UC Law School Class May Have Only 1 Black

Not one of the 14 black students admitted this year to UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law has decided to enroll, officials said Thursday, prompting the school’s dean to call the numbers “a total wipeout.”

The tally confirms some critics’ worst fears about the ripple effect of UC’s ban on affirmative action. Come August, when classes begin at Boalt, this jewel among California’s public professional schools will probably have the same number of blacks in its 270-member, first-year class as the University of Mississippi had in 1962: one, a student who was admitted last year but deferred enrolling.

“Nobody’s coming from this year’s admits,” Boalt Law Dean Herma Hill Kay said Thursday. Because UC offers less generous financial aid packages than private schools, she said, “the expectation was never very high. But I didn’t think it’d be a total wipeout.”

Richard Russell, one of three blacks on the 26-member UC Board of Regents, put it another way: “It’s obvious that the resegregation of higher education has begun.” Russell was not on the board when it voted in 1995 to ban consideration of race and gender in admissions; the ban goes into effect this year.

Last year, 20 black students enrolled in Boalt’s first-year class. Kay said her faculty and administration hope that minority students will still enroll at Boalt “because we continue to welcome them.” As the class firms up, it is possible that more underrepresented minorities on the waiting list will be offered slots.

But Kay said that if she were a black student weighing whether to attend Boalt, “I would certainly be very concerned about my ability to flourish here.”

At the UCLA School of Law, the numbers were not so stark. The school admitted 21 blacks and 74 Latinos for entrance this fall. On Thursday, Michael Rappaport, dean of admissions, said that to date, 10 blacks and 41 Latinos have said they will probably attend.

“The situation could have been worse [at UCLA], and to that extent I’m delighted it isn’t,” he said, stressing that some applicants could still change their minds. “But we’re obviously distressed that numbers are down so significantly from prior years. Typically, we enroll 30 or 32 black students.”

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News of the numbers followed the disclosure in May that UC’s law schools--working for the first time without race and ethnicity as admissions criteria--were accepting dramatically fewer underrepresented minorities than in past years. Opponents of affirmative action pointed to that sharp decline as evidence that black and Latino students were less prepared than whites and Asians.

“We are too politically correct to reach the conclusion: They are not as competitive to be lawyers and doctors,” UC Regent Ward Connerly, who spearheaded the movement to remove race and gender from admissions criteria at UC, said at the time. He could not be reached Thursday.

The latest numbers seemed to indicate yet another effect of the ban on affirmative action in admissions--a ban that will be extended to undergraduates next year. There is increasing evidence, officials say, that some of the best prepared, most competitive students of all ethnicities are opting not to attend UC at all.

“We’ve already had some Caucasian students withdraw from our waiting list because they prefer to go to a school with a more diverse student body,” said Kay, who added that she fears the education of the students who enroll this fall will suffer.

“Their training will be deficient in that they will no longer have the ability to engage in debate and dialogues with members of disadvantaged groups who were here formerly,” she said.

Officials said that of the 48 Latinos slated for entrance to Boalt this fall, 18 have indicated that they will attend, though those students could still change their minds. Both Native Americans who were accepted have opted not to attend Boalt. Last year, by contrast, 28 Latinos and four Native Americans enrolled in the first-year class.

As word of the numbers trickled out, reaction from faculty and students was resoundingly negative.

Robert Post, a white professor of constitutional law at Boalt, called the news “horrible, because one of the strengths of the law school was the fact that we were able to serve the diverse communities of California and play a part in the integration of the state. . . . [Without diversity] I will feel like I’m not performing part of my function.”

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Andrea Guerrero, co-chairwoman for La Raza Law Students Assn., which represents about 80 Latino students at Boalt, said the quality of legal education will be eroded.

“All Boalt students will suffer from the coming lack of diversity,” she said, calling the present admissions policy “devastating. California cannot afford to lose its brightest minority students to more inclusive public and private schools in other states.”

Joseph Jaramillo, staff attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said Boalt’s numbers were further evidence of systematic exclusion of minorities.

“This demonstrates both the discriminatory and deterrent effect of eliminating affirmative action and keeping in place an admissions policy that is neither fair nor open,” said Jaramillo, whose organization has a complaint pending before the U.S. Department of Education alleging that UC’s admissions policies violate federal civil rights law.

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Boalt Hall Admissions

Here, by ethnic group, are offers for entrance to UC Boalt Hall Law School in the fall:

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Ethnicity Offers Likely to Attend Black 17 1 Latino 48 18 Native American 2 0 Asian 158 44 Whites/others 660 239

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