Students, Lawyers Battle to Block Proposition 209
Jerry Cornfield
The Independent; November 14, 1996
Five hundred chanting protesters marched throughout UCSB on Tuesday, decrying Proposition 209 as a cradle of divisiveness and discrimination that will spawn a new movement for civil rights unmatched in its breadth since the 1960s. Demonstrators invoked the names of Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and President Kennedy as they angrily decried passage of the measure last week that guts the soul of 30-year-old affirmative action policies enabling the use of race, sex, and ethnicity as factors in helping decide who attends and who works for the University of California. Their voices joined a growing chorus of dissenters at other UC schools who today converge in San Francisco to pressure the Board of Regents to stop abiding by the initiative until state and federal courts decide its legality.
Meanwhile, two lawsuits have been filed in federal court that attack the proposition as unconstitutional by barring women and minorities from seeking protective race- or gender-conscious legislation, when other groups are permitted to seek such treatment. Both suits want injunctions-as yet ungranted-to keep the measure from taking effect.
A third suit filed by proponents seeks immediate compliance by throwing out statutes allowing community colleges, the state lottery commission, and the state Department of General Services to use race, gender, and ethnicity in contracting and hiring. Proponents acted so the measure is not judicially sidelined as occurred with the anti-illegal immigrant Proposition 187. "It's the law of the land," said Robert Corry, a Pacific Legal Foundation attorney representing the authors. "It's time for people to realize they have to live with Proposition 209."
Refuse to Lose: Visceral reaction to Proposition 209's passage is strongest on UC campuses, where, in July 1995, the regents ended the use of race, gender, and ethnicity in hiring and contracting-as of this year, and in undergraduate admissions in spring 1998. But the day after the election, UC officials ordered an immediate end to the use of such preferences in admissions, thus affecting high school students now applying for next school year. As a result, critics fear fewer women and minorities will enter UC this year. Meanwhile, admissions officials must devise new selection rules. The goal, a diverse student body, "remains the same, but the means to achieve it have changed, and we're in the process of redefining the means," said William Villa. UCSR's director of admissions.
The election loss followed by the sped-up implementation jolted students, faculty, and staff. Protest rallies occurred at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State, and UC Riverside this past week. At UCSB, 300 people attended a meeting November 8 at which testy students quizzed administrators and Chancellor Henry Yang on what lies ahead. Then came Tuesday's action. "The climate has changed. It is more hostile on campus," said a protester, graduate student Anastasia Telesetsky. "There is a sense of territorialization. There is a sense of the unknown that is generating fear and anger, justifiably so because no one knows what will happen."
For Chancellor Yang and top; administrators, these are trying. times. Philosophically, they back I the student positions but are unwilling to disobey regental orders. Students recognize the trip-wire on which they walk. "They're not part of the problem. We're asking them to fight with us," said student Daniel Villa. "We want them to stall the process of irnplementa tion as much as possible." Yang responded by accelerating outreach efforts in high schools, encouraging applications from nontraditional-minority--students, ' and he is creating a campus task force to answer questions triggered by this debate. "As with the public vote, our campus may not be together on the proposition," he wrote in an open letter to the cam-:, pus community. "However, I have confidence that we share a common belief in the value of diversity,: in an- intellectual community such as ours. We will work together, we will work within regental policy and the new law."
Tuesday's speakers want to believe that's true. In the meantime, they are coalescing with staff and faculty to exert new pressures in the political arena, possibly even putting forth a future measure to counteract Proposition 209. "These last few days have been a personal awakening for me," Telesetsky said. "I hope that someday we can say that Proposition 209's passage may have been a necessary evil. A small piece of paper written in sloppy generalized language about elimination of so-called 'preferences'-as if we can choose, to be who we are-has opened up a much larger kettle of fish."
Carl
Gutierrez-Jones
Department of English
University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106
E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu