UC President Richard Atkinson has concluded that last July's vote by the UC Regents to limit affirmative action in University admissions did not constitute a violation of shared governance at UC. Part of the underpinning for his view, he said, is that the delegated admissions authority of the UC faculty is limited to establishment of the minimum academic qualifications for entry into the University.
"Other admissions criteria, and the selection from among students who meet those criteria, are the responsibility of The Regents and the administration," Atkinson said in a letter to the Regents dated May 1. "This includes the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in selecting students from among those who meet the minimum academic qualifications as determined by the faculty." The Senate has a consultative role in these areas, he said, but not a determinative one.
Atkinson set forth his views in anticipation of the issuance of a report by the American Association of University Professors on whether the Regents violated principles of shared governance in their actions of last July. Following requests from UC faculty last summer, the AAUP agreed to form a commission to look into the issue.
In arriving at his view, Atkinson asked for an opinion from UC General Counsel James Holst. In a letter to Atkinson on April 25, Holst noted that the critical phrase of the Regents' Standing Orders with respect to the Academic Senate and admissions is that the Senate "shall determine the conditions for admission . . ." Holst said that the meaning of this phrase "has been the subject of numerous opinions of the General Counsel over the past 30 years. The term has consistently been interpreted to mean only those academic requirements below which a student is not qualified for admission."
Atkinson did note that the process by which the Regents made their decision last July was "a significant departure from the way such decisions are traditionally made in the University and did not include the customary deliberative analysis by the Academic Senate." Shared governance, he said, involves "not only delegations of authority, but also a complex system of collaboration, communication, and implicit understandings among faculty, administration, and Regents. And in those terms, at least, our governance mechanisms were severely strained by the events of the past year."
Atkinson noted that he has asked the Academic Senate to review shared governance at UC and added that "It is no accident that the University of California's first real steps toward greatness coincided with the introduction of shared governance 75 years ago." It would be appropriate, he said, for the Regents "to adopt a resolution in the near future reaffirming its historic commitment to shared governance."