San Diego -- The typical California public college houses an array of organizations devoted to minority students, women, and, recently, the all-out defense of affirmative-action policies that grant preferential treatment based on gender or race.
Those groups have become key players in a statewide campaign to defeat Proposition 209, a measure on the November ballot that would largely prohibit the use of such preferences by the state. If it passes, the measure could invalidate programs at public schools and colleges that show favoritism in awarding financial aid, admitting applicants, or providing outreach, tutoring, and other services.
Viewing Proposition 209 as a profound threat to their activities and to the future of the students they represent, the groups are working with faculty members, administrators, and national civil-rights groups to transform the state’s campuses into bastions of resistance to the initiative. They have staged demonstrations around the state -- including a series of protests this month dubbed"Weeks of Rage” -- and mounted voter-registration campaigns so that students can cast ballots against the measure, which is drawing attention nationwide.
“Our goal is to mobilize 50,000 students at all of the campuses to go to the polls and vote No,” says Sabrina A. Smith, a field organizer for the University of California Student Association and a 1996 graduate of the university’s campus at Los Angeles.
Surveys have shown that most voters in the state support Proposition 209, also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative.
On the campuses, however, the measure’s foes seem dominant. About the only vocal support for the initiative comes from chapters of the College Republicans and from some faculty members who belong to the California Association of Scholars, which has taken no formal position on the issue but has leaders of a"Yes on Proposition 209" campaign in its ranks.
Some students who support Proposition 209 try not to let their opinion be widely known."College Republicans and other people in favor of 209 are very timid about standing up for it,” says Patrick M. Batten, chairman of the student group’s chapter at San Diego State University."You don’t want to be deemed a racist.”
While they are more vocal and visible, foes of Proposition 209 have failed to mount the 1960s-style campaign of massive opposition they had predicted. Memberships in the organizations supporting the cause often overlap, and the same core group of committed students appears to be orchestrating much of the anti-209 activity. Observers on both sides say there may be less student opposition to Proposition 209 than there was to Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative that called for denying illegal immigrants access to various state services. It passed easily.
Most of the students encountered in recent visits to Southern California campuses said they had no opinion on, or knowledge about, Proposition 209.
Its chief provision says:"The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” The proposition provides exemptions for policies and programs required under federal law.
Last month, San Diego State was the site of one of several rallies staged by student groups opposed to Proposition 209. The featured speaker, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., was greeted by a racially diverse crowd of more than 1,000 students and professors who gathered at the campus’s Free Speech Plaza beneath an unblinking midmorning sun.
A few College Republicans mingled in the crowd, handing out literature supporting Proposition 209, but the event’s organizers quickly collected many of the yellow pamphlets and urged students to toss the rest in a recycling bin. Most of the people gathered here appeared to oppose Proposition 209; they held signs that said ‘Racism, Sexism Still Exists” and “Affirmative Action Benefits Our School.”
Alex Tom, a member of the University of California Student Association’s governing board, told the crowd that a"racist, sexist, homophobic, white, elitist, heterosexual society” had put the measure on the ballot. Iliana Guerrero, a San Diego State student who is active in the campus’s Women’s Resource Center, urged the crowd to"wake up” and"see how 209 has declared war on you.”
The organizations listed as opposing the measure included groups representing black, Filipino, and Latino students; the campus women’s center, Mexican-American Studies Department, and Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Student Union; and the California State Student Association, which represents student governments on all 22 California State University campuses.
Similar coalitions have come together at other institutions, including chapters of the College Democrats and groups representing American Indian and Muslim students and those of other races and ethnicities.
The groups charge that Proposition 209 threatens the existence of ethnic- and women’s-studies departments, along with clubs, organizations, and campus offices devoted to women and minority students.
But Gail L. Heriot, a University of San Diego law professor and a leader of the Yes on Proposition 209 campaign, insists that"clubs are in no way in danger” from the measure. Moreover, she says,"it is silly to suspect that ethnic-studies and women’s-studies departments are in jeopardy, unless they grant preferences based on race or sex in terms of who can study.” Nor, she adds, would centers for women or other groups be affected, unless they denied their services to some students.
The National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority also have worked closely with student groups to oppose Proposition 209, which they view as especially threatening to women.
Their focus has been on Clause C of the measure, which allows state agencies to establish"bona fide” and"reasonably necessary” sex-based qualifications related to jobs. If the measure passes, Ms. Guerrero told the crowd at San Diego State,"sex discrimination will practically be legalized here in California.” Other opponents of Proposition 209 say the measure leaves women in the workplace vulnerable to being fired for becoming pregnant or complaining about sexual harassment.
Ms. Heriot, rolling her eyes at the mention of such concerns, says the clause mirrors current civil-rights law and allows common-sense policies, such as one requiring that strip searches of prison inmates be performed by members of the same sex.
“The Clause C issue is manufactured to frighten voters,” she says."Rather than debating the core issues, they have attempted to distract voters by creating issues that don’t really exist.”
Both sides of the debate agree that Proposition 209 will probably produce a short-term drop in the number of black and Hispanic students in the state’s selective public colleges. Such preferences in admissions are used almost exclusively by the University of California, whose Board of Regents voted in July 1995 to ban their use in admissions beginning with students who enter in the spring of 1998.
James E. Holst, the University of California’s general counsel, recently reported that the passage of Proposition 209 could force the university to put the ban on admissions preferences in place a year earlier.
The regents also banned the use of race- and gender-based preferences in hiring and contracting, starting last January. Proposition 209 would put the force of state law behind that ban and impose the same policy on the state’s other public colleges.
Mr. Holst said the precise meaning of Proposition 209’s sweeping language"is likely to be litigated and may take considerable time to finally resolve.” He would be surprised, he added, if state courts forbade the university’s recruiters to make personal contact with promising minority students, but he said he would be equally surprised if the courts let the university design programs that provided no practical benefit to non-minority students.
The University of California regents have been credited with legitimizing the view that preferences are unnecessary and unwise. Ironically, they also may have planted the seeds for the campus-based resistance to Proposition 209.
Their July 1995 attacks on preferences were opposed by -- and appeared to alienate -- many administrators, faculty senates, and the U.C. Student Association. Those groups helped organize opposition to Proposition 209 on other campuses in the hope that the initiative’s defeat would prompt the university’s regents to repeal their own policies.
Meanwhile, a few students at the University of California at San Diego have formed a new group, Students Against Discrimination and Preferences, which endorses the regents’ decisions, favors Proposition 209, and views affirmative action as a violation of individual rights. But as described by Boris A. Slutsky, the graduate student who heads the group, it sounds more like a support group than a political movement. “Our minimum goal,” he says, is"to get visible enough to let students know, if they support 209, that they’re okay, they’re not alone.”
Ms. Heriot’s campus office has come to resemble a war room. Her desk is piled high with paper and Pez candy wrappers, and the plants on her shelf droop from weeks without water. She predicts that her efforts on behalf of Proposition 209 will pay off with easy passage. Moreover, she says, the state’s colleges will be better off.
Efforts to lower the bar for minority students, she argues, “have seriously interfered with the ability of colleges and universities to deliver the kind of education that all students deserve, regardless of race or sex,” and have masked the chronic failure of public inner-city high schools to adequately prepare students for college.
“For years, supporters of preferences regarded those preferences as a solution, and they’re not a solution at all,” she says."Now, genuinely good ideas are coming to the forefront.”
Opponents of Proposition 209 acknowledge that defeating it will be difficult. If it is passed, they promise to continue their struggle by fighting its enforcement.
Roland S. Coloma, a graduate student at the University of California at Riverside and a leader of Students for Social Justice, which opposes Proposition 209, sees the measure as part of a broader"attack on people of color, on women, and on other marginalized, disenfranchised groups.”
Ingrid H. Benedict, a black woman born in Nicaragua, questions whether she would be a senior at U.C.-San Diego if it were not for the college’s efforts to recruit and help minority students."If 209 passes,” she asks,"what kind of future am I going to have?”
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