In the wake of the July Regents vote on affirmative action, a systemwide group of UC faculty has come together to protest the action.
As of September 20, the Faculty Committee to Rescind SP-1, SP-2 (FCRSP) had gathered more than 1,100 UC faculty signatures on petition it began circulating late this summer, according to Jerome Karabel, one of the group's leaders and a member of the Berkeley sociology faculty. SP-1 and SP-2 are the titles of the Regents' resolutions on affirmative action in admissions and affirmative action in hiring and contracting, but FCRSP is taking no position on affirmative action as such; rather, the group's members are angered over a perceived insertion of partisan politics into UC's affairs, and over what they regard as an abuse of Regental authority.
"This group includes in it those who are lukewarm or even hostile to affirmative action, but who are unhappy about how this happened and the precedent it set," says Karabel, a member of FCRSP's systemwide Coordinating Committee. Other members of the committee include UCB's Troy Duster, UCLA's Neal Halfon, UC Santa Barbara's Denise Segura, UC Irvine's John H. Smith, and UC Santa Cruz's David Wellman.
FCRSP aims ultimately to take its petition to the UC Regents, but for the present it is interested in getting more signatures. The group has not yet decided whether it will try to work within the structure of the Academic Senate. Prior to the Regents' July vote, the Academic Senate leadership, systemwide and across all campuses, was united in opposing any weakening of UC's affirmative action efforts.
The FCRSP statement says that with their vote, "a narrow majority of the Regents defaulted upon their solemn responsibility to protect the University from the realm of partisan party politics."
Further, the statement says, by acting against the expressed judgment of faculty, administration and other UC constituencies "these Regents violated a long tradition of shared governance. This is a profound threat to the integrity of the University." The petition calls upon the Regents to immediately rescind SP-1 and SP-2.