What authority has the University of California faculty been granted over admissions? In his letter of May 1, President Atkinson held that the faculty's authority extends only to setting "the minimum academic qualifications" for entrance to the University. "Other admissions criteria, and the selection from among the students who meet those criteria, are the responsibility of The Regents and the administration," the president wrote. However, the president went on to note that shared governance "by long tradition involves not only delegations of authority but also a complex system of collaboration, communication and implicit understandings among faculty, administration, and Regents." Nevertheless, the president's letter set forth a clear de jure principle regarding admissions -- one that some faculty feel is at least questionable and that others believe is simply wrong.
At last month's Universitywide Assembly meeting, the president expressed some misgivings about the position he had taken, but to date his only written opinion on the issue is contained in his letter.
No one doubts that ultimate authority over admissions, or any other University issue, rests with the UC Regents. The question that has been raised is what admissions authority has been delegated to the faculty -- and what to the administration -- by the UC Regents. Further, how has this delegation been treated in practice? To what extent, in other words, does practice differ from principle in this issue?
There is a clear definition of the "minimum academic qualifications" that Atkinson asserted faculty have authority over. These are the "subject, scholarship and examination" requirements, also known as the a-f, grade-point average, and standardized test requirements that high school graduates must meet in order to be eligible for admission to UC. Campuses are free to be more selective, however, in picking from among students who have met these minimum qualifications. In this process, they use both additional academic criteria (such as higher GPAs and test scores) and "supplemental" criteria (such as economic hardship and special talents). All parties are agreed that it is the Senate's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) that is charged with setting the minimal requirements for entrance to UC. The issue the president's letter has raised, then, has centrally to do with authority over the additional academic criteria and the supplemental criteria. (Of the latter, the most famous, of course, are the criteria the Regents have voted to abolish that allow consideration of race, gender or ethnicity.)
In his letter, the president based his view of faculty admissions authority on an opinion he requested from UC's General Counsel's Office. In a letter written on April 25, General Counsel James Holst supported the notion of a limited faculty admissions authority and cited as the basis for his view "numerous opinions of the General Counsel over the past 30 years." But what, in turn, underlies these General Counsel's opinions? UC President, Emeritus Clark Kerr points out that in interpreting any body of laws or regulations, it is common to "look at what the language itself says, what the intent of the parties [drafting the language] was . . . and what the practice was following the change" in regulations. In the case of UC admissions, the language governing delegations of authority is contained in the Regents' Standing Orders and the important change in them came in 1920, when the Regents delegated significant new powers to the faculty.
Though the subject is now being investigated, no one in the Senate or the General Counsel's Office has any idea what the "intentions" of the Regents were in 1920 when they revised their standing orders. Further, no one has undertaken an investigation to see if University admissions practices differed immediately before and after the 1920 change. What the General Counsel's opinions rest on, then, is an interpretation of the language in the Standing Orders and a linkage of this interpretation to some of UC's admissions practices.
The actual Regents' language on admissions authority is sparse. The word "admission" appears only once in the Standing Orders in connection with an explicit delegation of authority. Regents Standing Order 105.2.a states:
The General Counsel's interpretation of this language turns out to hinge on the meaning of one word: "conditions." According to Gary Morrison, a UC deputy general counsel, a condition is "a characteristic that is required, not one that is desirable." "It is something that must be met to get over the bar." It follows from this, he says, that the Regents have charged the Senate only with determining minimal standards for admission. Meanwhile, he says, the administration's authority over admissions derives from the broad authority the Regents have granted to the president and chancellors. As Standing Order 100.6 notes, campus chancellors are to be "the executive head of all activities on that campus, except as herein otherwise provided . . ." Thus, in the General Counsel's view, what has not been delegated to the faculty has been delegated to the administration and what has been delegated to the faculty concerns only basic entrance requirements.
Not surprisingly, this view of Regental delegation is not shared by everyone. Some faculty have noted that the General Counsel's Office has selected from among several definitions of the word "condition," and that, under other interpretations of the word, the faculty can be viewed as having been granted authority over all aspects of admissions. Clark Kerr says that the General Counsel's interpretation "cannot be derived from what was said in 1920." At that time, he says, the Regents delegated authority over admissions to the faculty and the board, he says, "did not at any point take back this authority." Further, with respect to the interpretations provided by the General Counsel's Office, he says "there is nothing suggesting that the Senate was ever consulted about these changing relationships, or even informed."
Despite the lack of information on the events of 1920, both sides in this dispute look to history to provide some support for their case. Morrison points to a list, generated in the 1960s, of extra-academic "admissions" factors that traditionally have been overseen by the Regents or the administration. For example, students may not be admitted without paying fees and students who have had disciplinary problems may not be readmitted without the approval of the chancellor. Under this view, supplemental admissions criteria are just another sort of admissions factor that is under the control of the administration. Looked at another way, however, such things as payment of fees would seem to be the very kind of minimal "requirements for admission" that the General Counsel's Office says the faculty have authority over.
John Douglass, a historian and executive director of the UC Santa Barbara Academic Senate, has been asked by the Senate's Task Force on Shared Governance to look into the historical record with respect to the admissions issue. His initial investigation, he says, has revealed that faculty have always been involved in setting admissions policy outside of minimal undergraduate standards. For example, at the turn of the century, UC instituted what is now known as "admissions by exception," under which a limited number of students who don't meet minimal academic standards may be admitted. The faculty, he says, were intimately involved in setting up and implementing this procedure -- both at the turn of the century and, at Santa Barbara, as late as the 1950s.
Whatever de jure authority the Senate has over admissions, there is no doubt that much of the de facto control over admissions rests currently with the administration. For simple demonstration of this, consider the soon-to-be-released guidelines for undergraduate admission that were constructed in the wake of the Regents' votes on affirmative action. It is President Atkinson who will put the stamp of "policy" on these guidelines, not the Senate. Though faculty were heavily involved in the task force that constructed the guidelines, no one in the Senate questioned the president's authority to bring such a group together and no one challenged his authority to make policy of the proposals that were drafted.
The view of Arnold Leiman, chair of the Senate's Academic Council, is that over time the Senate has effectively ceded its admission authority to the administration, in large part because, with the growth of the University, admissions has simply gotten too complex and burdensome to be handled by the faculty. John Douglass shares this view, saying that since about 1960, the faculty "have knowingly or unknowingly delegated the authority that was given to them," largely to a group of admissions professionals. These views find some common ground with an idea expressed by Gary Morrison, who speculates that, when the University was smaller, there may have been "no difference between meeting minimum qualifications and being admitted." Under this view, it is not official delegations of authority that have changed over time, but rather the world to which these delegations apply.
Given all this, the view of Council Chair Leiman is that "The
time has come to examine the story of admissions, including delegations
of authority and the culture of faculty engagement in this issue
over the past 50-70 years. We have different points of view that
need to be resolved."