Repeal of SP-1, 2 ends dark period of UC politicization

  Michael Weiner Weiner is a fourth-year
history and political science student. His column analyzing issues
of interest to the UCLA community runs on Mondays. E-mail him at
[email protected].

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When the UC Board of Regents voted unanimously to rescind its
ban on affirmative action in admissions and hiring last week, it
brought to an end a period of nearly six years during which this
university was politicized to an extent that hasn’t been seen
since the era of Gov. Ronald Reagan.

SP-1 and SP-2, the board’s 1995 measures that ended the
use of race and gender preferences, did not merely result in a
steep decline in underrepresented minority students, especially at
the UC’s flagship campuses of UCLA and UC Berkeley. They also
marked the University of California’s entry ““
notwithstanding the protests of the vast majority of its students,
faculty and administrators ““ into the leading edge of the
debate over what would become perhaps the biggest political wedge
issue of the ’90s.

Hoping to be a presidential contender, former Gov. Pete Wilson
sought a national platform for the demagoguery he had perfected
with the 1994 immigrant-bashing initiative, Proposition 187.
Affirmative action was a winning issue, because many moderate and
some liberal voters felt, and still feel, that such programs are no
longer warranted.

The University of California had been at the center of an
affirmative action controversy before. It was the defendant in the
1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision, known as Bakke, that provided the
national standard for legal preference programs. Namely, it stated
that race and gender could be taken into account in university
admissions, business contracts, etc., but hardened quotas were
found unconstitutional.

Nonetheless, the UC’s role in this state’s
affirmative action debate, and the consequent passage of
1996’s much-ballyhooed Proposition 209, was unprecedented for
an institution that is supposed to be non-partisan and
apolitical.

Ironically, as mayor of San Diego and a U.S. senator, Wilson was
a consummate moderate who supported many affirmative action
programs. But like so many politicians of our epoch, Prudent Pete
wasn’t going to let his beliefs get in the way of his
career.

So the affirmative action issue was born anew. And Wilson had
the perfect stooge on the Board of Regents to mix some pure
ideology with his own self-interested political jockeying.

Appointed by Wilson in 1993, Regent Ward Connerly, an African
American, is more obsessed with race than the most ethnic of
ethnocentrists. Connerly’s entire life is devoted to
trumpeting one extremely misguided assertion: that race as a
category is irrelevant.

This represents a standard conservative viewpoint of the last 20
years ““ it belatedly embraces the rhetoric of the Civil
Rights Movement while at the same time ignores the systematic
institutionalized racism and socioeconomic inequality that are
direct remnants of past discrimination, and thus makes programs of
redistributive social justice (such as affirmative action) as
necessary as ever. Regardless, that is a political debate that can
be saved for another day. The issue at hand is that Wilson, with
Connerly fronting as his ideological puppet, used the UC as an
instrument to advance his political career.

In many ways, SP-1 and 2 served the purpose of testing the
waters for Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action
statewide just over a year later. Starting with the UC, Wilson was
allowed to jumpstart the campaign for 209 early, and thus build up
his national reputation before the 1996 Republican primaries.
Wilson’s presidential hopes soon faded, but the damage to the
university was already done.

Clearly, a politician using a public university as a lever for
political gain is unconscionable, but that’s exactly what
Wilson, with help from Connerly and the Republican functionaries on
the Board of Regents, did. When the affirmative action ban was
being considered in 1994 and ’95, every significant segment
of the university population opposed it ““ from former UC
President Jack Peltason to all nine chancellors to the Academic
Senate to the UC Students Association. Officials told the regents
that doing away with affirmative action would mar the educational
mission of the university. And of course, they were right.

But Wilson and his cronies weren’t interested in such
sentiments, so they pulled the UC kicking and screaming into the
political arena, and there it has stayed for almost six years. Our
university is labeled in almost every press account of the national
affirmative action debate as a leader in the charge to dismantle
such programs.

Last week’s action rescinding SP-1 and SP-2 won’t do
anything substantive to increase diversity on UC campuses. In
truth, it doesn’t really provide a much-needed repudiation of
the measures, judging from the fact that even Connerly voted to
approve the new resolution.

What it does do, however, is close the book on a dark period in
this university’s history, a period when irresponsible public
officials violated a sacred public trust by using an educational
institution for narrow political gain.