Berkeley’s Awkward Two-Step to Ensure a Racially Diverse Campus : Affirmative action: A whites-only scholarship fund and a program to shield minorities from competition impale school on race issue.

Administrators at UC Berkeley are probably wishing race would just go away.

The university recently agreed to create a whites-only scholarship for undergraduates. The $500,000 fund, a bequest from Margaret Hornbeck, a retired school teacher and alumna, will target impoverished Caucasian students. In accepting the money, Berkeley officials quickly reaffirmed university policy: matching funds will be made available to minority students barred from competing for the Hornbeck scholarship.

Then earlier this month, on the separate but related issue of affirmative action, the Department of Education, through its Office of Civil Rights, charged that the admissions program of the university’s law school discriminated against whites. To achieve its self-imposed goal of an entering class that is 23% to 27% minority, Boalt Hall shielded non-white applicants from competing with whites by restricting competition for the set-asides to minorities. Consequently, whites were not considered for a fraction of the available positions.

The financial plight of poor, white students is certainly deserving of sympathy, and the university should honor its commitment to them through traditional sources of financial aid. But the racial preference mandated by the Hornbeck award, and which UC Berkeley signed on to, is offensive for an important symbolic reason. It is spelled: H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.

Whites-only scholarships, like whites-only drinking fountains, railroad cars and schools, are ugly remnants of an ugly past that should not be resurrected for a new generation to endure. Berkeley should learn the lessons of its own history of using religious, racial or gender criteria to exclude applicants. It should not travel that unpleasant road again.

Though at the risk of being labeled a hypocrite, I am not offended by, and see nothing improper with, university scholarships for historically disadvantaged religious, racial, gender or ethnic groups underrepresented in the student body. I once received such an award, an embarrassingly lavish one, from UCLA. The fellowship was intended for minority students who pursue a Ph.D. When I arrived in Westwood for orientation, I noticed I was one of only a few Latinos in a room of 200. All the protests, lawsuits, programs and scholarships in American higher education had only yielded a Harvard Chicano in a roomful of white faces. That inequity, and the danger it presents in dealing with future global challenges, justifies the university’s attempt to lure minority students.

Still, it was only a matter of time before Berkeley’s marker on quotas came due. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bakke decision invalidated the flagrant form of race-conscious admissions employed 100 miles away by the medical school at UC Davis. Justice Lewis F. Powell’s Solomonic decision had something for everyone. Allan Bakke was admitted to medical school. Davis was reprimanded for filling an arbitrary quota. But, much to the dismay of conservatives, racial affirmative action in university admissions was upheld. Powell even praised his old school, Harvard, for doing race-consciousness the right way--not by setting a numerical racial goal but by considering race as a factor for admission. Affirmative action good, quota bad.

After Bakke, Berkeley decided it was safest to use subtlety and deception to accomplish the important goal of a racially diverse student body. For 14 years, Berkeley and its UC sisters have pretended not to violate Bakke while graduating classes with increasing racial diversity. Did Boalt violate Bakke? Of course.

Shhh, a secret. Seven years after Bakke, as a high-school senior writing a term paper on racial preference, I obtained a copy of the University of California’s not-so-subtle five-year affirmative-action plan. It listed, for instance, the number of Mexican-Americans that each UC campus planned to enroll in the 1990-91 school year. A goal? A quota? Same difference. The answer depends on whether you approve of affirmative action in the first place. I was accepted to Berkeley under a quota that the Supreme Court had ruled illegal; I was accepted to Harvard under a goal that had the court’s blessing. So what?

It is no accident that Berkeley now resembles a social-science experiment, a Third World utopia with white students as the numerical minority. Berkeley is not Harvard. Could not be Harvard for one important reason: Berkeley is a public school, and thereby the beneficiary of public dollars to which a public obligation is owed. Two years ago, I was one of 2.5% of Harvard undergraduates who were Mexican-American and of the 5% who were Latino. Harvard is trying to improve its numbers, it says. Yeah.

Still, Harvard has no public obligation to do so. In a state that is now almost 40% Latino and in which minority students comprise the majority of public-school students, Berkeley is not afforded Harvard’s luxury of simply trying harder. If there were still 2.5% Chicanos at Berkeley, I would be leading the charge on Sproul Hall and demanding blood. Racial percentages on college campuses are sterile tallies of good and not-so-good intentions that either inspire or discourage young people that there is something for them after high school. As Berkeley now knows, it is creating those percentages in the first place that gets messy.

Ten years ago, Ronald Reagan told Americans to beware the new injustices of reverse discrimination, that unspeakable horror that strips white men of educational and economic opportunity. Now, ironically, as we flounder in a recession that Reaganomics help create, it is reverse discrimination that is blamed for the economic maladies of those who always took that opportunity for granted. A white male told me recently that he is convinced he is out of work because “all the jobs go to women and minorities.”

In 1992, 60% of young Latinos never make it to high-school graduation. According to one study, as many as half of all African-American males aged 16 to 25 are in jail, on parole, out on bail or wanted by police. And women earn 70 cents for every dollar a male makes. Meanwhile, a 1990 survey by Korn/Ferry International found that white males control 95% of the real power jobs in corporate America.

And that white man thinks his gender and race put him at a disadvantage in our society. The reality is that educational and economic opportunity remain as elusive in American society as they ever have been. I doubt that Boalt’s capitulation will help any.

Berkeley’s awkward two-step through the racial minefield of scholarships and quotas illustrates the complexities and complications of an American practice of racial engineering that is always distasteful and sometimes illegal. White people irrationally assume that any institutional effort to help minority students automatically hurts white students and that every non-white student who went to college since the advent of affirmative action was unqualified. Supporters of affirmative-action programs, many of whom have benefited from them, irrationally assume that racial parity in higher education can be achieved only by tinkering with the process and that those who challenge such efforts are simply racist. Both sides think they have the answers; yet, blinded by prejudice and paranoia, neither really understands the questions.

If Boalt graduates lack job prospects in a depressed legal market, they might consider staying in Berkeley. After all, if the University of California does not stop playing it fast-and-loose with the race issue, it will continue to need good lawyers.