U.S. to Investigate White, Asian Bias Charge at Berkeley

UC Berkeley, whose admissions decisions regarding Asian-Americans have been scrutinized by the state, faces a federal investigation about possible discrimination against Anglo and Asian applicants, officials announced Wednesday.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will investigate an Asian-American man’s complaint that UC Berkeley’s affirmative-action policies for blacks and Latinos constitute illegal quotas and hurt the chances of other possible freshmen, officials said.

Jack McGrath, an Education Department spokesman in Washington, said the complaint is unusual in that an Asian, who has not himself applied to UC Berkeley, is alleging that the university shows bias against whites. But McGrath added that federal investigators will examine the university’s total freshman admissions policy.

“It is impossible to look at one group in a vacuum,” he said. “With the limited number of seats available (in a freshman class), it is necessary to look at the whole application pool.”

McGrath said federal policies forbid identifying the complainant. However, sources with knowledge of the matter said he moved recently from Massachusetts to Northern California and has shown a strong interest in civil rights law.

Reacting to news of the federal probe, UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman said Wednesday the university’s policies have led to an ethnically diverse student body “that is a model for the nation.” In a prepared statement, Heyman said: “I look forward to providing full information to investigators, because I am convinced that Berkeley took the right course toward the right goals.”

During the 1980s, the campus accepted all black and Latino applicants who were eligible--in the top academic 12.5% of all California high school graduates. Partly as a result of that policy, the percentage of whites among UC Berkeley’s freshman class dropped from about 60% to 33% over the last eight years, said Ray Colvig, a spokesman for the university. During the same period, he said, the figures rose from 6.4% to 20% for Latinos and from 5.2% to 11.3% for blacks, but at a much more modest rate of from 26.2% to 28.6% for Asians.

That angered some highly qualified Asian and Anglo applicants who felt they were forced to attend a second-choice UC campus.

The campus had so much success in improving the number of blacks and Latinos that it is about to drop that controversial admissions policy in favor of one that stresses grades and test scores more and ethnicity less. So federal investigators may be looking at materials that soon will be irrelevant.

UC Berkeley officials said federal investigators will concentrate on admissions in the College of Letters and Science during the last year--which would make the probe much more limited than the OCR’s investigation into all undergraduate and graduate admissions at UCLA and Harvard. Those investigations began last year and are still under way.

Over the last few years, several studies and legislative hearings on possible anti-Asian bias in UC Berkeley’s admissions procedures have proven provocative but inconclusive. Last year, a faculty report found that some policies had hurt the admissions chances of Asian-Americans but that there was no clear evidence of discrimination. In 1987, the state auditor general found that whites appeared to have a slightly easier time being admitted but also found no pattern of bias.

McGrath said the OCR conducts hundreds of investigations on bias complaints every year. He said he did not know how long it would take to conclude the Berkeley probe, which is expected to begin in the next few weeks and will entail review of documents and interviews with campus officials.