Presidential and Scientific Papers—Richard Atkinson

Testimony on demand for the education doctorate before the California Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education.

Opinion piece about summer institutes for California’s K-12 teachers sponsored by UC and the California State University.

Opinion piece about the role of standardized testing and the SAT I.

In the aftermath of SP-1 and Proposition 209, the University of California has adopted several strategies in order to maintain access. In the long term, the university seeks to work with individual students to improve their academic preparation and to expand partnerships with the K-12 public sector. The state’s need to educate more of its minority citizens is urgent, however, so in the shorter term the University has focused on three strategies in its admissions process: comprehensive review, Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC), and the Dual Admissions Program (DAP). The paper also discusses the use of standardized tests in judging students’ readiness for university-level work, and especially changes to the SAT tests that have come about partly in response to UC policies. The paper concludes by assessing the ongoing debates over racial preferences in college admissions.

In July 1995, the University of California s Board of Regents voted to ban consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions and employment—a ban that was extended to all state agencies when the voters of California approved Proposition 209 in November 1996. This paper discusses the national controversy over affirmative action and analyzes the experience of the University of California as a case study in how an elite public university responded to the end of nearly three decades of affirmative action. It concludes that profound social and demographic change in American society since the 1960s, especially the growth of income inequality, requires a rethinking of affirmative action, and of how the goal of diversity can be achieved in elite public universities.

Article on challenges facing the University of California.

Opinion piece on UC’s efforts to achieve diversity without the use of race and ethnicity as factors in admissions.

Opinion piece about the challenges of expanding opportunities for students without regard to race and ethnicity, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 1998. Reprinted in the Los Angeles Daily News, the Santa Barbara News-Press, and the Oakland Tribune.

This paper was prepared for the Third Conference on Learning, Remembering, and Forgetting, sponsored by the New York Academy of Science at Princeton, New Jersey, October 3-6, 1965.

A general theoretical framework is developed in which to view memory and learning.  The basic model is presented in terms of a memory system having two central components: a transient-memory buffer and a long-term store. . . . The model is applied to a set of experiments on paired-associate memory with good success.

This paper was read at the Symposium on Mathematical Models of Psychological Processes, XVIII International Congress of Psychology, Moscow, USSR, August, 1966.

Remarks on the occasion of receiving the medal.

Remarks at the conference “University in Transition,” University of California, Berkeley, March 1997.

Keynote address at the California Coalition on Science and Technology Summit.

Opinion piece on the need for public investment in education and research.

Letter to UC Academic Council chair proposing an alternative path to supplement the University’s current admissions process.

Opinion piece about UC’s efforts to boost community college-to-UC student transfers.

Article on Sproul’s presidency of the University of California.

Letter to members of the UC community on the exchange of divergent viewpoints.