A task force that was subsequently formed to look at the issue
recommended late in August that UCAP take the issue up for further
study; the committee agreed and has begun reconsideration of the
issue through a subcommittee. UCAP Chair John Poulos of UC Davis
says his committee believes several broad issues need review,
among them the question of the need for such a change on a universitywide
level - as opposed to the need on selected campuses - and the
question of whether enhancements to UC's salary scales might better
be directed to lower-ranks faculty.
When the UC Regents voted in July to approve a governing board for the proposed merger between the UC San Francisco and Stanford hospitals, they also ordered an independent, third-party review of the proposal. The Regents' questions were: does this make sense as a business decision, and do we have enough information to act?
In September, the board got a progress report on the review from the man heading it up, San Francisco investment banker Warren Hellman. Joining Hellman on the blue-ribbon group are John McArthur, the former dean of the faculty at the Harvard business school, and Samuel Thier, a professor of medicine at Harvard and president of Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Hellman panel has come to its work between two of the major steps in the proposed merger. With their July vote, the Regents approved a 17-member governing board for the joint venture: six board members from UC, six from Stanford, and five from the outside. The UC board members would include three regents (one of them the president), the UCSF chancellor, the dean of UCSF's Medical School and one faculty member from the school.
The next step in the merger is the formation of Newco, the corporation that would be governed by this board. President Atkinson has said that he would like to ask the Regents to approve Newco's incorporation by the end of the year. Before this takes place, however, the Regents want to hear from the Hellman panel. In September, Hellman told the Regents that he expects to present his group's report to the Board on October 17.
The Summer 1996 issue of Representations, the quarterly journal of humanities and social sciences published by UC Press, is entirely devoted to the subject of affirmative action, with many of the articles focusing on the UC Regents' affirmative action decision of July 1995. The issue contains 14 submissions, nearly all of them by UCB faculty members. An on-line summary of it is available on the World Wide Web at: http://violet.berkeley.edu:7000/55cont.html