No, what we have here is a blatant act of politics. Prodded by Wilson, suburban avatar of the angry white male, the Republican-dominated regents voted last week to end racial and gender preferences in the nine-campus system. Prodded by Jackson, protesters at the meeting tried to reinvent the ’60s (though most of them failed to get arrested). Using each other as handy foils, playing to their respective audiences, Wilson and Jackson maneuvered for ground in an escalating war. Now that the regents have actually rolled back a major affirmative-action program, that war is certain to last through the 1996 election.
Californians are just realizing what the vote means for their most cherished institution: the country’s largest public system of higher education (120,725) and one of its most prestigious. UC is the leading edge of the leading edge- and the key social escalator in the nation’s most diverse and mobile state. Sproul Hall at Berkeley was the launching pad for the student-led movements of the ’60s, which had among their goals the affirmative-action ideas now under attack. One of its schools, UC Davis, produced the 1978 Bakke case, in which the Supreme Court struck down numerical quotas but enshrined the idea of affirmative action. Now the UC system is the nation’s first to retreat fromthe racial precepts its students were the first to demand.
The urgent issue now is admissions. The regents’ vote will change the face of the student body–literally–when it is implemented in two years. Under the old rules, 40 percent of all UC students were admitted for reasons other than pure academic merit, among them race. With race and ethnicity now eliminated as factors, computer analyses performed at Berkeley project that the ranks of blacks and Latinos will shrink markedly. Blacks at Berkeley would drop from 6.4 percent of the class to 1.4 percent; Latinos from 15.3 percent to 5.6 percent.
‘96 campaign: The big winners would be Asian-Americans. Already the leading ethnic group at Berkeley with 42 percent, they could constitute more than half the class in 1997. Whites would benefit, but not dramatically. Their ranks would rise from 30 percent to perhaps 34 percent. Most angry white parents, in other words, will still be angry. “If people think the degree of competition will change,” says Bob Laird, the admissions director at UC Berkeley, “they’re wrong.” The biggest concern, said Laird, isn’t at Berkeley. Minorities who won’t be able to get into even the least selective UC schools could languish in community colleges.
In altering the UC system, Wilson is playing with a central feature of the American Dream: a good college for the children of hardworking parents. His advisers crowed that the vote highlights his presidential campaign mantra of rubber-meets-the-road effectiveness. “He doesn’t just talk about change,” says campaign chairman Craig Fuller, “he makes change happen.” Not to be outdone, two of Wilson’s rivals for the GOP presidential nomination manufactured their own race-based news. Sen. Phil Gramm, hastily tried (but failed) to attach an anti-affirmative-action amendment to an obscure spending bill. Sen. Bob Dole, the front runner, promised to introduce this week a sweeping (and long delayed) bill ending all federal preferences.
After months of lying low, Bill Clinton decided to join Jackson-at least on this issue. In an emotional speech in the great chamber of the National Archives, the president issued a surprisingly unequivocal defense of race-based preferences. Presidential politics obviously were part of Clinton’s calculation. He desperately needs black and brown-and female–votes in coastal and Midwest states in 1996. But the speech also felt good to a Southern baby boomer who was inspired by the civil-rights movement. “Affirmative action has been good for America,” he said, even adding some Jacksonian poetic meter: “Mend it, but don’t end it.” It’s a nice phrase, but it won’t come close to resolving the coast-to-coast debate.
