UC Berkeley Law School Faces Federal Bias Inquiry

The U.S. Department of Education will investigate UC Berkeley’s law school for possible civil rights violations in the use of separate admissions waiting lists for various ethnic groups, officials said Friday. The inquiry will be launched even though the school changed its waiting list practices last year.

Paul Wood, a spokesman in the department’s Office for Civil Rights, said a preliminary review of the waiting lists between 1980 and 1988 showed enough evidence of possible racial bias that a full-scale “compliance review” will begin in two or three months. “Part of the procedure is to ensure that policies are eradicated that were once discriminatory,” Wood said in Washington.

Administrators at the school, known as Boalt Hall, said the lists were legal but unusually candid attempts to help minorities gain seats in the incoming class and did not signify a racial quota system. The separate lists were dropped last year for what administrators called “cosmetic” reasons amid the wider controversy about possible anti-Asian bias at UC Berkeley’s undergraduate schools. However, the new unified waiting lists still indicate an applicant’s race and Boalt considers ethnicity a factor in admissions decisions.

Boalt Hall’s dean, Jesse H. Choper, said Friday that he had not received formal notification of the investigation though the school had provided data for the earlier review. Choper said he was puzzled why the federal government would investigate a dropped practice.

Edward Tom, admissions director at the prestigious law school, declined to comment Friday.

Federal officials attributed their interest in admissions at the law school to a February, 1989, article in The Times revealing the separate waiting lists for Asians, blacks, Latinos and American Indians. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita), a critic of some affirmative-action policies, later urged the Department of Education to look into the matter for possible violations of the 1978 Bakke decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Bakke ruling forbade specific racial quotas for admission at the UC Davis medical school but allowed race to be a factor in admissions decisions. As a result, the medical school was forced to enroll Allan Bakke, a white student who had been rejected in favor of what he claimed were less-qualified blacks.

One official within UC Berkeley’s central administration said Friday that the law school inquiry could “retest the Bakke definitions.”

Federal investigations into possible anti-Asian bias in admissions at UC Berkeley’s undergraduate College of Arts and Letters and at both undergraduate and graduate levels of UCLA and Harvard are reportedly under way.

Rohrabacher said Friday that he hoped the investigation would ensure changes in admissions policies at Boalt are substantial. “I’d like to make sure what they’ve done is not just change the arrangement of the chairs but changed the whole nature of the system,” he said.