UC to Retain Ethnic, Gender Guidelines, President Says

With a judge having suspending enforcement of Proposition 209, the University of California will use race, gender and ethnicity to evaluate the 70,000 high school and community college students who have applied for admission, UC President Richard C. Atkinson has confirmed.

Atkinson issued a letter to the nine campus chancellors advising that--barring an emergency action on appeal--the university will retain its affirmative action criteria in making decisions on undergraduate admissions and financial aid.

Atkinson’s directive comes just as UC admissions officers are beginning to sort through applications for 32,277 openings for freshmen and transfer students for fall 1997.

Acceptance and rejection notices will begin to trickle out in January and the process is expected to be completed in March.

Atkinson predicted that the 1997 admission cycle will be finished well before there is a trial or final ruling on the constitutionality of Proposition 209, which called for an end to racial or gender preferences in the state’s government and universities. The preliminary injunction issued Monday by U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson prohibits UC and other state agencies and local governments from implementing the November ballot measure’s ban on affirmative action pending further legal proceedings.

“We will endeavor to do everything possible to avoid further changes during the admissions cycle,” Atkinson wrote, emphasizing the need to have applications processed in a timely manner.

This may be the last time race and gender factor into UC’s admissions decisions, though, because university officials plan to phase in their own ban on affirmative action next year.

The UC Board of Regents passed a resolution in 1995 to ban the use of such preferences in the 164,000-student university system. UC officials have been preparing a new set of admissions criteria for students seeking to enroll in the spring 1998 term.

Admissions officers also have struggled for months over precisely how to select the fall 1997 freshman class, a process thrown into chaos when 54% of California voters decided to pass Proposition 209 in last month’s election.

Initially, the university decided to accelerate its affirmative action ban to comply with Proposition 209, but then was ordered by Henderson to refrain from implementing the proposition.

Meanwhile, 50,000 high school students and 20,000 community college students mailed applications to the university system by the Nov. 30 deadline.

On Monday, the judge stabilized the situation a bit by granting a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of Proposition 209 pending a trial or a final ruling on its legal merits.

In his 67-page ruling declaring that the law is probably unconstitutional, Henderson cited UC as an example of where affirmative action programs have benefited minorities and women competing for a limited number of openings.

The judge said the record indicates that without current race- and gender-conscious affirmative action efforts, the number of African American students enrolled “could be reduced across the system by as much as 40% to 50%, while Chicano/Latino enrollments could be reduced by 5% to 15%.”

Lawyers for the state plan to appeal the case to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and attorneys on both sides forecast a lengthy legal battle likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.