ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : UC Irvine Bars to Transfer Students Should Be Lifted : Education: Commitment to a diversified student body is not met by disenfranchising those from community colleges.

On Feb. 4, 1984, David Gardner, then president of the University of California, visited Orange County to complain about the decrease of community college transfers who entered the UC system. According to The Times report, Gardner said: “Not only are the numbers down, but the proportion of community college students who transfer is down.”

Demeaning community colleges, Gardner referred to a “flight to quality,” the bypassing of enrollment in community colleges by high school graduates who applied directly for admission to UC.

The UC system, recognizing at that time a decreasing pool of college students, intensified its recruitment of high school graduates to justify its requests for increased financial support from Sacramento, including the practice of accepting students who were not part of the top 12.5% of their graduating class as prescribed by the Master Plan for Higher Education.

Gardner sought to ensure healthy UC enrollments at the expense of an enrollment decrease in California community colleges. He reiterated UC’s commitment to accept minority transfer students even as he challenged the worthiness of the transfer programs in the state’s community colleges--a challenge that roused those colleges into action.

The good news is that community colleges responded to Gardner’s attack and significantly increased the number of transfer students. UC Irvine, for example, reported a 17% increase in transfer applicants from September, 1990, to September, 1991. Overall, community colleges improved their transfer curriculum, established transfer centers to assist and counsel transfer students, and scheduled visits for potential transfer students to UC and CSU campuses.

But there is bad news: Last month, UC Berkeley and four CSU campuses announced that except for students who receive preferential treatment under affirmative action programs, those campuses will not accept any transfer students for the 1992-1993 academic year. Administrators of both systems blamed the state’s budget crisis. UC Irvine has shut the door on transfer students for winter, 1992, and probably for spring, 1993, according to Juel Lee, UCI’s transfer director.

Claiming that grades and test scores are not the only measures of excellence, UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien points to the regents’ policy requiring UC to enroll students of a broad diversity on each campus. Implementing that policy at UC Berkeley means admitting 45% of its students not based on academic achievement. Among groups identified by Tien as receiving “preferential consideration” are athletes, debaters, musicians, the poor and the disabled.

To admit approximately half of UC Berkeley’s students on a basis other than achievement, Tien asserts, is “academically and culturally sound” and “consistent with the longstanding tradition and principles of public education in a democratic society.” He acknowledges that students who worked diligently and excelled academically but whose university applications were rejected would likely regard the university’s admission policy as unfair--which it is.

To summarily reject applications from transfer students ignores the university’s previous commitment to accept them and breaches a moral contract between the university and transfer applicants. To base UC admissions on diversity instead of academic factors will end, at least temporarily, the education of a group that should partially make up UC’s diversity: transfer students. How do the returning mothers, having completed UC transfer requirements, continue their education? Or how do part-time working students who have attended community colleges for enough years to meet transfer requirements continue their education?

Why is it that in 1991 UC Irvine had 1,000 transfer slots, but in 1992 it has zero? The answer is simple: UC campuses act in ways that suit them, without reproof.

In its quest to achieve diversity, however, UC campuses and other colleges and universities become less diverse. James Daughdrill, president of Rhodes College, convincingly argued that diversity accounts for “the wreckage of American education” and pointed out that quotas based on any factor prevent diversity.

Not hiring the best qualified professors--regardless of sex, race, or any other criterion--just as not accepting the best qualified applicants, diminishes the long-term quality of university programs, a high price for society to pay.

Like preferential personnel policies for hiring women and minorities, preferential admission policies will stigmatize the students admitted under them. And students admitted to colleges and universities based on merit will never regard preferentially admitted students as their peers, creating an unwanted and undesirable diversity in academia.

The problem with trying to mandate diversity is that it is impossible to define all the groups that legitimately make up diversity within a particular setting. In this case transfer students throughout California have been disenfranchised.

If a football player, a violinist, and a minority student are each part of diversity at UC and CSU campuses, those campuses must not withhold recognition of transfer students as part of diversity. At UC Berkeley and at UCI this means allocating a portion of admissions to transfer students, and not reneging on the university’s long-established commitment.