Affirmative Action: TAKING IT ALL BACK

If the importance of a historical event can be measured by the noise that surrounds it, then the University of California's Board of Regents could be sure it was making history last week. During 12 hours of passionate, sometimes ferocious debate, the board met to consider whether to end a 30-year effort to include more blacks, Latinos and Native Americans among the system's some 160,000 students. The meeting was interrupted by a bomb threat, punctuated by protests from radical feminists and brought to a halt when the Rev. Jesse Jackson linked arms with other protesters to sing We Shall Overcome. At that point, the regents fled to a separate meeting room.

That was where the real history was made, in relative quiet. In a divided vote, the board ended affirmative action throughout the nine campuses that are the jewels of the California state system, prohibiting the consideration of race, gender or ethnic origin in admissions as well as in hiring and dealing with contracts. At a moment when affirmative action is under attack across the country -- and just one day after President Bill Clinton told Americans that it had been ''good for America'' -- the vote made California the first state to eliminate race preferences in college admissions and put the state at the forefront of eliminating them nationwide.

''This is a historic moment,'' exulted Governor Pete Wilson. ''This is the beginning of the end of racial preferences.'' He would also be pleased if it marked the beginning of an upsurge for his slow-moving presidential campaign. Though Wilson serves as president of the 26-member board, until last week he had not attended a regular meeting since 1992. But after he had been kept offstage for much of the summer by throat surgery, he won national attention with his high profile in the regents' vote. With polls showing that two-thirds of Californians and a growing majority of Americans oppose quotas, that could bring Wilson the political equivalent of brand-name identification as an opponent of affirmative action. ''The Governor got his victory, and I'm sure we'll see a campaign commercial shortly,'' grumbled Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat who also serves as a regent.

It took some doing. The repeal of affirmative action was opposed by the president of the university system, the chancellors of all nine campuses and many faculty and student leaders. But the regents, 18 of whom were appointed by Wilson or previous Republican Governors, were influenced by months of lobbying by the Governor. They also enjoyed political cover: a leader of the rollback effort was one of the board's three black members, Ward Connerly, a Wilson appointee. ''We are turning down Asians and whites with 4.0 averages to take in blacks and Chicanos with 2.8,'' says Connerly. ''We can't go into the 21st century with half the people entitled to preferences because of their race and the rest standing on the sidelines boiling with anger.''