Welcome to the seventh issue of the WAGE newsletter!
Welcome
by Charity Hirsch
WAGE met in Irvine on 28 September 1996.
As usual, the morning was devoted to hearing from women with cases. Several WAGE members
suggested that at future meetings women should come with brief summaries of their cases so we can
spend time on mutual brainstorming about tactics.
In the afternoon we heard from
Rudy Acuna and Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez and their attorneys
Moises Vasquez and
Robert
Racine. Theirs was the story of Acuna's inspiring case, which was won on age discrimination after
the judge, who was clearly very sympathetic to UC, threw out the race and political discrimination
counts. After Acu–a won, this judge reduced the fees to his lawyers; though UC spent millions on
outside attorneys, only $500,000 was awarded to Acu–a's fifteen lawyers, who were working on
contingency.
One message came through loud and clear: these fights are political and have to be organized for
accordingly. Acuna took a year's leave of absence from his tenured job at Cal State Northridge to work
on his case. He went with his attorneys to every deposition, went through the materials obtained from
UC, and spoke about his case at every opportunity.
Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez spoke very movingly of the costs of resisting oppression: most of the
heroic leaders in the Mexican/Indian tradition ended facing firing squads. She was the first Chicana
full professor at UCSB. She was offered the position of Associate Dean of the Graduate Division but
had noticed that the associate dean was always minority or female while the Dean was always a white
male! She had been Chair of her department and had supported Rudy Acuna's candidacy to the position
in her department, and was removed from the Chair by the administration because of this support. She
now has a case of her own.
The WAGE Governing Council met the next day. The best thing we did was to
authorize Catherine Shepard-Haier to take over many of the secretarial duties which Pat St. Lawrence, Annie Sharreffs and I had been handling. As you will see in
her article Catherine is full of ideas to professionalize and improve this
organization, and has the time and energy to do it. I'm really excited to see someone with her skills and
knowledge working with us and delighted by this beginning of a central office. You may not have time
to volunteer for WAGE, but your finanacial support pays for Catherine to do it!
We also prepared for the election of new Council members.
Thanks to Sue Butler, Jenny Harrison, Wendy Mink, Julia Moore, David Mosier, Leigh Segel and
Martha West, whose terms ended at the end of 1996, for their service to WAGE. I hope all of you who
had sent in dues since 10/95 received ballots and I'm very grateful to those of you who voted. When the
slate is uncontested it feels like a real vote of confidence when you send the ballot back.
The Irvine members of the Governing Council took on the project of making the next WAGE
meeting a fund-raiser. They were unable to get it organized in time for their proposed February date,
but we hope it can happen in the future.
Pat St. Lawrence , our Chair, died in November. Our state
incorporation papers required us to pick a new Chair in December, before the Council could meet, so I
agreed to be Chair since Catherine had taken over the Secretary's duties. Then, in January, Leigh Segel
asked to be relieved from her job as treasurer because of a family health emergency. She'd served in
that role from the beginning and we thank her, and we're also grateful to Anne MacLachlan for taking
on the job.
IRS update: In the last issue I told how I found
that out of thirty people with legal fights with UC, thirteen had had IRS audits. That number is now up
to sixteen out of thirty-three. Nine of these people have sent Representative Ron Dellums letters
authorizing him to ask the IRS if their audits were politically triggered. He has asked but the IRS has
not yet responded.
Torres bill revisited: You will remember that
the University is required to report by March of each year on how much it spent on outside
attorneys in tenure cases where discrimination is charged, as well as on what progress the
University is making in reforming the tenure review process to prevent discrimination. The
report on 1994 was made in September 1995 and gave a meager nine names, four of them men,
including Rudy Acu–a. UC reported spending $1,250,000 on outside attorneys for his then still-
pending case. No report was made on reforming tenure review. The report for 1995, which
was due in March 1996, has not been produced as of February 1997. Lieutenant Governor Gray
Davis has been helping us in our efforts to get this report.
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