SAN FRANCISCO “”mdash; The incoming president of the University
of California came out against a controversial ballot initiative on
Wednesday that would prevent the state from collecting information
on an individual’s race or ethnicity. The initiative was
authored by Regent Ward Connerly.
UC San Diego chancellor and president-elect Robert Dynes
announced his opposition to Proposition 54 during a press
conference with student leaders at the UC Board of Regents meeting.
In doing so, he joins a growing list of the initiative’s
opponents, which already includes state medical practitioners, law
enforcement officers and education officials.
Dynes, who is a former researcher in physics at UCSD, said he
was principally concerned that Proposition 54 would restrict access
to racial information that scientists and health researchers
require.
“As a research scientist, I know that to test hypotheses
and to test models, you need data,” he said. “Without
data, you are lost.”
Matt Kaczmarek and Anu Joshi, the chairman and vice chairman of
the UC Student Association respectively, stood on either side of
Dynes during his remarks. Joshi said Proposition 54 has become a
rallying point for many UC students, sparking a renewed interest in
politics as they galvanize to defeat the measure.
“Anyone who says students do not care about politics has
not been to one of our committee meetings or seen all the effort
students have put into (defeating this initiative,)” she
said.
Afterwards, Kaczmarek presented Dynes a black and yellow
“No on Prop. 54″ t-shirt. Dynes accepted the gift and
joked he would wear it whenever he went jogging around UCSD.
Current President Richard Atkinson, who is retiring this
October, and the vast majority of the regents have come out against
Proposition 54, saying the UC relies on racial data for faculty
research, implementing outreach programs, and, in some cases,
distributing financial aid. Connerly, a long-time advocate against
racial consideration by the state, says he introduced Proposition
54 as an effort to make society more “colorblind” and
to de-emphasize the importance race takes in society.
However, Jonathan Wang, a medical researcher at UC San Francisco
and one of the speakers at the press conference, said race plays a
key part in medical research, where doctors track diseases and
death rates by ethnicity and then gear treatment toward those
communities.
Getting rid of racial information will therefore cripple the
effectiveness of health care, Wang said.
“Proposition 54 won’t make us colorblind. It will
make us blind,” he said.
Connerly denies that the initiative will affect healthcare at
all, citing an exemption clause that would allow the collection of
racial data concerning “medical research and patients”
to continue.