Colleges Fear Affirmative Action Setback : Education: Some officials say admission policy agreement between U.S. agency and Berkeley law school may weaken efforts to boost enrollment of minorities.

Leaders of national higher education organizations warned Tuesday that the new admissions policy agreement between a federal civil rights agency and the UC Berkeley law school might weaken affirmative action efforts in colleges and universities across the country.

“I’m very worried about the message that is being sent. . . ,” said Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education, which includes most of the nation’s four-year institutions.

“Colleges and universities ought to be about the business of diversifying their student bodies and their faculties,” Atwell said. “The message ought to be, ‘We want you here and we’re going to try very hard to get you,’ but the message from the Office for Civil Rights is, ‘You’d better be very careful about the way you proceed here or you might be violating (federal civil rights law).’ ”

Atwell was referring to the announcement Monday by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that admissions policies at Boalt Hall, the Berkeley law school, “are not consistent” with Title VI of the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act.

The agency found that Boalt Hall was evaluating applications in separate racial groups and was not considering enough factors, other than race or ethnicity, in trying to assemble a diverse entering class.

The law school has agreed to change some of the procedures it follows while leaving the basic policy unchanged.

This year, 39% of the entering class of 267 students is minority.

Robert Rosenzweig, president of the Assn. of American Universities, which includes 56 of the most prestigious universities in the country, said, “It appears that the Boalt Hall people couldn’t defend the practices they were using, and I have no reason to think those practices were unique or even unusual.”

Rosenzweig predicted that “all prudent universities will be looking at their affirmative action policies.”

However, a contrary opinion came from Carl Monk, executive director of the Assn. of American Law Schools, who said the Boalt Hall-Office for Civil Rights agreement should have little effect on admissions policies of the 158 law schools that belong to his organization.

“What Berkeley has done is enter into a conciliation agreement by which it will make some minor adjustments in the procedures it follows in pursuing a diverse student body,” Monk said. “It should not affect other law schools in their commitment to affirmative action.”

Deans of the Stanford and UCLA law schools said they did not believe their schools would be affected.

“We certainly will review our existing procedures in terms of what OCR has said,” Dean Paul Brest of Stanford said, “but I don’t think our program raises the kinds of questions that were raised at Boalt.”

Brest said Stanford has had an affirmative action policy for many years and currently tries to enroll between 30 and 40 African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, American Indians and Puerto Ricans out of each new classs of 180.

Dean Susan Westerberg Prager of the UCLA School of Law was out of town Tuesday but said in a prepared statement that the features of the Boalt Hall admissions policies objected to by the Office for Civil Rights “are not present in the UCLA law admissions program.”

About 42% of this year’s law school entering class of 294 at UCLA are minority students.

Dean Herma Hill Kay of Boalt Hall said the agreement with the Office for Civil Rights should not discourage minority student recruiting efforts, whether in law schools or in higher education generally.

“We have not admitted any violation of law,” she said. “We don’t believe we were in violation of the law. No one should consider this a scaling back of our commitment to affirmative action and others should not feel discouraged. This may require the kind of fine-tuning we are doing, but I don’t think it endangers affirmative action.”

Dean Kay noted the difference between the “restrained” findings of the Seattle-based investigators for the Office for Civil Rights, who made no mention of “quotas” in their report, and the Monday “interpretation of these findings that came out of Washington.”

“My interpretation is that the D.C. office is trying to get a little political mileage out of this settlement,” she said.

Troy Duster, a UC Berkeley sociology professor who has studied affirmative action programs extensively, said the agreement “will not have big reverberations nationally” but is “the kind of climate change . . . that empowers that part of society that really doesn’t want to have very much to do with affirmative action.”