Closing time

By Mason Stockstill Daily Bruin Senior Staff The 1990s were
largely the decade of three things: Power Rangers, Pokémon,
and Pete Wilson. For UCLA, however, the more significant of the
three was Wilson, the two-term Republican governor of California,
who was elected in 1990. The majority of the issues and decisions
that shaped the UC system during the ’90s were either pushed
by Wilson himself or were the indirect products of his policies.
Even now, it is difficult to fully assess Wilson’s impact on
UCLA, as the reactions his policies have created remain in flux.
Wilson’s actions left a mark on UCLA and higher education
throughout the state. The only question that remains to be answered
is what his legacy will be.

The cost of an education

Wilson learned early on in his gubernatorial career that he
could, when inclined, exercise an incredible amount of control over
higher education in the state. Faced with a recession in the early
years of his first term, Wilson not only was forced to raise taxes
statewide, but he also prodded the UC Board of Regents to raise
fees. Between 1990 and 1994, fees for in-state undergraduates at
UCLA more than doubled, from $1,685.50 to $3,893.50, annually.
Costs for graduate students increased apace, from $2,203 to $4,396,
annually. Predictably, many were upset at the development, saying
it further eroded the state’s promise of affordable public
education. “California’s commitment to its future
steadily eroded as “˜student fees’ first crept, then
shot, upward,” UCLA alumnus James Richardson wrote in UCLA
Magazine in 1997. 1996-97 Student Regent Jess Bravin pointed out
the irony of Wilson raising fees so substantially, since the
governor, who attended Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law,
had benefited from a system “that gave ““ rather than
sold ““ him one of the finest educations in the world.”
Not only did student fees go up, but Wilson cut back on the amount
of money the state made available to higher education. Between 1991
and 1995, the state cut its funding for higher education by 20
percent. The budget crunch facing the UC had several effects, both
immediate and long-term. Hoping to entice some of its more highly
paid professors to retire, the university sweetened its retirement
packages. As a result, many of its older and more distinguished
faculty members left. This exacerbated the trend that had already
begun where more classes were taught by graduate students and
part-time, adjunct professors who are often given no benefits. In
the long term, Wilson’s belt-tightening caused a paradigm
shift in the way the UCLA funds itself. In 1990, 33 percent of
UCLA’s annual budget came from the state; in 1998, it was
down to 22 percent. To make up the difference, UCLA has turned to
two sources: the hospital and private donations. Long a cash cow
for the campus, the hospital accounted for $380 million of the
campus’s budget in 1990. By 1998, that number had ballooned
to $714 million. And as then-Regent Frank Clark pointed out, when
it came time to appoint a new chancellor of UCLA, the candidate
“couldn’t have that job without fundraising
ability.” But the students, who were so infuriated by the
huge fee increases, and the administrators, who were left with few
options after their funding was slashed, were destined to lose the
battle in the short term. All of the members of the Board of
Regents had been appointed by Wilson or his Republican predecessor,
George Deukmejian, meaning they were mostly political allies of the
two. It was in this environment that Wilson made his next move in
the realm of higher education ““ one that would reverberate
throughout the UC system for years to come, its effects still
influencing policy today.

Affirmative action Part I: The regents

By 1995, Wilson had appointed six regents to the board, one of
whom was Ward Connerly. Appointed in 1993, Connerly proposed taking
on the university’s decades-old affirmative action policy,
which he felt had made the UC admissions process an unfair playing
field. “Certainly, we must know how indefensible it is in a
social democracy to use color or any other physical characteristics
as the basis for how one is to be treated by his or her
government,” Connerly wrote in a submission to the Daily
Bruin in 1995. Wilson embraced Connerly’s ideas, making it a
priority of his to attend the meetings of the board (the governor,
by virtue of his office, is president of the board) when the policy
was being discussed. “California’s diversity must be
achieved naturally,” Wilson told the Daily Bruin at the time.
“Students at the University of California should achieve
distinction and will achieve distinction without the use of any
kind of preferences that have been place.” When the proposal
was first suggested at a meeting in January 1995, the board, which
usually remained outside the realm of political debate, was thrown
into the middle of one. A small but vocal group of students made it
their priority to try to dissuade the regents from going along with
the idea, which was separated into two proposals: SP-1, for
admissions; and SP-2, for hiring and contracting. “I have not
met any students who are planning to show up in favor of
Connerly’s proposal,” said Peter Nguyen, then president
of UC Davis’ undergraduate student government, referring to
students who were planning to travel to a meeting to protest. But
it soon became clear to the students who were opposed to the
changes that many of the regents felt the same way as the governor
on the issue. At that point, the tactics employed by the students
switched from lobbying to disruption. Protests became commonplace
at the campuses. Outraged students and faculty members crammed the
public comment periods at the board meetings. In July 1995,
UCLA’s undergraduate student government approved spending
$500 to send 20 students to protest the meeting in San Francisco,
when the board was scheduled to take its final vote on the
proposal. Hundreds of protesters crammed the meeting and the
streets outside. High-profile activists including the Rev. Jesse
Jackson and United Farm Workers leader Dolores Huerta were present.
More than 50 students, including then-Student Regent Ed Gomez, were
arrested in a sit-in. Several disruption tactics, including a bomb
threat, were used as students attempted to forestall the vote,
which, it had by then become clear, was going to go against
affirmative action. And it did: After a 12-hour meeting, the
proposals passed by votes of 15-10 and 14-10 on July 20, 1995. Soon
after, Connerly spearheaded the campaign for the 1996 ballot
initiative Proposition 209. It passed, applying the policies to all
public school admissions and governmental hiring decisions
statewide.

Affirmative action Part II: The effects

The immediate results of the new policy were disparate. Protests
and sit-ins continued sporadically, and students continued to be
arrested. Affirmative action policies for undergraduate admissions
were still used until the entering freshman class of fall 1998. For
the administrators and faculty whose opinions had been ignored
during the battle over admissions policy, it was time to find a way
to counteract the negative effects they feared would come as a
result of the decision. Interpretations of the new policy varied,
as some administrators felt that it would still allow certain kinds
of affirmative action in admissions, while others believed that
even asking for applicants’ race or ethnicity would be a
violation. After much discussion, the university settled on
outreach as the preferred way to keep the campuses’ diversity
at acceptable levels. Each university would be allotted a set
amount of money to spend on recruiting underrepresented minorities
to apply to UC, and for recruitment of students who had already
been admitted. Before the board of regents created the Outreach
Task Force in 1996, the university spent $60 million on outreach
systemwide; this year, that number is closer to $250 million.
UCLA’s Chancellor Charles E. Young and Chang-Lin Tien,
chancellor of UC Berkeley, who had been outspoken in their
opposition to Connerly before the board’s decision, in 1996
announced their retirements. Though rumors abounded that the
chancellors were resigning in protest, Tien said he wanted to
return to teaching and Young said he just felt that after 28 years,
it was time for him to step down. In spring of 1998, the statistics
for incoming freshmen were released. As many had feared, the number
of underrepresented students admitted to UC Berkeley and UCLA
dropped precipitously: the number of African Americans admitted to
UCLA fell from 488 to 280; at Berkeley, the number dropped from 562
to 191. The number of Latina/o students admitted fell similarly,
from 1,497 to 1,001 at UCLA and from 1,266 to 600 at Berkeley.
Minority enrollment has remained at largely the same percentage in
the years since, causing supporters of affirmative action no small
amount of dismay. “The admissions numbers this year prove
once again that UCLA operates under exclusionary and discriminatory
policies,” USAC President Mike de la Rocha said earlier this
year. “Compared to 1995, these set of numbers are like a slap
in the face of students of color because UCLA is clearly not
representational of the population of California,” he
said.

The legacy

The effects of these policies still linger today. Registration
fees, which were frozen after the state’s economy recovered
in 1996, remain much higher than they were at the beginning of the
decade. And affirmative action has dominated campus politics for
the past five years; the Students First!/Praxis slate that has
dominated UCLA’s undergraduate government since 1995 was
created in opposition to the regents’ decision. The UC system
continues to feel the effects of Wilson’s two terms in
office, and some who opposed him are still trying to reverse those
actions. At the June 1997 meeting of the board of regents, the last
Young attended as chancellor, he urged the regents to reexamine
their actions in eliminating affirmative action. “(I also
hope) that some measure of correction of what has been done will be
taken, to enable this university to better serve the society it
should be serving than it has been able to do, and will be able to
do until those corrections are made,” Young said.