Putting Them to the Test
The head of the UC Board of Regents wants low SAT scorers -
- even his own sons -- kept out of the system. Hardship
doesn't matter, he says.
By Alan Zarembo
LA Times Staff Writer
January 27, 2004
SAN DIEGO — When it came time for college last year, John J. Moores encouraged his twin sons to aim low.
"I'm fairly indifferent about college for a lot of kids," said Moores, chairman of the University of California Board of Regents. "I don't think it's all that important."
The boys were more suited to the football field than the classroom, Moores said. They would have no place at UC.
Neither would thousands of other students already there, if he had his way.
Rarely has the question of who gets admitted to UC been more pressing. The college-age population in California is growing rapidly, but budget cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would mean a 10% reduction in the size of next year's freshman class.
Moores knows whom he would reject: the applicants with sub-par SAT college board scores. He alleges that top campuses have been admitting them in the name of racial diversity — and in violation of a state ban on race-based affirmative action. He sympathizes with students who grew up without advantages. But by college, he said, it is usually too late to learn basic skills.
"Some folks, God bless 'em, believe that success is getting their favorite underrepresented minority group into the University of California, not making sure that the favorite underrepresented group is prepared for the university," Moores said.
He accuses university outreach programs of unfairly planting dreams of Berkeley in the minds of poor minority students at underachieving high schools. He'd rather spend the money on improving their elementary education.
His view puts him at odds with many in the public university establishment. But at 59, Moores — wildly successful entrepreneur, philanthropist and owner of the San Diego Padres — seems to relish the role of the plain-spoken contrarian.
His own life is full of contradictions.
He counts former Democratic President Jimmy Carter as a close friend and his "all-time hero," yet he is also an ally of Ward Connerly, a leading foe of affirmative action.
He has given more than $250 million to charity — and a smaller fortune to politicians — but not long ago made the Fortune magazine list of "greediest" executives for cashing out $611 million in stock in Peregrine Systems Inc., his San Diego-based software company, mostly before it became known that the company had dramatically overstated revenue. Moores said he knew nothing about the problems because he was relying on audits provided by the now defunct Arthur Andersen accounting firm.
He professes deep interest in higher education, and eagerly accepted his 1999 appointment to the Board of Regents by then-Gov. Gray Davis. But college was a sideshow in his own rise from Texas poor kid to California powerbroker.
Raised in Corpus Christi, he and his two brothers shared a room in a converted garage. With profits from a paper route, he helped buy a car for his stepfather, a newspaperman and musician.
He "always said he was two weeks away from bankruptcy at any time," Moores recalled.
In school, Moores "could do his homework in the backseat of the car on the way home," recalled his younger brother Barry, a retired optometrist. Their parents never pushed them toward college. "They didn't have any college," said Barry Moores, "and it wasn't a big deal for them."
John, however, scored "1400 or 1500" out of a possible 1600 on the SAT, he said, and enrolled at Texas A&M University in 1962 with Becky Baas, his high school sweetheart and future wife.
He left school before graduating to join IBM as a programmer. "I got more out of that than 100 years of college," John Moores said. Eventually he earned economics and law degrees at the University of Houston, all the while working full time at IBM and then Shell Oil Co.
He now considers law school "a boneheaded move," since he was never interested in practicing. But he said his professors left a lasting impression on him: They lamented that standards for minorities had been lowered so significantly that some "simply couldn't get the job done."
Moores ultimately turned his programming skills into big money. In the late 1970s, he wrote a groundbreaking code that condensed data flowing to computers. In 1980, he started BMC Software Inc. to market the program with $1,000. Twelve years later, he cashed out his shares in the Houston company for $400 million.
Money bought him cars, vacation homes, new software companies and, in 1994, the Padres. He set up trust funds for two dozen or so relatives, making them "financially independent" for life.
His charitable giving began in the late 1980s, with $50 million to the University of Houston for a music school and sports programs and $25 million to start a foundation to distribute a drug for river blindness, a Third World disease.
Moores, who displays a portrait of Carter behind his desk, has given tens of millions of dollars to the ex-president's charity, the Carter Center, to fight tropical diseases.
"There's not a more generous or incisive or sensitive philanthropist with whom I'm familiar," said Carter. The two men talk often and have fished together on two continents.
Richard Lerner, president of La Jolla-based Scripps Research Institute, said it is not uncommon for Moores, who is on the board of trustees, to drop in, pick up a golf club for a practice swing and ask how he can help. The next day a check arrives.
Moores seems to have lost track of his own generosity. Asked to catalog some of his charity to basic education, he said: "I gave a million bucks to the San Diego school district for some kind of program, a million bucks to UCSD to found a charter school, a fair amount of money in Houston for one school program or another. Geez. There's another charter school here in town that I think I've given money to. Not as much as a million bucks. A smaller number. But I like schools."His foray into the dicey politics of affirmative action confounded people who knew him as a big booster for Democrats — in California and nationwide.
"Something is gnawing at him," said Barry Munitz, a former chancellor at the University of Houston, where Moores once served as a regent. Munitz later served as chancellor of the California State University system and now is president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Moores had just arrived in California to take over the Padres when he gave $100,000 to fight Proposition 187, the 1994 Republican-backed measure that sought to deny state benefits to illegal immigrants. The measure passed, but was invalidated by a federal court.
And he was one of the largest donors to Davis' 1998 gubernatorial campaign, giving $200,000. Two months after taking office, Davis made Moores a UC regent.
But in 1998, Moores also changed his registration from Democrat to "does not specify." He said he had become disenchanted with the party for what he perceived as a leftward shift.
Though he gave $100,000 to fight the recall of Davis last year, he said he voted for Schwarzenegger, the victor. Last month, at a fundraiser for the new governor, Moores and his wife each gave the maximum allowable individual donation, $21,200.
"He's a centrist," Moores said of Schwarzenegger. This year, he said, he may back the reelection campaign of President Bush — whom he opposed in his earlier runs for Texas governor and president.
Despite his opposition to Proposition 187, Moores does not toe the Democratic party line on the politics of race.
He was among three of 26 UC regents to vote against comprehensive review, which allows the consideration of various nonacademic factors — including hardship — in its admissions decisions. He mocks the policy as "compassionate review" — "inherently unauditable" and "open for a lot of mischief."
He said he abstained from voting on Proposition 209, the successful 1996 ballot measure that barred consideration of race in hiring for state jobs and admission to public universities. In principle, he favors giving the edge to minorities when two applicants are roughly equal. But he said he fundamentally believes in meritocracy.
Moores is an ally of Proposition 209's sponsor, Connerly, a maverick fellow regent.
Some Latino leaders in San Diego protested after Moores held a $750-a-couple fundraiser in 2002 for another Connerly cause, Proposition 54, which sought to prevent the state from collecting most racial data. The measure was defeated last November.
One day last month, Moores strode around the nearly completed ballpark that San Diego is helping the Padres build. He sat in one of the $270 seats behind home plate to take in the view.
When the park opens in April, it will represent a victory for Moores, who weathered six years of taxpayer lawsuits and an ethics scandal to get it built with the help of more than $300 million in public funds. In 2001, Valerie Stallings, a San Diego city councilwoman who had supported the bond, pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors for failing to report gifts she received from Moores. Stallings, who resigned from the council and was fined $10,000, admitted receiving several plane tickets, baseball memorabilia, $200 toward a camera and various meals. Moores also arranged for her to participate in an initial public offering for Neon Systems Inc., a company in which Moores is the major shareholder — a deal that netted her more than $11,000.
The U.S. attorney investigated Moores but did not file charges. The case was turned over to the San Diego district attorney, who also declined to press charges.
Moores said he and Stallings had become friends when she was battling breast cancer and that he had no intention of influencing her votes.
At the time, he had bigger worries.
In 1997, Moores had begun selling off his stock in Peregrine Systems, where he was chairman of the board. As he was selling his final shares, the company's value tanked on news of accounting irregularities. Shareholders who lost hundreds of millions of dollars filed civil suits — still tied up in court — seeking damages from Moores and Peregrine. Three executives pleaded guilty to fraud and are cooperating in a federal investigation.
Moores, who left the company in February, is not a target of the probe.
For Moores, the criminal investigation and civil suits were serious matters, but they did not distract him from what was becoming a growing passion.
For months, he said, parents from Torrey Pines High School, where his twin sons were seniors, and fans at ballgames were complaining that their well-qualified children were being rejected by top UC campuses.
"The noise level was quite high," Moores said.
Skeptical that the university — "the mother of all bureaucracies," he calls it — could answer his concerns, Moores launched a private inquiry in April.
With the help of a UCLA graduate student, he chose to focus on Berkeley. He estimated he spent 1,000 hours over five months on the project.
His report, released in October, pointed out that in 2002, 374 students were admitted to UC Berkeley with SAT scores of 1000 or lower while 3,218 applicants who scored above 1400 were rejected.
Though his report did not mention race, he said that "Berkeley has let in large numbers of under-qualified students to make the university look just a whole lot better on meeting some sort of — I think illegal — racial or ethnic quotas."
Moores cannot unilaterally impose his ideas, but the report added fire to an ongoing review of admission practices. The Berkeley chancellor accused Moores of irresponsibility. UC officials argued that Moores overvalues SAT scores, which they said correlate more closely to socioeconomic status than to performance in college.
Carter suggested that Moores' attack on the admissions system was motivated by his desire to uphold the state ban on affirmative action. "I don't think that would indicate any lack of concern on the part of John for minorities," the former president said. "I think his feeling is that both the wealthiest students and maybe also the poorest students would be best served in a venue within which they can perform best."
In Moores' view, admissions should be based almost entirely on grades and SAT scores. "I don't give a damn whether the freshman class is all Asian, if it's all white, if it's all black, or if it's all brown," Moores said.
Neither of Moores' twins, Eddie and Earl, topped 900 on the SAT, well below average.
Moores chalked up their performances to their upbringing before he and his wife adopted them six years ago. In sharp contrast to the Moores' two biological children, now in theirs 30s, the boys had lived in poverty and often played hooky. When he looks at his sons, he doesn't see scholars but "professional football players." Both are 6 feet 5 and weigh more than 330 pounds.
"These are the most wonderful kids the world has ever seen," Moores said. "I love them so much there is no way in hell I'd ever let them go to Berkeley. They would have no business doin' it."
The sons agreed. "I was more focused on football," Earl said.
Earl has since been admitted to the University of Arizona, where he is on the football team. Eddie has been hired by Time Warner as a cable installer.
For all the time college football players devote to training, memorizing the intricacies of the playbook and juggling practice with the demands of academics, they should earn a degree, Moores said, adding, "It's as meaningful as a lot of majors." |
