UC Berkeley Unveils Plan to Maintain Racial Diversity : Universities: Program will target students before they reach college and focus on family income and education.

Despite the abolition of affirmative action at the University of California, UC Berkeley officials pledged Thursday to maintain racial diversity at the flagship campus by helping minority students long before they reach college age.

“We want all students to know they still have an opportunity to receive the finest education at Berkeley--no matter whether their skin is white, black, brown or yellow,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien. “We pledge to keep the opportunity alive.”

Speaking to a group of inner city Oakland students, Tien unveiled “the Berkeley pledge,” a program to help prepare disadvantaged students to meet admission requirements at UC Berkeley.

The initiative, designed to avoid controversy by targeting students according to family income and education level rather than race, will also provide $60 million in scholarships for disadvantaged students accepted for admission.

The Berkeley campaign is the first concrete step taken by any UC campus to maintain racial diversity since the Board of Regents voted in July to ignore recommendations by the UC president and the heads of its nine campuses and end race-based preferences in student admissions.

Tien insisted that the Berkeley pledge is consistent with the regents’ action and is a way of helping minorities without relying on the racial and ethnic criteria used under affirmative action programs that grant preference to students from underrepresented minority groups.

“As a public university, our campus has a historic responsibility to serve all of California,” Tien said. “Our commitment has made Berkeley an international model for ‘excellence through diversity.’ We do not intend to retreat from our commitment.”

UC Regent Ward Connerly, who led the fight to dismantle UC’s affirmative action policies, said he was thrilled by the Berkeley program and pledged to raise $50,000 for the scholarship fund.

“This is exactly the kind of initiative that I certainly contemplated when I offered the resolution about eliminating the use of race and ethnicity and other factors,” he said.

“We all want diversity. Only a person who is not of goodwill does not want diversity. . . . We only want to achieve it naturally, and this Berkeley pledge . . . is exactly what we had in mind,” he said.

Connerly said other UC campuses should propose similar initiatives, calling Berkeley’s plan a model for the proper role of the university in ensuring diversity.

The state’s public elementary and secondary schools bear the primary responsibility for making sure that all students are prepared to meet UC requirements, and “UC Berkeley is saying this is what we will do as a partner to help you meet them,” Connerly said. “But it is really a K-12 responsibility.”

At Fremont High School in Oakland, Tien joined with superintendents of school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area to sign the pledge and promised to work with public schools to help recruit and prepare minority students.

University officials said the program will not be limited to minority youth; students will be enrolled based on non-racial criteria such as family income and parents’ education level.

But given the low economic standing of many minority families, most of the targeted junior and senior high school students will probably be black or Latino.

School superintendents from San Francisco, Oakland and other cities were enthusiastic about the program and the opportunities it can provide for their minority students.

“The rhetoric is being matched by the intensity and by putting a financial commitment behind it,” said San Francisco Schools Supt. Waldemar (Bill) Rojas.

Like other UC administrators, faculty members and students, Tien had strongly opposed the regents’ decision to end affirmative action. He gained national attention when he publicly challenged Gov. Pete Wilson, a regent and driving force behind the move to end race-based preferences.

On a personal note, Tien told his high school audience that as a refugee from China he attended college on a full scholarship in the segregated South of the 1950s, experiencing the blessings of financial aid and enduring the hardships of discrimination.

As chancellor of UC Berkeley since 1990, he said he has made “excellence through diversity” the university’s unofficial motto.

“Some people believe [the regents’] decision was a signal that the University of California no longer cares about serving students who reflect the great diversity of this state,” Tien said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We care deeply about preserving the diversity that is essential to the excellence of Berkeley.”

The chancellor noted that the regents, in abolishing affirmative action, called on the nine-member UC system “to develop and support programs which will have the effect of increasing the eligibility rate of groups which are ‘underrepresented’ in the university’s school of applicants.” The Berkeley pledge, Tien said, is consistent with that directive.

Known as a skillful fund-raiser, Tien said UC Berkeley will pump $1 million into the program, which will target youths as early as the seventh grade. Among its features, the program will:

* Expand the recruitment of minority students by sending university faculty, staff members and students to secondary schools to attract future applicants.

* Provide campus mentors to help youngsters prepare for college and adjust to campus life.

* Create an intensive summer program for high school students, and increase the number of weekend and summer courses to improve college preparation.

* Raise more money for scholarships to keep UC Berkeley affordable, and increase campus work opportunities for students.

* Provide special coaching for disadvantaged students in fields such as chemistry, math and engineering, and encourage them to pursue graduate careers.

In the wake of the tumultuous debate over affirmative action at the July regents meeting--which had been interrupted by a protest and bomb threat--the Berkeley proposal won praise from all sides in the affirmative action debate.

A spokesman for Wilson said the governor had not seen details of the Berkeley initiative but would probably support it because it does not favor students on the basis of race. Wilson has made the abolition of affirmative action a centerpiece of his campaign to win the Republican nomination for President.

“I think it is an excellent idea,” said Regent Roy T. Brophy, a Sacramento developer who supported the university’s affirmative action program.

Patrick Callan, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center, also commended the proposal as the first positive step taken since the regents’ decision.