UCLA Lecturer Target of Probe After Complaints by Students : Education: Teacher asked Asians in his class to submit photo with project to help him match faces with names. The university’s diversity council will investigate the matter.

A UCLA council will investigate student complaints against an engineering lecturer who asked his Asian students to submit a photo with their final project because he had difficulty matching Asian names and faces.

The chairman of the mechanical aerospace nuclear engineering program also has come under fire for waiting more than two months to respond to student complaints about the incident. The chairman, Peretz Friedmann, said he believed the matter had been resolved earlier by lecturer Alex Samson’s apology to the students in the campus newspaper.

“It sounds like there was a serious manifestation of insensitivity and it sounds like there was an unsatisfactory apology,” Raymund A. Paredes, vice chancellor of development and chairman of UCLA’s Council on Diversity, said Thursday. “It’s a very serious matter.”

Paredes said the diversity council will attempt to “get all the players together” to resolve the controversy in the next few days.

It was unclear, however, whether any further action would be taken. Late Thursday, Samson forwarded a written apology to university officials, who indicated that copies will be mailed to each student in the class. Samson said he asked for the photos in order to give the correct amount of credit to each student.

“In retrospect, my request was poorly stated which resulted in some students being offended,” he wrote. “I therefore sincerely apologize to you for any hurt or insult that I may have caused in this matter.” Samson also invited students from the class to come to his office so he could apologize in person.

Engineering school dean A. R. Frank Wazzan also wrote an apology, addressed to the UCLA student body, expressing regret at “this unfortunate incident and the length of time it has taken to bring this matter to a conclusion.”

Students in the nuclear engineering class had said they were outraged by Samson’s request in March, which they said unfairly targeted Asians and carried a “racist tinge.”

Ten students in the class signed a resolution requesting that Samson send an official apology to all of his students and forwarded the petition to Friedmann and Stephen Jacobson, dean of student affairs at the engineering school. Nothing came of the request, according to the students.

“Whenever you single out one group in a multiethnic setting, it’s going to look racist even if that wasn’t the intent,” said student Janet Lee, who was not enrolled in the class but has been active in seeking the apology.

The racial issue is especially sensitive at UCLA in light of a finding last year by the U.S. Department of Education that the university’s graduate department of mathematics had discriminated against Asian applicants in violation of federal civil rights law. Federal investigators found that a disparity between the rates at which Anglos and equally qualified Asian-American applicants were admitted to the department in 1987 and 1988 appeared to be race related.

UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young denounced the conclusions, saying they were the result of faulty reasoning and political pressure. The university plans to appeal.