UC Accused of Bias in Admissions

Filing a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday, civil rights lawyers accused the University of California of discriminating against women and minorities by abolishing affirmative action in graduate student admissions but keeping other criteria that they say favor whites and men.

The complaint says UC Berkeley’s Boalt Law School, for instance, gives added weight to the grade-point average of applicants who attended elite Eastern colleges with few minority students but discounts grades from predominantly black Howard University or Cal State Los Angeles, which has high Latino enrollment.

The coalition of Latino, African American and women’s groups asked the Clinton administration to investigate and withhold federal dollars, if necessary, to ensure that the university complies with federal civil rights laws.

“We are basing these allegations on several projections showing an extremely sharp decline in minority and female enrollment,” said Joseph Jamarillo, staff attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “We believe the Clinton administration is concerned about providing equal education and will be diligent in investigating this complaint.”

Susan Thomas, a UC attorney, said she had not seen the complaint but defended the university’s new admissions procedures as conforming to federal law.

“We have made every effort to come up with an admissions process that is fair and free of discrimination and helps realize the university’s commitment to diversity,” Thomas said.

The complaint comes as university officials are selecting about 9,600 students for UC’s five medical schools, three law schools and 600 other graduate programs.

This year is the first time in decades that UC officials are not giving any preference to gender, race or ethnicity in their selections--implementing the affirmative action ban approved by the UC Board of Regents in 1995.

The ban will be phased into undergraduate admissions next year.

MALDEF and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a separate administrative complaint earlier this year asking the Labor Department to halt this round of graduate admissions on the ground that the university is violating its obligations as a federal contractor.

UC officials disputed the allegation and Labor Department lawyers are trying to determine if the agency has any jurisdiction to pursue the matter.

In Wednesday’s complaint to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, MALDEF and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund were joined by the California Women’s Law Center in arguing that UC’s graduate admissions policies “have a discriminatory effect” on blacks, Latinos, American Indians and women.

The complaint did not directly challenge the elimination of affirmative action. Instead, it questioned the remaining selection criteria, such as the weight given grades, scores from “culturally biased” standardized tests and various nonacademic “whole person” factors.

In considering “whole person” factors, admissions officers now can weigh an applicant’s age, a disability, various extracurricular achievements or whether a parent is an alumnus of the school.

Some of these criteria “significantly favor white and male applicants,” the complaint argues, saying that the schools also should consider the achievements of women or minorities in persevering over discrimination.

Defending Boalt Hall’s practice of weighting grades, law school officials say they make the adjustments to take into account “the quality of the student body” and the “grading patterns at the school attended.”

But the complaint argues that those schools downgraded in Boalt’s formulas have high minority enrollment, such as Howard University’s 85% African American student body and California State University system’s 33.6% population of Latinos and blacks.

In contrast, the complaint states, the law school more highly values grade point averages of candidates from elite schools--it lists Swarthmore, Williams, Duke and Carleton as examples--that have dramatically fewer minority students.