm of respect by governing boards for the judgment of the faculty and administration has long been a fact of life at the nation's leading institutions of higher education. When the Board of Regents passed resolutions SP-1 and SP-2 over the forcefully expressed objections of the faculty and administration, it constituted the worst breach of prevailing norms of governance at a major American university in over a quarter of a century. Unless one grasps the magnitude of this violation, it is impossible to understand either the depth of faculty opposition or the seriousness of the situation now facing the Board.
When 14 Regents voted to pass SP-1, they were acting in violation of three-quarters of a century of tradition at the University of California. Regents' Standing Order 105.2, passed by the Regents in 1920, delegates to the Academic Senate the capacity to determine the conditions for admission, for certificates, and for degrees. To be sure, this authority is "subject to the approval of the Board." Yet in the decades after 1920, it became accepted practice for the faculty and not the Board to set the criteria for admissions. As one analyst wrote in 1964, "While the exercise of this delegated power is made pro forma subject to the approval of the Regents, and thus the senate's power is less than complete, it is virtually unthinkable that the Regents would ever substitute their judgment for the senate's." On July 20, 1995, what had been "virtually unthinkable" thirty years earlier suddenly became a stark reality.
In formally requesting that the Regents rescind their actions, it should be emphasized that the faculty is not making the claim that the Regents exceeded their legal authority. Instead the faculty's claim is that the Board failed to exercise appropriate self-restraint in overriding the judgment of both the faculty and the administration on a matter central to the educational mission of the University.
When we the faculty say that the Regents overstepped well-established normative boundaries of university governance, the faculty is not covertly trying, as one current Regent has written, to replace "shared governance" with "faculty governance." On the contrary, the faculty believes that many important areas of decision-making fall appropriately within the domain of Regental authority. But on matters close to the educational and research core of the University -- such as the determination of the criteria by which students are to be selected and faculty are to be hired -- the faculty asks not merely that it be consulted, but that its judgment be respected. From this point of view, the Regents' actions of July constituted a grave breach of the faculty's properly exercised authority. And a continued failure to repair this breach, the faculty believes, threatens the University of California's status as the nation's leading public university.
If the Regents' July actions contradicted the cherished principle of shared governance, these actions equally violated another principle with deep roots in the history of America higher education: namely, that the university, as a public trust, should be protected by its governing board from the vagaries of partisan party politics. Historically, boards of trustees have often served as essential buffers, protecting the university from the political vicissitudes of the moment. The greatest harm occurs when boards are transformed from buffers to their opposites; that is, when they become conduits for surging political pressures. It was just such a transformation of the Board of Regents from its official role as political buffer that led to perhaps the darkest moment in the history of the University of California -- the Loyalty Oath Controversy of 1949-1952. Though in subsequent years there have been other instances in which external political pressures have led the Board to intervene in matters normally left to the faculty, the passage of SP-1 and SP-2 was the gravest violation in over 40 years of the basic principle that the Regents have a responsibility to protect the University from overt intrusions of partisan party politics.
From the perspective of the faculty, the evident fact that SP-1 and SP-2 were forced upon the University despite the utter absence of any urgency on educational grounds constituted disturbing evidence that the Board had turned into a transmission belt for the very political pressures from which it was supposed to protect the University. The Board today faces an historic choice: it can either continue to enmesh the University in the partisan political struggles of the larger society, to the detriment of both the University and its own legitimacy, or it can reaffirm its commitment to one of its great historic tasks: to defend the University against the ever-present risks that it might, in the words of a loyal 19th-century Berkeley alumnus, Jacob Freud, be "wreck[ed] to pieces on the rocks of partisan life and party contention."
A full text of the analyses prepared by the Faculty Committee to Rescind SP-1 and SP-2 and other faculty who appeared before the Regents is available from the Academic Council at (510) 987-9458.