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By Pamela Burdman The Campanile still serenades the campus during lunch time. Classes still start at ten past the hour. Student organizers line the path through Sproul Plaza, and the Bear's Lair still pours beer. The face of the campus has hardly changed, but the faces on campus are noticeably different. Affirmative action ended in 1997 and, five freshman classes later, the throngs of students hustling to class include dramatically fewer African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans than they did when race-conscious admissions policies benefited those groups. According to a report by Berkeley's faculty admissions committee, underrepresented minorities made up 16.5 percent of last fall's freshman class, dramatically lower than the 26.5 percent they constituted among incoming freshmen in 1995. The declines appear even starker when contrasted with the growth statewide of underrepresented minorities: While 38 percent of California public high school graduates were from underrepresented minorities in 1995, seven years later their proportion had grown to 42 percent, largely because of the rapidly expanding Latino population. All this has led officials of the UC system--who for years tried to highlight the relatively steady percentage of underrepresented minority students coming into the system--to concede that the lagging diversity at Berkeley and other selective UC campuses is a problem. "Troubling" was the term used by UC President Richard Atkinson in a recent Washington Post piece titled "Diversity: Not There Yet." Berkeley sociology professor Troy Duster is among the troubled. He notes that, because of Berkeley's status as a top feeder to medical and graduate schools, the decrease in diversity will mean a reduced supply of minority doctors, who often serve minority communities, and of minority professors to teach the next generation of college students. But it's not just a matter of changing demographics--real lives have changed, too. Many students from underrepresented minorities say they feel more isolated. "When there's no one that looks like you in your class, it's harder to get into a study group. It's much more intimidating, and it's stressful on individual students to deal with this every day," says Arian White '03, an African-American student activist and former ASUC senator. Liz Ramirez has experienced the change firsthand. She entered as a freshman in 1995 and, after taking a few years off, has returned to finish her studies. "Today, when you walk through Sproul Plaza, you don't see as much diversity," says Ramirez. "It makes you feel: What happened? Where did everybody go?" On the other hand, some white and Asian students believe the new policy is more fair to them. Asian Americans have climbed as a proportion of those offered seats in the freshman class--from 33.5 to 39.8 percent between 1995 and 2002, while white students remain around 34 percent of students admitted. Rong-Gong Lin II '03, former editor-in-chief of the Daily Cal, says that eliminating affirmative action has resulted in a more equitable process. "Many students feel 'I got there on my own merit, and there shouldn't be any racial preferences at all,'" he says. Some on the faculty, like philosophy professor John Searle, believe Cal is better off. "Affirmative action was a disaster," says Searle, who until recently served on the faculty admissions committee. "We had a sizable number of people who were not prepared to do college work. We don't have them any more." Indeed, freshmen are entering with higher grades and test scores and more honors and advanced placement classes than ever before. "Uncapped" GPAs (which include extra points for AP and honors classes) rose from an average of 4.07 in 1995, the year the regents passed the affirmative action ban, to 4.12 in 1997, the last year any affirmative action was allowed. In last fall's entering class the average hit 4.28. Test scores climbed as well: from 1236 on the SAT I in 1995 to 1323 two years later, where they remain today. Average SAT II scores in the '95 and '97 classes climbed from 1856 to 1976, while '02 freshmen posted an average of 2032. As admissions director Pamela Burnett '71 points out, however, racial policies alone do not tell the whole story of admissions to Berkeley in the last five years. Competition has also become much more intense because of the mushrooming volume of applicants vying for the same number of seats. The campus received 22,811 freshman applicants in 1995, compared with 36,920 for this fall, according to preliminary figures; an applicant's chances of getting in have dropped from 38 percent to 23 percent. Burnett says the increased competition alone could explain the higher grades and test scores. When the regents voted to do away with racial preferences in UC admissions and California voters approved Proposition 209--which prohibits affirmative action in public education, hiring, and contracting--protests over admissions policies took place almost weekly, and campus activists were determined to reinstate affirmative action. Today, Cal still faces attacks from both sides. Groups like BAMN (the Committee to Restore Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary) still want to reverse 209, while conservative critics such as 209 author Tom Wood are scouring admissions reports for evidence that current admissions officers are "putting their thumb on the scale" to help minority students. But, between those extremes, the campus has arrived at an uneasy equilibrium. Many who oppose the race-blind policies are now trying to work within them instead of challenging them. And faculty foes of affirmative action have tempered their criticism (or stopped giving press interviews at all). "The signs are visible to everybody [on the faculty] that, since the regents' vote and 209, at least in most classes, the number of minorities has gone down," says Berkeley political science professor Bruce Cain. "There's a vague discomfort in the back of people's minds--they're in a no-man's land of being unsatisfied with the status quo and not being willing or able to do much about changing it." Nevertheless, the debate on race and university admissions has gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in June that universities can consider race in a limited fashion. The decision makes UC's lack of affirmative action an anomaly nationwide and could bring even more impetus for a policy change--though few observers believe the votes exist statewide to restore affirmative action, even if a counter-initiative to repeal Proposition 209 could be placed on the ballot. Instead, student activists are concentrating on smaller victories, like the regents' 2001 decision to strike UC's affirmative action ban from the books. In the wake of that symbolic vote, student volunteers for the campus's minority recruitment and retention centers agreed to resume their cooperation with the campus to attract more minority students (after they had withdrawn their support for a year in protest of the affirmative action ban). Students had been concerned that their effort to convince admitted minority students to choose Berkeley and boost the campus's minority "yield rate" were covering up the damage caused by 209; in the end they decided that having more black and Latino students was more important than protesting 209. "It's not that people have accepted these terms," says Cameron Patterson '03, who is working on campus and applying to African American Studies Ph.D. programs at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. "Watching the numbers decline has been difficult. It's been a motivation for me to keep at it and try to bring more minority students to the University." Many say such outreach and recruitment efforts by students and administrators have paid off, noting that minority enrollment has inched up after the initial precipitous drops. By last fall, the percentage of incoming freshman from underrepresented minorities had risen to 16.5, from 11.2 in 1998. "Huge efforts have been made within the constraints of the law to maximize diversity," notes Robert Post, a constitutional scholar and professor at Boalt Hall School of Law. "They've been much more effective than anybody reasonably could have hoped." The efforts include a series of admissions reforms that comply with 209 by allowing affirmative action based on economics, but not on race. Socioeconomic factors have long been used in Berkeley admissions, and a 2002 study by the Irvine Foundation ranked Berkeley second (after UCLA) among the nation's top universities for its proportion of low-income students--roughly 30 percent of undergraduates receive Pell grants. In addition, California's "top four percent" plan, which guarantees a seat at a UC campus to students in the top four percent of their high school class, has also received national attention, although Burnett says most of the students admitted in this way also would have been eligible without the plan. One admissions approach that has made a difference is Berkeley's "comprehensive review," a process that eschews numerical formulas and assesses each applicant in a holistic fashion. Application readers now consider not only grades and test scores, but the curriculum offered by the student's school, rising or falling trends in the student's grades, the student's socioeconomic situation and parents' educational level, as well as less quantifiable factors like leadership ability, creative talent, maturity, and insight. "It says that people with fewer opportunities will nevertheless have a real chance of being admitted to UC if they make the most of those opportunities and do well," says Patrick Hayashi, UC associate president and Berkeley's former associate vice-chancellor for admissions. "For a public university, that's an extremely important message." Comprehensive review has also been popular among faculty and students. Conservatives like the fact that it involves individual assessments, and liberals who still favor affirmative action endorse the process because it looks beyond grades and test scores. Even civil rights groups who had sued the campus over declining enrollments of underrepresented minorities settled their case after the comprehensive review process was adopted systemwide. The U.S. Supreme Court also seems to like the approach. In the ruling about admissions to the University of Michigan, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor called upon universities to consider applicants individually, using a comprehensive approach just like the one initiated at Berkeley. As administrators field calls from around the country, Berkeley is becoming a de facto model for how public institutions can maintain a diverse enrollment--despite the fact that UC remains one of few institutions nationwide that can't consider race. In her decision, O'Connor noted that there should be no need for affirmative action 25 years from now. In the meantime, as universities grapple for ways to comply with the new ruling and contemplate the eventual sunset of race-conscious admissions, it seems clear that the lessons learned at Berkeley will continue to be relevant. Pamela Burdman, M.A. '92, MBA '92, former higher education writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, is a contributing writer for Black Issues in Higher Education. |
 Illustration by Edel Rodriguez
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