President's Letter Ignites Controversy
On Authority over Admissions at UC

A letter sent to the University of California Regents last month by UC President Richard Atkinson has prompted a controversy regarding a seemingly straightforward question: what authority over admissions have the Regents delegated to the UC faculty? The answer Atkinson gave in his letter is that the faculty's authority is limited to setting minimal academic standards for entrance to the University and that all other authority either has been retained by the Regents themselves or has been delegated to the administration. To such seasoned observers of the University as President, Emeritus Clark Kerr, however, the president's position is supported neither by the language of the Regents' Standing Orders nor by the past practices of the University.

Ironically, Atkinson opened a controversy about shared governance and admissions in a letter that was intended to defuse a more general criticism of shared governance at UC. The president drafted his letter in anticipation of a finding released late in May by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) on whether the Regents violated principles of shared governance by voting as they did last July to cut back affirmative action at UC. In his letter, the president used his assertion about the faculty authority over admissions to buttress his central conclusion: that "there are no reasonable grounds to conclude that a violation of shared governance occurred."

The AAUP inquiry and the president's letter are two pieces in an ever-growing puzzle that the University has been trying to put together on shared governance since the Regents votes of last July. For the past several months, a statewide Senate task force, led by Academic Council Vice-Chair Duncan Mellichamp, has been conducting an analysis of shared governance at UC. This group is seeking to shed light, Mellichamp says, "on where the Academic Council has been effective with respect to shared governance, where it has not, and how it might be reorganized to become more effective." Meanwhile, every campus Senate Division has voted to call on the Regents to rescind their votes on affirmative action, in part on grounds that the votes represent a violation of shared governance. Going beyond this, the Berkeley Division took a preliminary vote in April to censure the Regents for their affirmative action votes, citing, among other things, the board's "violation of long-established traditions of University governance . . . "

The Berkeley Division's vote came just as a UCB Senate advisory group, chaired by Clark Kerr, issued a report that called for the establishment of "joint committees," made up of faculty and Regents, that would "facilitate direct exchange of views" on admissions and governance. Hearing from Kerr at its May meeting, the Academic Council voted to accept the concept of informal meetings between faculty and Regents on a broad array of issues.

The President's letter effectively landed in the middle of these activities and its assertions on the faculty's authority over admissions prompted several responses from the Senate. The statewide Senate Task Force on Shared Governance decided to focus in the near-term on the history of shared governance and admissions. Meanwhile, in a letter issued on May 2, Kerr urged the Senate to "act promptly" to challenge what he called the "unsupported interpretations" on admissions authority set forth in Atkinson's letter. Council Chair Leiman, likewise, has said the issue should be looked into. A review of the president's position and the criticisms of it is contained in the Notice story, contained in this issue, What Admissions Authority Does the UC Faculty Have?