UCSC Review Winter 1996

Regents asked torescind affirmative action votes

Contending that UC's Board of Regents "defaulted upon their solemn responsibility to protect the university from partisan party politics," UCSC's Academic Senate voted in a special end-of-fall- quarter meeting to ask the board to rescind its July affirmative action decisions.

UCSC faculty attending the November 29 meeting voted 72-0 to support a motion proposed by David Wellman, professor of community studies. Four members of the senate voted to abstain.

The vote made UCSC the sixth Academic Senate within the UC system to request that the Regents rescind their two decisions in July: one that eliminated race, ethnicity, and gender from admissions criteria; a second that eliminated the same factors from hiring and business practices.

Within UCSC's senate, support for the Wellman resolution came from three sources:

--From members who said that the Regents' vote runs contrary to a responsibility UC has to reflect California's increasing diversity.

--From members who said that the Regents' vote deprived the faculty of its rightful role in establishing admissions criteria and in hiring and promoting faculty.

--From those members who objected to the Regents' vote on both grounds.

The Regents' vote in July was the "worst violation of shared governance since the loyalty oath in the height of the McCarthy era," said Kristin Luker, a UC Berkeley faculty member who addressed UCSC's senate.

"It's equally important--if not more so--that we also as a faculty make a statement for diversity in our university," observed David Swanger, UCSC professor of education and creative writing.