Across the plaza, one of the most popular parties, Calserve, was
handing out fliers urging students to vote yes on Proposition 3, which, by
contrast, was considered a shoo-in. It called for student fees to be
increased by $3 in order to support outreach efforts to increase the flow of
minority students from local high schools. Berkeley students, in turns out,
are like most Americans: they want diversity without the zero-sum calculus
that inevitably accompanies affirmative action.
Ending affirmative action on campus has had many fewer nightmarish
effects in California than you might have thought from the initial returns.
Many, though scarcely all, of the minority students who didn't get in to
Berkeley or U.C.L.A. the first year after Prop.
209 was passed enrolled instead at one of the less selective U.C.
campuses, including Irvine, Santa Cruz and Riverside -- a phenomenon known
in the affirmative action world as ''cascading.'' What's more, thanks to
some deft fiddling with admissions criteria, Berkeley found that the
zero-sum calculus was not quite as inexorable as it seemed. In early April,
the admissions office announced that Berkeley had admitted 30 percent more
minority students than it had the year before. Apparently it takes a year to
get the fiddling right, since Boalt Hall, Berkeley's law school, experienced
a comparable jump in its second post-preference entering class as
well.
Finally, ending affirmative action has had one unpublicized and
profoundly desirable consequence: it has forced the university to try to
expand the pool of eligible minority students. Outreach programs like the
one underwritten by Proposition 3 have proliferated; the State Legislature
authorized $38.5 million for such efforts last year and has required the
public schools to spend an additional $31 million on similar initiatives.
U.C. campuses are now reaching down into the high schools, the junior highs
and even the elementary schools to help minority students achieve the kind
of academic record that will make them eligible for admission, thus raising
the possibility that diversity without preferences will someday prove to be
more than a fond hope. Academics and administrators throughout the system
admit that the university would never have shouldered this burden had it not
been for the elimination of affirmative action; and many say that the price
is worth paying. As Saul Geiser, head of student academic services for the
U.C. system, says: ''California has brought this whole new thing to the
country with Proposition 209. Maybe we can be the ones who begin to
show what's on the other side.''
What's on the other side is not so much a coherent alternative to
affirmative action as it is a series of impromptu adaptations. Elements of
this unsystematic system may frustrate ideologues on both sides of the
debate: liberals think that cascading represents a terrible denial of
opportunity, and conservatives think that fiddling undermines the principle
of merit. The question is whether the new dispensation is preferable to the
old one. The answer is yes.
The University of California is, like gaul, divided into three parts.
According to the 1960 master plan, the top eighth of graduates in the state
are eligible to enroll in one of the U.C. campuses; the top third may attend
one of the Cal State colleges, and the remainder can enroll in junior
college and eventually transfer to a four-year institution (though few
actually do). In recent years, however, as increasing numbers of high-school
graduates have trained their sights on Berkeley and U.C.L.A., the U.C.
system has developed a meritocratic ladder of its own. The campuses at the
bottom, including Santa Cruz and Riverside, accept all U.C.-eligible
students, but you have to be in the upper third of that group -- in the top
4 percent of the state -- to make it into Berkeley or U.C.L.A. Not many
Latinos, and a minuscule number of blacks, make it into this
pool-within-a-pool. And so the essential function of affirmative action in
California has been to redistribute minority students from the bottom to the
top of the U.C. ladder. Berkeley's gain, until recently, has been
Riverside's loss. Now it's working the other way around. One way to think
about the consequences of ending affirmative action, then, is to ask, How
bad is it to go to Riverside?
It's not a question that goes down well on the Riverside campus. One
afternoon in March I sat around a table with a group of black and Chicano
students who were involved in Riverside's outreach program. (Chicanos are
Latinos of Mexican extraction.) When I asked Kenya Coleman, a black student
who was majoring in business, whether she felt that students denied
admission to Berkeley would be losing out on something at Riverside, she
bristled slightly and said, ''If they end up here it would be a blessing in
disguise.''
Coleman had in fact been accepted at U.C.L.A., but had elected to come to
Riverside. Another student, Ricardo Vargas, was just as loyal to the campus
and even less inclined to give lip service to affirmative action. Vargas
said that his parents had been farmers in Mexico. ''I grew up in a poor
family,'' he said. ''My parents instilled in me the fact that education is
the only way to succeed. If I can burn the midnight oil and work hard, I
don't see why everyone else can't.''
U.C.R. is a cozy institution where classes are small and professors keep
long office hours and freely give out their home phone numbers. Virtually
every student I talked to remarked on what a welcoming place it was. Black
students, who report feeling uncomfortable or beleaguered on many campuses,
brought this up again and again. Bert Wright Jr., a senior with a shaved
head, wire-rimmed glasses and a scraggly Ho Chi Minh beard, said that his
father had gone to U.C.L.A. and that he had been accepted there himself. But
thanks to a campus-based program for minority students, Wright had spent
parts of the summers after his sophomore and junior years in high school on
the Riverside campus, where he worked on science projects with a professor,
and that heady experience had sold him on the school.
''I think I am more prepared in terms of graduate school than I would
have been if I had gone to U.C.L.A.,'' Wright said. ''Some of the professors
there are not necessarily as humble as they are here.'' The accepted wisdom
on campus was that U.C.L.A. was so big and overcrowded and the professors so
unapproachable that students rarely had a chance to speak to their
instructors and often had to wait a semester or two to take the courses they
wanted.
I met a surprising number of students who, like Wright or Coleman, had
got into fancier schools but had chosen to enroll at Riverside, and none of
them had come to regret it. A black student named Mark Thomas told me that
he had been accepted at U.C.L.A., Berkeley, Yale and Princeton, but that he
had chosen Riverside because it was much cheaper than the Ivy Leagues and
had offered scholarship money unavailable at the other U.C. schools. Thomas
was majoring in biochemistry. ''This year,'' he said, ''I've already spent
two and a half to three hours with my academic adviser; I've heard that the
average at other places is about half an hour.''
I spoke to only a few freshmen who felt bitter about ending up at
Riverside after failing to gain admission to U.C.L.A. or Berkeley. I also
found several Asian upperclassmen who felt that they had been denied a shot
at a more prestigious school by the end of affirmative action, but even most
of them believed they they were getting a rigorous education, at least in
the sciences.
Riverside has almost all the trappings of a serious university: a
first-rate engineering school, a supercompetitive biomedical program, a
grassy quad crisscrossed by pathways, a clock tower. Still, Riverside is
deep in the boonies: 60 miles east of Los Angeles, in the heart of what is
known as the Inland Empire. It is considered a fairly dead town, and
students say that entertainment near campus is limited to one movie theater
and one Starbucks. The parking lots near the dorms are jammed, since almost
everyone drives home on weekends. It's the kind of technocratic, friendly,
bland and utilitarian institution summed up by the words ''second-tier.''
Riverside is much stronger in the sciences than in the humanities. An
upper-level political science class I attended was positively torpid.
One student, Josh Phillips, a white kid from Orange County who had scored a
1,400 on his S.A.T.'s but hadn't been able to afford Berkeley because of the
higher housing costs, said tartly, ''I'd rather be a number at U.C.L.A. than
an individual here.'' Phillips was working 20 hours a week, taking 20
credits and keeping a high G.P.A. without apparently breaking a sweat. The
intellectual life at Riverside seemed at least as meager as the social life.
When I asked about campus politics, Bert Wright said, ''There aren't too
many issues that rile students up.'' He thought for a while. ''There's fees,
of course, and parking.''
Still, Riverside is much more than a credentialing factory. Many of the
minority students I met were involved in the school's innumerable outreach
programs. Indeed, one reason scarcely anyone could get agitated about
affirmative action was that Riverside has an active sense of social mission
that made the whole issue of preferences seem almost irrelevant. When I paid
a visit to Carlos Velez-Ib1/3nez, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts
and Social Sciences, he started telling me about a program he had devised to
bring minority students from a local community college to the campus for an
intensive five-week summer course in research and statistical methods.
Eleven of the 13 students he had worked with had gone on to Stanford or to a
U.C. college; he said that he planned to expand the program to the
high-school and then to the junior-high level. ''What we're not doing is
making decisions based solely on race or ethnicity or gender,'' he said.
''But we're still acting affirmatively, giving people a chance to be
excellent.'' Affirmative action, at least as he understood it, had mostly
involved a rather trivial form of reshuffling within the elite.
''Seventy-five percent of African-American and Mexican families are working
class,'' said Velez-Ib1/3nez. ''My gestalt is to look at the 75
percent and provide opportunities for them.''
The pipeline-expanding idea that is novel elsewhere in the system has
been close to the core of Riverside's identity throughout this decade. When
a physicist named Raymond Orbach was appointed chancellor in 1992, he
realized that the key to growth was to recruit more of the Asian, Chicano
and black students from the surrounding region. Riverside and the
neighboring San Bernardino Counties are among the poorest regions in
California served by a U.C. campus; in 1990, only 6 percent of graduates in
the area were U.C.-eligible. Orbach made it a universitywide mission to
increase the supply of eligible students through recruitment as well as
academic coaching, and he appears to have proved that the problem is not
quite as intransigent as it seems. Between 1990 and 1996, for instance, the
fraction of U.C.-eligible students declined in almost every region of
California; in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, the figure rose from 6
to 8.1 percent.
Orbach told me that only a thousand black graduates in the state had made
it into the top eighth, but he was wrong; the most recent sample, from 1996,
put the number at 547. And the success of Asians, many of whom come from
poor immigrant families, only underscores this gulf: the same study found
that 30 percent of Asians graduate in the top eighth, but only 12.7 percent
of whites, 3.8 percent of Latinos and 2.8 percent of blacks do so. An Asian
student, in other words, is 10 times as likely as a black student to be
U.C.-eligible.
Indeed, blacks have been left behind as social change and social mobility
have made affirmative action unnecessary for one group after another. In
California, women were dropped long ago from the category of
''underrepresented'' groups. Filipinos were once underrepresented, and then
they weren't. So many non-Chicano Latinos have been making it into the top
eighth that the category was being phased out at some campuses even before
the regents' decision. Chicanos remain the most disadvantaged of
California's major minority groups, with many first-generation parents both
impoverished and illiterate. Nevertheless, a slightly higher fraction of
Chicanos than blacks make it into U.C., and at both Riverside and Berkeley I
met a remarkable number of Chicano students who had overcome every
imaginable disadvantage to become U.C.-eligible. Second-generation Chicanos
will almost certainly do better than first-generation ones, and the terrible
problem of black students will remain.
Orbach is a thickset, bustling, enthusiastic character, an ardent booster
who believes, like Kenya Coleman, that no rational student could regret
enrollment at Riverside. Almost every week the chancellor rides the circuit
of the region's high schools; the day I saw him he happened to be heading
out to Indio High School near Palm Springs, and he invited me to come along.
We were running late for the scheduled parents' meeting at the school, about
60 miles to our east, and so Orbach roared along at 75 m.p.h. as he
delivered a town-by-town analysis of U.C. potential on either side of U.S.
10. ''We're passing through the Moreno Valley here -- very poor area, very
few kids going to four-year colleges.'' Then came Banning and Beaumont,
where the candidates were slightly more plentiful and the campus had a
relationship with the high schools. Then, on the flat, wind-swept plains on
the other side of the San Andreas Fault were Desert Hot Springs, Palm
Springs, Thousand Palms. Orbach said there had been gang violence at one
school not long before. There is probably no job that promotes orotundity
and the global perspective like being a university chancellor. And yet
Orbach had strapped himself to his provincial neighborhood and absorbed its
nuances like a social worker.
We reached Indio High School by about 7:30 P.M. and were met by the
principal, Rudy Ramirez, a restless, demanding figure straight out of
''Stand and Deliver.'' Indio is a largely Chicano school that for years had
sent virtually no one to a U.C. campus. On the drive in, Orbach had told me
that Ramirez had confronted him at a meeting of local principals several
years earlier, saying, ''Our students are much better than you realize, only
you won't let them in.'' Orbach had agreed on the spot to have his
admissions staff interview seniors whom Ramirez felt could succeed at
Riverside despite an academic record that would not qualify them for U.C.
admission. Only 13 of the 36 seniors he chose ultimately graduated, but a
relationship sprang up between the two institutions. Indio is now sending
two dozen or so students, out of a graduating senior class of 400, to
U.C. campuses each year.
Orbach had come often to harp on his favorite subject: students must take
algebra in eighth grade if they expected to be U.C.-eligible; Ramirez had,
in turn, initiated a 30-day intersession class for students who
failed algebra. A team of instructors from Riverside had recently come out
to review the transcripts of the entire junior class. And the Indio
faculty would soon be going to the campus to work on curriculum.
About 125 people, mostly parents and students, had gathered in the
auditorium to hear the chancellor; 30 or so listened on headphones to a
simultaneous translation in Spanish. Orbach came out and said, ''This is the
finest public university in the world, and each of you has an opportunity to
attend a campus of that university.'' That was it for the rhetoric; the rest
was practical, blunt advice. Orbach showed the audience a chart indicating
the magnitude of the earnings differential between a college and a
junior-college degree. He talked about financial arrangements that would
allow the child even of the poorest parents to afford the $13,000 or so in
annual costs. And then he painstakingly led them through the sequence of
math courses that their child would need to take in order to end up at
pre-calculus in 12th grade, as the university requires. ''Your child,'' he
admonished, ''should be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions
by sixth grade.'' Afterward, all the questions were about money. Most of the
parents were poor, very few had been to college and the idea that their
children could attend the extraordinary university that the chancellor was
talking about plainly strained their sense of credulity.
Riverside's relationship with Indio has been assimilated into a statewide
School-University Partnership program created by the new legislation.
Riverside now has similar ties with seven school districts, in each case
comprising one high school and a junior high school and two elementary
schools that feed into it. Two of those high schools are virtually all black
and Latino and have about the lowest U.C.-eligibility rate in the state -- 1
or 2 percent. Obviously, it remains to be seen how much of a difference
Riverside can make by reaching downward into the public schools. Pamela
Clute, the math professor who was appointed to run the program, which now
spends $5 million a year, is one of those who believe that it took the
prospect of a world without preferences to make the university wake up to
its own obligations. ''Until about a year ago,'' she says, ''what outreach
meant was fuzzy, feel-good stuff -- come to the campus on Saturday, see the
buildings, look at the daffodils. Now, it's taken on a life of its own, and
it's been put at the core of the university's existence.''
Perhaps it will prove to be beneath the dignity of scholars at a place
like Berkeley to huddle with high-school teachers and to give pep talks to
parents; that's not, after all, what any of them had in mind when they
ground their way through their doctorates. Robert Berdahl, the chancellor of
Berkeley, says flatly, ''The University of California in its eight
institutions can not reform the public schools.'' What is striking, though,
is the extent to which Riverside, a far more humble and pragmatic
institution, has begun to reshape itself around the mission of expanding the
pool of eligible minority students. Clute says that by placing the program
under the control of a scholar like herself, the chancellor is sending a
signal to her colleagues that outreach is an academic -- not merely a public
relations -- function of the university. There has been discussion of
weighing community service more heavily when considering promotions and
merit raises.
Ray Orbach is not a national figure like Robert Berdahl or like Derek Bok
and William Bowen, the former presidents of Harvard and Princeton, whose
book, ''The Shape of the River,'' has helped make the case for affirmative
action. But Orbach has arguably done more than any of them to advance the
cause of minority education.
Despite Orbach's extraordinary success in expanding minority enrollment,
it is he who wrote the position paper in which all the chancellors in the
U.C. system laid out their objections to the regents' anti-affirmative
action policies. Orbach made a point of telling me, ''I don't want this to
be perceived as somehow a replacement for affirmative action.'' He is not
convinced that what has worked for Riverside will work at the much higher
level of selectivity required to bring minority students to Berkeley.
Indeed, in California and in Texas, where a 1996 court decision, Hopwood v.
Texas, prohibited the use of affirmative action in higher education, the end
of racial preferences is widely seen as the harbinger of a tremendous
catastrophe for minority students.
Jerome Karabel, a Berkeley scholar and a leading authority on affirmative
action, calls the rollback ''the biggest negative redistribution of
educational opportunity in the history of the country.'' Technically, that
may be true. But the sky-is-falling position assumes both that elite
institutions will not have significant minority representation without
preferences and that students who descend a tier in educational prestige
will suffer a devastating loss. And both those assumptions seem hyperbolic.
There's no question that what began in Texas and California is now moving
on to other states. An organization called the Center for Individual Rights,
working through local plaintiffs, has filed two lawsuits, which are expected
to be heard in the late summer or fall, against the University of Michigan
and its law school, as well as another against the University of Washington
Law School. Any public institution practicing affirmative action is
potentially subject to 14th Amendment due-process claims, and since most law
schools and medical schools, and about the upper fifth of undergraduate
institutions, practice affirmative action to a significant degree, similar
lawsuits can be filed in many other states and almost certainly will be if
the plaintiffs win in any of the current cases.
Yet, even if the plaintiffs in these cases prevail, ''redistribution''
will probably not become widespread. Terence Pell, the senior counsel at the
Center for Individual Rights, points out that only 6 of the 74 colleges,
universities and graduate programs in California and Texas suffered from a
loss of minority students in the first year; even at those six, minority
enrollment increased in the second year. At the University of Texas, it
dropped only slightly after Hopwood went into effect. ''I don't think we can
conclude that it's impossible for even the flagship schools to get the
numbers where they were before the use of preferences,'' Pell says. In fact,
the Texas experience will probably be the norm for most public universities,
since few are as selective as Berkeley.
At the graduate-school level, however, even the cheery Pell concedes that
''it's going to take a few years'' before the fraction of minority students
at the most desirable graduate schools -- including Boalt and the University
of Texas Law School -- return to affirmative action levels. And as Jerome
Karabel observes, more than half the applicants in any given year are not
accepted into any medical school. And so, without affirmative action, many
minority students may not be able to attend medical school at all.
What about those who do cascade downward -- what kind of harms will they
suffer? None, say many conservatives. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom,
authors of ''America in Black and White,'' write that historically black
colleges produce more black engineers and doctors than all of the Ivies and
the other great universities. In a critique of ''The Shape of the River,''
Martin Trow, an emeritus professor at Berkeley and a prominent critic of
affirmative action, writes, ''The notion that you have to go to one of the
most selective universities to fulfill your potential, or to become a leader
in America, betrays an elitist conception of American life.''
Conservatives have consistently argued that affirmative action does not
benefit its beneficiaries. The Thernstroms write that black students are
likelier to succeed academically, and to graduate, at institutions for which
they are qualified than at those to which they have been granted special
access. Mark Thomas, the black biochemistry student at Riverside, agrees.
''The model of affirmative action is better here,'' he told me. ''It's more
a question of getting you in, and once you're here we're going to try to
make you succeed. The other way is, 'We can get you in, but we don't think
you're going to be able to do the work.'''
And yet this view, too, is overdrawn, as a comparison of Berkeley and
Riverside makes clear. The Thernstroms make great use of Berkeley, where
until recently the black graduation rate was only 60 percent. By 1998,
however, the graduation rate was up to 71 percent for black students and 78
percent for Latinos. At Riverside, the graduation rate for the entire
class was only 68 percent. For blacks it was just 60 percent. You'd
think that rigorous schools would have higher dropout rates, but in fact the
opposite is true. Mark Thomas, the student at Riverside, has it backward:
once you have been admitted to the rarefied community of a Harvard or a Yale
or a Berkeley, you are almost not allowed to fail. As Bok and Bowen observe,
in the sample of 28 elite schools they studied, ''even those black students
in the lowest S.A.T. band (those with combined scores under 1,000) graduated
at higher rates, the more selective the school they attended.'' The elites,
in short, protect their own.
What is true is that at lower levels of selectivity the gap can be very
large: 72 percent of white students, but only 39 percent of black students,
typically graduate from Colorado University at Boulder.
But what about the actual experience? Bok and Bowen concede that minority
students do not flourish academically at elite schools; the average black
admittee in their study graduated at the 23d percentile of the class,
while the average Hispanic was at the 36th percentile. Many of the minority
students I met at Berkeley had been stunned by how hard the work was and had
thrashed around unhappily for a while. Susana Morales, a slight girl with a
piping voice, tortoise-shell glasses and a shy smile, admitted that, at
first, she had been overwhelmed at Berkeley. ''It took me about three
semesters to learn everything,'' she said. ''I had to learn how to read
critically. I had to learn how to think critically. I had to learn how to
study critically. It's still very hard for me to compete.''
But you could also argue that students like Morales profit more from the
challenge than do their more blase classmates. Morales, who is hoping to
pursue a Ph.D. in cultural psychology, said that Berkeley ''was everything I
expected.'' She had been thrilled to discover that her professors were part
of larger intellectual currents she had never recognized before. ''In my
class on drugs and the brain,'' she said, ''every day I would go home
and read an article that was parallel to what the professor was saying.''
And if Susana Morales had gone to Riverside? In all likelihood, she would
have been quite happy, as most of the minority students I met there were,
and she would have gone on to a productive, successful life -- but at a
somewhat lower trajectory. A large fraction of the female students I spoke
to at Riverside, minority as well as nonminority, planned on a career as
teachers -- a very modest ambition compared with pursuing a Ph.D. in
cultural psychology. According to Deborah McCoy, Riverside's head of
placement, very few minority students go on to medical school, and the law
schools they choose tend to be the local or regional institutions, like
U.S.C., Loyola Marymount or McGeorge Law School at the University of the
Pacific.
What, then, is at stake in affirmative action? It is certainly not true,
as you sometimes hear, that the black or Hispanic middle class
depends on affirmative action for its survival and growth. Only about 20
percent of the nation's colleges -- the prestigious ones that everyone has
heard of -- even use preferences to a significant degree. The vast majority
of four-year institutions admit all or almost all of the students who apply.
Most important, the number of blacks enrolling in college has continued to
rise: they now constitute 11 percent of the college-going population, up
from 8.8 percent in 1985.
What's at stake is not a place in the middle class, but a place in
the elite -- in the famous universities and graduate schools and in the law
firms and banks and foundations and so on that lie at the apogee of the
culture and that offer the big rewards. Another way of putting it is that
affirmative action permits minority students to compress their climb up the
ladder of social mobility by a generation or so and thus speeds their
assimilation into the larger culture. This is hardly a good to be dismissed.
On the other hand, it is a good that one would very much prefer to see
accomplished without recourse to racial preferences. There is a third way.
You can explode a lot of myths about affirmative action by the simple
expedient of talking to students. One morning I sat down at a table in the
main campus commissary at Berkeley -- caffe latte, croissants, grilled
cheese -- across from a white freshman named Eric who wore armlets of
braided black leather straps and hair moussed straight upward. Eric looked
like the latter-day version of the classic Berkeley radical, but when I
asked about the elimination of affirmative action, what came out of his
mouth was pure Norman Podhoretz. ''I don't think it's such a bad thing,''
said Eric (who felt sufficiently nervous about his position to keep his last
name to himself). ''I don't believe that the S.A.T.'s are biased against
minority students. If you know your English vocabulary, then you know your
English vocabulary; that's it.'' Eric acknowledged that his North Hollywood
high school had given him enormous, even ''unfair,'' advantages over many
minority students, but he had concluded that ''it makes much more sense to
send students who aren't prepared to community college,'' from which they
could transfer.
Most of the white and Asian students I talked to, both at Berkeley and at
Riverside, were rigorous meritocrats; they took it for granted that S.A.T.
scores and G.P.A. measured something fundamental. Of course, they viewed
affirmative action less in ideological than in personal terms; as one
freshman said to me, ''I felt like I was a target.'' I found very few ardent
supporters among white or Asian students. Vinnee Tong, the editor of the
student paper, The Daily Californian, told me, ''At the last minute, I voted
no,'' on Prop. 209, and then she added, ''but if you asked me
again, I might vote yes.''
Does it matter what students think? When I asked Chancellor Berdahl, he
said, ''I don't happen to believe that that means a whole lot.'' And yet
Berdahl, like virtually all university administrators, also takes the
position that affirmative action is good -- indeed, profoundly good -- for
students like Eric and Tong. ''If the campus is predominantly white and
Asian,'' he said, ''the kind of education those students are going to
receive is going to be different, and I would argue, it would be deficient.
I think the beneficiaries of affirmative action are both sides of the racial
divide.'' In other words, Berdahl takes the exact opposite position from the
Thernstroms: affirmative action is a benefit for everyone.
University administrators and concerned faculty members talk endlessly
about the benefits of ''diversity,'' by which they generally mean ethnic
background. Admissions departments also select students on the basis of,
say, geographic diversity, but you rarely hear about the importance of ''the
Midwestern viewpoint'' -- nor do such forms of diversity require much
preferential treatment.
Alex Saragoza, a professor in the ethnic studies department, said to me,
''Kids need to understand that diversity is fundamental.'' But the problem
is, they don't. The students I spoke to viewed diversity as a worthwhile
goal, but scarcely a fundamental one. If diversity required paying a price
in merit, then they would sacrifice some diversity. What's more, diversity
felt more like a piety than a vivid reality. Most of the white and Asian
students I spoke to felt quite cut off from black and Latino students.
Social life was largely balkanized by ethnic identity. Only a few classes
were small enough for the kind of sustained discussion that would feature
the black or Latino ''view.'' And the number of minorities in such
upper-level classes was very small. Most of the minority students I spoke to
said the same thing. As Felicia Brown, a black junior, put it, ''The color
lines here are very distinct; it's very rare that there's any kind of
crossing.'' What about in the dorms? It turned out that Brown had decided to
live in the all-black ''theme'' dorm.
Indeed, racial self-segregation is such a widespread phenomenon on campus
that you can hardly say that it is caused by affirmative action. But it
wouldn't be surprising if the preoccupation with supposed racial or ethnic
points of view, not to mention the very existence of a separate set of
admissions standards, had the effect of reinforcing boundaries of identity.
And this sat very ill with students who did not wish to be defined by their
ethnic background. Vinnee Tong said to me: ''They have a week of orientation
when you first get here, and they give you this talk about diversity -- what
kind of place do you come from, what kind of people did you live with? They
really shove that down your throat. I come from a predominantly white,
Republican town in Northern California, and all of a sudden I'm an Asian
girl, whether I like it or not. I really resented it.''
If talking to white and Asian students demolishes one shibboleth of
affirmative action, talking to the beneficiaries demolishes another -- the
''stigma.'' In ''The Content of Our Character,'' Shelby Steele writes,
''Preferential treatment, no matter how it is justified in the light of day,
subjects blacks to a midnight of self-doubt, and so often transforms their
advantage into a revolving door.'' Well it might. But try and find the
evidence that this is so. For one thing, most of the minority students I
have spoken to, at Berkeley and elsewhere, do not believe that they are
affirmative action beneficiaries, even when the facts cry out that they are.
As Susana Morales put it: ''I don't think I needed affirmative action. I
took the hardest courses at my school, I had a good G.P.A. and I wrote a
really good essay.'' The minority students all seem to have written terrific
essays, though until recently the essay counted for very little in the
admissions process. Only when she admitted that she had scored 990 on her
S.A.T.'s -- about 350 points below the Berkeley average -- did Morales
concede that she might have benefited from affirmative action.
Perhaps this evasion only proves Steele's point. And yet you wonder if
the stigma argument doesn't have more to do with how critics think students
ought to feel than how they actually do. The typical point of view was
Felicia Brown's: ''With or without affirmative action, I deserve to be
here.'' Minority students look around and realize that they have had to
fight their way through thickets unheard of in North Hollywood. Saul
Mercado, a senior, said: ''I come from a family of 11 kids. My father got as
far as third grade; my mother stopped at second grade. There was no talk of
school. I was swimming against the tide at home, and societal expectations
as well.'' As far as Mercado was concerned, triumph over adversity easily
trumped test-score meritocracy.
More to the point, how can you be stigmatized if you don't feel it? Of
course, the stigma hovers somewhere between the minority students who might
feel it and the whites and Asians in whose eyes they would feel it. I did
speak to one black student, Norell Giancana, who said, ''When you want to
start a study group, it's hard; there's a stigma that you're not as
capable.'' Norell, who may have been unusually candid, considered this a
genuine flaw of affirmative action. On the other hand, she said, ''I don't
think we're at a point in our society where we can do without it.''
It would be convenient, for the critics, if affirmative action really
harmed its beneficiaries; then you wouldn't be in the position of opposing
the objective interests of many minority students. It would be equally
convenient, for the supporters, if diversity really were a fundamental good
and came at no expense to some other good -- like merit -- for then you
could tell white and Asian students that they, too, came out ahead on
balance. Alas, you can't. Affirmative action forces a complex calculus of
costs and benefits. For all its goods, affirmative action violates a broadly
held faith in the neutral principle of merit (however determined), judges
people according to group membership rather than individual attributes,
subtly reinforces racial and ethnic identity and infects the atmosphere with
uneasy euphemisms. The consequences of eliminating it are cascading, which
is serious but not tragic, and a new ethic of outreach and academic
development, which is difficult but wonderful. You hope that this new ethic
will help solve the problem in the long run; in the short run, there's that
murky, if necessary, fiddling.
Public Universities, unlike private ones, have traditionally selected
candidates according to strict numerical performance: You awarded a certain
amount of weight to S.A.T. scores and a certain amount to grade-point
average or class rank, and you chose everyone who made it over a
given threshold. (The rule did not apply, of course, to such sheltered
categories as athletes or legacies or children of prominent state
legislators.) Affirmative action was initially administered by simply
selecting a lower threshold for minority students. Then the Bakke decision
confused everything by prohibiting racial quotas and the dual admissions
systems used to administer them, but permitting admissions departments to
award minority students a ''plus'' factor in order to insure a ''diverse
student body.'' Most public universities, including Berkeley, continued to
use a numerical grid, but now added a confusing additional layer of
admissions criteria in which ''diversity'' earned applicants a certain
number of bonus points. Even one prominent supporter of affirmative action
says that the principal imperative of admissions departments in recent years
has been ''opacity.'' And conservatives have played a gleeful game of
unmasking that exposes the yawning gaps in academic qualification that lie
beneath the rhetoric of diversity and ''special gifts'' and so on.
The ending of affirmative action has provoked a feverish new round of
innovations in admissions policy; the common theme is reducing the
importance of the numerical grid and accepting students on a one-by-one
basis, as elite private universities have long done. Thus, in the aftermath
of Hopwood, the University of Texas invited applicants to describe whatever
disadvantages might ''put their achievements into context'' and required two
essays highlighting personal experience. ''The process has nothing to do
with race or ethnicity,'' says Bruce Walker, the director of admissions. It
does, however, create the kind of opacity that makes admissions decisions
almost unchallengeable. And though fewer minorities applied in the year
Hopwood went into effect, Texas was able to accept the same fraction of them
it had before.
In the aftermath of the regents' decision, the numbers crunchers in the
central administration of the University of California tried valiantly to
come up with some legitimate credential that they could select that would
happen to correlate with race. They tried low socioeconomic status or
first-in-the-family-to-go-to-college or some combination of the two; what
they got were mostly working-class whites and Asians. The truth is
that most affirmative action beneficiaries are only relatively
disadvantaged. The average black student applying to the University of
California comes from a family whose income is $38,000. (The figure for
whites is $75,000.) Behind this fact lies an appalling statistic:
nationwide, the average S.A.T. score of black students from the uppermost
quarter of the socioeconomic scale is lower than the average score of whites
or Asians from the lowest quarter. What this means is that impoverished
black students are not even in the running, while middle-class
students only do well enough to get into the affirmative action pool.
As affirmative action was being eliminated, Berkeley, like Texas, drafted
new admissions criteria that were more ''comprehensive'' and ''holistic''
than they had been. Each file would be examined by two readers; students
were to be evaluated on a range of academic and nonacademic achievements,
personal qualities and on ''diversity in personal background and
experience.'' All achievements were to be considered ''in the context of the
opportunities an applicant has had, any hardships or unusual circumstances
the applicant has faced and the ways in which he or she has responded to
them.'' But the new formula produced a freshman class that was only
10.7 percent black and Chicano.
And so the admissions department tried something new. It distributed to
readers a detailed profile of an applicant's high school, so that the reader
could award greater weight to a student who succeeded despite attending a
substandard school -- who had, in effect, overcome educational rather than
socioeconomic disadvantage. It suggested that readers consider S.A.T. scores
''in light of each applicant's history and circumstances.'' And the new
formula appears to have worked, increasing the fraction of minority students
in the admitted pool to 13 percent.
Berkeley had, in effect, established a new form of merit that turned out
to be mildly correlated with race and ethnicity. Was that bad? Jack Citrin,
a professor of political science and one of the rare public opponents of
affirmative action on the Berkeley faculty, quit the admissions committee
when the new criteria were promulgated. ''I don't think we're in the therapy
business,'' Citrin says. ''I think what we have happening here is an attack
on the idea of merit as conventionally defined.'' On the other hand, Bob
Laird, the director of admissions, observes, ''When you look at the
difference between the high-achieving and low-achieving high schools, they
might as well be in two different worlds.'' It is, after all, a lot more
impressive to excel in an environment where practically everyone is hellbent
on failure than to do so in a school where success is taken for granted. One
Chicano student I talked to, Hector Coronel, said that it was so unheard of
at his high school to attend a top-ranked college that his counselor told
him not to bother to apply to Berkeley. He did so, he said, ''out of
spite.'' Hector had a G.P.A. of only 3.1 and S.A.T.'s ''under 1,000,'' but
it was hard to begrudge his admission to Berkeley.
There is a real danger that state legislatures will react to the
abolition of preferences by forcing elite institutions to lower their
barriers to admit more of everyone. A post-Hopwood law requires the
University of Texas to accept anyone who graduates in the top 10 percent of
any state high school. A state legislator in California called for a similar
law, but a study by the regents found that such a system would enroll
thousands of vastly underprepared minority students. Instead, the regents
agreed to accept the top 4 percent of graduates starting in 2001, and even
then to exclude students who had not taken the required college-preparatory
classes. This will raise the number of eligible black students by 30 percent
and of Latinos by 24 percent, though it will do relatively little to cure
their underrepresentation.
How should we feel about the murky, opaque fiddling that is bound to fill
the vacuum created by the abolition of preferences? Critics like Lino
Graglia, a professor at the University of Texas Law School, have ridiculed
the idea that minority status is correlated with anything schools can
actually select for, like ''leadership abilities.'' Stephan Thernstrom says
that admissions departments have simply ''figured out how to circumvent the
law,'' though he concedes that ''whether you can ever deal with that through
some legal means is a question.'' Thernstrom, like Graglia and Jack Citrin,
holds the meritocratic principle sacred.
But perhaps we should accept a dent in meritocratic purity as a fair
price for admitting students as individuals, not group members. This may
turn out to be a very popular middle ground. I asked Bob Laird if, in
retrospect, he now felt uncomfortable about the use of explicitly racial
criteria, and he said, to my surprise: ''From where we are now -- yeah. When
I look to what we were doing then -- no.''
Affirmative action is not only a set of practices but also a way of
thinking -- about race and ethnicity, about merit, about elite institutions.
And the truth is that it is not a way of thinking that even its advocates
feel terribly comfortable about. In ''The Ordeal of Integration,'' the
Harvard scholar Orlando Patterson sweeps away every argument against
affirmative action -- and then calls for an end to the practice after 15
years, without offering any evidence that it won't be needed then. Implicit
in Patterson's argument is the recognition that it cannot be good for black
students to be seen as the perpetual beneficiaries of special treatment.
More broadly, how can it be good for our collective selves to be handing out
benefits on the basis of group identity rather than individual attainment?
Affirmative action lets schools off easy; eliminating it compels an act
of self-scrutiny. Why is the failure rate among minority students so high?
Why, in California, did the overall fraction of U.C.-eligible graduates drop
from 12.3 percent in 1990 to 11.1 percent in 1996? Why did the figure for
blacks drop from 5.1 percent to 2.8 percent? One answer is that the schools
have been starved for funds; it is a quandary lost on no one that
affirmative action was eliminated just as California was dropping to 49th
place in state educational spending per capita. An equally valid answer is
that in recent years state educators have run after every kind of faddish
educational practice. It's hard to think of a more powerful corrective for
the latter than the insistent focus on standards coming from people like Ray
Orbach.
Whatever is lost with the elimination of affirmative action, what's
gained is a new sense of mission for schools and universities. Riverside is
considered one of the more ''left'' of the U.C. campuses; yet the left
commitment there has to do with dedication to the painstaking work of
improving minority performance. John Briggs, the head of Riverside's writing
program, told me that he had begun driving around to high-school English
departments 12 years ago, talking about the kind of curriculum that would
prepare students for college and offering to bring teachers to the campus.
Last year, he and 10 of his tenured faculty members visited 90 to 100
classrooms, and talked to 3,000 kids. ''What affirmative action is supposed
to be about,'' Briggs says, ''is making a concerted effort to increase the
pool of available students, and that means better preparation and better
counseling.'' Ultimately, of course, that means better schools.
