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Abstract

California's land-grant institution provides an important window into the affirmative action debate not only because of the 1995 edict by the Board of Regents, and later the passage of Propostion 209, but also because of the demographic context of the university effort to diversify its student body. This article provides a historical analysis of how the University of California has approached the issue of educational opportunity over time, focusing largely on undergraduate admissions. The author argues that affirmative action, and specifically the use of race as a factor in admissions, is historically consistent with the larger effort by the University of California to admit students from a broad range of California society. Yet, the translation of broad and ill-defined policy goals into specific programs has posed substantial problems and paradoxes. The ad hoc and decentralized growth of affirmative action programs within a vast nine-campus UC system led to a disjuncture between the values of the university's Board of Regents and the academic and administrative community.

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Anatomy of Conflict

Abstract

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