Since Californians abolished affirmative action in 1996, the next logical step seemed to be to get rid of the question of race on college applications altogether, or at least that is what UC Regent Ward Connerly thought.

Connerly authored Proposition 54, known as the Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI), which, if it had passed on October 7, 2003, would have removed the question of race from not only college applications in California, but other government forms as well.

However, with the help of mandatory student fees, Proposition 54 was defeated. The California Patriot reports that the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) and Graduate Assembly (GA) spent $31,000 on a campus campaign against Proposition 54. The ASUC and Graduate Assembly expenditures on the campaign include mandatory student fees, collected by the university and controlled by the student government. According to the Daily Californian , the move was in clear violation of the ASUC’s own spending rules , which forbid the use of funds for off-campus political activities (Article II of the finance bi-laws state that "No A.S.U.C. funds may be used to fund off-campus political activities — such as local, state, or national political campaigns, candidates or ballot initiatives"). In the end, university administrators, specifically Chancellor Robert Berdahl, decided on a "one-time exception" to the universities rule banning spending university funds on political campaigns and allowed the ASUC and graduate assembly to go unpunished.

Additional Information:

http://www.calpatriot.org/september03/092203sexton1.html
http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=13603

Contact outrage@isi.org for more information.