Critics of the pro-affirmative action stance taken to date by the University of California Academic Senate have long suspected that substantial portion of UC faculty actually oppose admissions and hiring preferences based on race or gender. In January, they got fuel for their argument in the form of a survey of 1,000 UC Academic Senate members conducted by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. What the survey found was that UC faculty seem fairly evenly split on the issue of affirmative action, though faculty responses varied widely in accordance with the exact wording of the questions asked.
When the question was: "Do you favor or oppose using race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as a criterion for admission to the University of California?" 52 percent of Senate members were in favor and 34 percent opposed. Forty-seven percent of those surveyed favored using these criteria in employment and contracting practices, while 39 percent opposed.
The survey then went on to ask which of two statements "best describes" the policy that UC should pursue: granting preferences to women and certain racial and ethnic groups in admissions, hiring and promotions, or promoting "equal opportunities in these areas without regard to an individual's race, sex or ethnicity." Forty-eight percent of the UC faculty polled chose the second statement, while only 31 percent chose the first. The poll also indicated that a slim plurality of UC faculty (43 to 37 percent) personally defines "affirmative action" as meaning "promoting equal opportunities" for all individuals without regard to race or sex, rather than "granting preferences" to women and certain racial groups.
Conducted in December, the poll was sponsored by the conservative California Association of Scholars (CAS), an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars. In terms of methodology, the survey appeared to be very strong in some ways: polling by telephone, the well-respected Roper organization got an 80 percent response rate from a random sampling of Senate members distributed on all nine campuses and representing a range of the professoriate, from instructors to full professors.
Nevertheless, the survey did have critics. Berkeley professor Michael Hout, an opponent of the Regents July decision and director of UCB's Survey Research Center, was concerned about the wording of the poll's questions. With respect to choosing between the two statements -- on "preferences" as opposed to "equal opportunity" -- Hout said that the pollsters "constructed a false dichotomy between affirmative action and equal opportunity. From the point of view of those who support affirmative action, it promotes equal opportunity."
Even supporters of the Regents action acknowledge that on an issue such as affirmative action, the specific language of the questions that are asked will strongly determine the responses -- witness the disparity in the UC faculty's response to Roper's first question as opposed to its second.
"All that one can say about these results is that there's a split in the faculty," says Sanford Lakoff, a professor emeritus of political science at UCSD who favored the Regents' July votes. "Certainly there is a significant amount of support within the UC system for the existing system [of racial preferences] and there are lots of us that are opposed to it."
CAS leaders said, however, that this is exactly the point: there is no UC faculty consensus in support of affirmative action. This notion stands in sharp contrast to divisional votes that have been held to date in connection with the Regents' votes; all nine UC divisions or representative Assemblies that have considered the twin issues of affirmative action and shared governance have approved resolutions calling on the Regents to rescind their actions. Why this seeming disparity between rank-and-file views on the one hand and Senate votes on the other?
One answer is that the resolutions considered by Senate divisions were as much about shared governance and alleged political intrusion into UC's affairs as about affirmative action. Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel, a leader of the group The Faculty Committee to Rescind SP-1 and SP-2, says that "It was sufficient to vote for recision of SP-1 and SP-2 based on any of the three grounds in the resolutions."
UCSD's Lakoff believes that those who have attended the divisional Senate meetings "tend to be people on the left . . . who are apt to feel more passionate about political issues," while moderates or conservatives, he says, "tend to be more involved with their work and they don't want to get involved in political issues." Meanwhile UC Berkeley historian Sheldon Rothblatt, director of UCB's Center for Studies in Higher Education, says that "Nobody wants to be targeted as a racist, which is the way you get targeted when you raise your hand at a Senate meeting and say you're against preferences." Rothblatt thus believes that the Roper poll is significant because it provides a more accurate view of the state of faculty opinion.
Apart from its main findings, the poll revealed some sharp distinctions within the UC faculty on the subject of affirmative action, among them a distinction between men and women. On the question of using race or sex as criteria in admissions, 73 percent of female faculty were in favor, in comparison to only 47 percent of male faculty.
Responses also varied in accordance with academic disciplines. Sixty-six percent of arts and humanities faculty favored using race and sex as admissions criteria, while only 38 percent of computer science and engineering faculty felt this way.