[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

As Ward Connerly prepares initiatives to abolish race-based affirmative action in five more states, New America Foundation fellow Gregory Rodriguez, no fan of Connerly's movement, has published an eye-opening book that nonetheless reinforces deep questions about the nation's racial assumptions and categories.

Connerly is the Sacramento businessman and ex-regent of the University of California who drove the successful campaigns overturning race-based preference policies in public education, employment and contracting in California, Washington and Michigan. He's now planning similar campaigns in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Connerly's most notable failure was the overwhelming defeat of California's Proposition 54 in 2003, which would have prohibited the use of official racial categories in all instances where they were not required by federal law and not essential to public safety. Those categories, Connerly said, legitimized racial divisions that were long obsolete.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

The James Irvine Foundation has released a 44 page report, "New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization: A Report on the California Votes Initiative",that is the product of a multi-year study of infrequent voters.

The authors of this report, Melissa R. Michelson of California State University East Bay,Lisa García Bedolla of the University of California at Irvine, and Donald P. Green of Yale University are all respected scholars. Green is the author of Get Out The Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout, published in 2004 by the Brookings Institution Press.

While the information here is of tremendous interest to those involved in the hurly burly of political campaigns, there is a very important point they make as well: The electorate that is turning out does not represent California's diversity. At the beginning of the report, they say:

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

Any plan to change the undergraduate admissions system at the University of California is likely to bring charges that it's yet another politically correct attempt to reinstitute race preferences. That applies especially to reforms that de-emphasize grades and test scores.

A set of major revisions now proposed by BOARS, UC's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, will be no exception. It would make more high school graduates eligible for consideration for UC but end the virtual guarantee of eligibility that students with high grades and test scores – those in the hypothetical top 12.5 percent of California high school graduates, many of them Asians – now enjoy.

Only those in the top 4 percent in their respective schools would still be guaranteed a place in the system.

Yet complex as they are, the proposals and BOARS' analysis of the flaws of the existing system are buffered with enough reasoning to be worth the debate, if not the backlash that could follow if they're adopted.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Vow to continue efforts for access and affordability of higher education in California, including Dream Act in 2008

By Oiyan Poon
President
University of California Student Association

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Aprille Espinueva

Students are eagerly awaiting the next step in making a dream a reality.

The California Dream Act, SB1, was recently passed in the state legislature and now awaits Governor Schwarzenegger’s approval. The bill allows undocumented immigrant students from California high schools to receive financial aid in college, including community college fee waivers and the Cal Grant.

The bill, authored by Senator Gilbert Cedillo, acts as a supplement to AB 540, which passed in 2001. AB 540 qualifies all students for in-state tuition at California state universities provided that they attend California high school for three years, graduate or obtain a GED, and sign an affidavit stating that the student will apply for legal residency as soon as he/she is eligible to do so.

Support for the California Dream Act hasn’t been easy to attain, however. Last year, the bill was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger, who raised concerns about taking away financial aid from other students (document students and US citizens). The new bill has been amended to address Governor Schwarzenegger’s concerns and focuses on eligibility for noncompetitive grants, which excludes the competitive Cal Grant program. According to an article in the Daily Californian, noncompetitive grants make up one percent of student aid by the state.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Phil Isenberg, Chair of the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force making a point to the Assembly Special Committee on Water while Jay Lund, an Environmental Professor from the University of California, Davis and C. David Nawi of an Environmental Mediation Firm listen as part of the first panel of experts.

By Frank D. Russo

The Sacramento Bee had an editorial in March of last year, two days after we started the California Progress Report, "Water's Two Religions: Beware a clash of Birkenstocks, Concrete."

The Bee stated: "In the recent failed bond talks, legislators debated the merits of new reservoirs for California with a religious-type fervor that bordered on the bizarre. It is appropriate to take an agnostic view on the matter.

"A new reservoir is neither inherently good nor evil. It all depends on the reservoir's details - where it is, how it is to be managed, who is to pay for it."

There is a lot more in the Bee editorial that seems to hit the nail on the head for the hot topic of water in today in the special session of the legislature that may produce a bond ballot proposition for the February 5, 2008 election.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

The University of California is a big, complex operation, so maybe you shouldn't be surprised at the regularity with which one or another part shoots itself in the foot.

No sooner had the Board of Regents, following reports of extensive administrative disarray, nudged UC President Robert Dynes into an early semiretirement than came the on-off-on appointment of Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of a new law school at the University of California, Irvine.

Was Chemerinsky's contract abrogated because he was a well-known liberal and had drawn opposition from conservatives, or because, as a future dean, he was writing Op-Ed pieces on controversial subjects? Or was it all, in fact, one and the same?

At almost the same time came the regents' even more embarrassing disinvitation of Larry Summers as a speaker at their dinner last week. Summers, who had been President Clinton's treasury secretary and president of Harvard, had been forced to resign from Harvard following faculty pressure prompted by his remarks suggesting that women might be underrepresented in the sciences because of some genetic insufficiency.