Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Having expanded greatly in the previous decades, in the late 1970s the state stopped. Conservatives, led by Governor Ronald Reagan, turned an attack on the New Left campus movement to an attack on students in general.98 Tuition and fees at the University of California system doubled in the ’80s, then tripled in the ’90s.99 Right-wing lawyers attacked affirmative action, posing individual white claims against black group claims. In the landmark Bakke ruling of 1978, the Supreme Court struck down the UC system’s racial admissions quotas—themselves a compromise with the open-admission demand from the Third World student movement—which steered liberation struggles toward an individual anti-discrimination orientation. Backed by campus reactionaries, school administrators relaxed their inclusion efforts.