Test Tube for a Changing Political Climate

Joseph Collier knew that he wanted to go to UCLA Law School. But, with reports of dwindling minority admissions at UC law programs, the 31-year-old black student from Ohio was apprehensive. Then Collier found out how much UCLA wanted him. After receiving his acceptance letter he was courted heavily by the dean, faculty members, alumni and the African American law student organization. “I felt that the university was making a lot of effort to make me come,” says Collier.

Collier is one of 10 black students who enrolled in UCLA Law School this year, the first under the University of California’s ban on affirmative action. The figure is in sharp contrast to the UC system’s other major law school, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, where only one of the 14 blacks accepted chose to enroll.

But the mood is far from celebratory this fall at UCLA Law School, as both the administration and student leaders struggle to come to grips with the new post-affirmative action reality. Under the ban, the number of blacks accepted to both the UCLA and Berkeley law programs plummeted 80%. Latino admissions also dropped sharply, 50% at Berkeley and 25% at UCLA. “It’s really depressing that one of the big things that UC was known for before--its diversity--has been taken away,” says Peter Nguyen, president of UCLA Law School’s Student Bar Assn.

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For years, UCLA’s law program has been on the forefront of the effort to diversify the legal profession and provide students with a multiethnic academic experience that mirrors the demographic reality of California. Now, the school has become a closely watched test tube for a changing political climate in which affirmative action itself has been equated with discrimination. And the state’s experiment with colorblind admissions is already proving volatile, stirring up tensions within the school while drawing the attention of the legal community and activists--a big protest rally is scheduled today.

Thus far, UCLA Law School has avoided the fate of Berkeley, which in addition to enrolling one black student managed to successfully recruit only 14 of the 48 Latinos accepted. At UCLA, half of the 21 blacks and 79 Latinos who were admitted decided to enroll.

Nevertheless, the number of blacks in UCLA’s first-year class of 381 students is the lowest since 1967, when the school implemented its affirmative action program. Latino enrollment dropped 13% from last year, while the number of Native Americans shrunk from five students to one. The big exception to the decline in minority enrollment was Asian Americans, whose ranks jumped by 70%.

White enrollment, meanwhile, increased more than 30% from 1996 to almost two-thirds of all new students. Together, the figures represent a major shift for UCLA, which only three years ago admitted an incoming class with no racial majority.

“I think the impact of the ban has already been severe, and I think it will be even more severe in the future,” says professor Cruz Reynoso, a former justice of the California Supreme Court. “We are now very far from the mythical ideal of having a law school somewhat representative of the population of the state.”

SP-1, the resolution banning affirmative action at UC schools, was passed in 1995 by the board of regents and took effect at the graduate level this year (it will be extended to undergraduates next year). In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, a sweeping initiative outlawing racial and gender preferences in all government contracting and publicly funded higher education. The only other state to ban affirmative action in college is Texas.

Thus far, SP-1 and Proposition 209 have had only a modest overall impact on the UC system’s 600 graduate programs. But the measures have delivered a one-two punch to both the UCLA and Berkeley law programs, which like other UC professional programs, relied more heavily on affirmative action for admissions. Until this year, 40% of UCLA’s law school class was admitted on diversity criteria, which took into account factors beyond test scores and grade-point average, including race.

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For foes of affirmative action, the dramatic decrease in black and Latino acceptance at UCLA and Berkeley has served as confirmation of their contention that the system was biased. “The drop in enrollment by blacks and Hispanic students was a sign of how deep those universities were giving preferences based on race,” says Jennifer Nelson, executive director of the Sacramento-based American Civil Rights Institute, the group founded in January by African American regent Ward Connerly.

UCLA officials, however, assert that these guidelines allowed them to widen the pool of students while maintaining rigorous academic standards. “One of the great success stories of the last 20 years is achieving a very integrated student body,” says Michael Rappaport, the law school’s dean of admissions. “We’ve done that while still maintaining one of the most difficult, competitive schools.”

Not only has the law school aggressively recruited minorities, it has actively sought to create an atmosphere of racial harmony. The presence of high-profile minority professors such as Reynoso and Kimberly Crenshaw, a leading African American legal scholar, contributes to that environment. So do the National Black Law Journal, the Chicano / Latino Law Review, and the Asian Pacific American Law Journal--all edited here.

The effort to forge a hospitable milieu for minorities is also visible at a more personal level. “We don’t have this big, impersonal, large-school mentality. We really try to reach out to people,” remarks professor Kristine Knaplund. Knaplund has played a critical role in this: In 1985, she developed an academic support program to bolster students’ performance.

The program traditionally has attracted a high percentage of minorities. “It is really designed for students who don’t know very much about law school, who don’t have parents, brothers and sisters who were lawyers, and that’s often true of minority students,” says Knaplund, who has helped establish similar efforts at Rutgers, the University of Miami and other law schools.

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The UCLA Law School has been cited by the State Bar of California for doing more than any other law program in the state to bring minority students into the profession, but many feel that this status is now in jeopardy.

For law students, interaction with a wide range of people is not just a nicety, observes Knaplund. “The odds are, when you graduate from law school and start to practice, your client or your managing partner or your judge is not going to be the same color as you are.”

More broadly, supporters of affirmative action anticipate a chain reaction that will make itself felt beyond the law school. They anticipate fewer applications from blacks and Latinos. A significant decrease was seen this past year. Daria Neal, head of UCLA’s Black Law Student Assn., cites the example of a friend who expressed apprehension about coming to UCLA because of the expected decrease in black enrollment. That student is now at Georgetown.

Many student leaders and teachers worry that the drop in enrollment of blacks and Latinos will eventually translate into a loss of diversity within the profession. Nationally, minorities account for only 7% of lawyers, compared to more than 20% of the population, according to the Law School Admissions Council.

“Is it good for the state, for the legal profession, for the school, to not have a diverse student body?” asks Raymond Marshall, a partner with the prominent San Francisco law firm McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen. “It’s not that a Latino has to have a Latino lawyer, a black has to have a black lawyer, a woman has to have a woman lawyer. But you cannot have an all-white male legal system and expect that people will respect the system.”

While the drop in minority enrollment came as a jolt, it was not unexpected. In fact, UCLA Law revised its admissions guidelines to give greater weight to socioeconomic status in hopes of partially offsetting the elimination of affirmative action. The change does appear to have had some success, particularly with Latinos.

The school, aided by alumni and student organizations, also mounted an aggressive recruitment drive to convince those minority students who were accepted to enroll. By contrast, Berkeley did relatively little to enroll minority students, according to Monique Langhorne, co-chair of Boalt Hall’s Law Students of African Descent.

There appears to be less friction between students and the administration at UCLA. Nevertheless, some students are not convinced that the school is doing everything it can. “Most faculty and staff say they are committed to it, however I don’t necessarily think their actions support their words,” says Christina Alvarez, a member of the student group Coalition for Diversity.

On Sept. 24, the coalition sponsored a teach-in. While all six professors who spoke made their support for affirmative action clear, the tone remained scholarly until the very end, when Reynoso--who also serves as co-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights--delivered an impassioned speech about the importance of maintaining a diverse student body.

Monica Cazares, co-president of the Latino law student group La Raza, agrees with Alvarez that the school should take a firmer stand. “I’d like to see the faculty that has come out in support of continued affirmative action and diversity talk to the media, write articles, start a coalition such as the one that students started.”

According to Cazares, much of the faculty has not taken a position on affirmative action. One exception is professor Eugene Volokh, who argues that it’s time to pull the plug on affirmative action and other “social engineering” schemes. Moreover, he disputes the assertion that the regents’ ban has resulted in a drop in minority enrollment.

“If diversity is a code word for numbers of blacks and Hispanics, it’s less diverse,” Volokh says. “But I know of no evidence that we have less intellectual diversity than we did a few years ago.” He also notes that, if Asians are included, there has actually been an increase in the number of minorities. Volokh acknowledges that his view is shared by relatively few of his colleagues, but says that the atmosphere among the faculty is collegial.

Some dissension has been brewing among students following the passage of a resolution by the Student Bar Assn. demanding that the administration intensify its efforts to maintain ethnic diversity. The resolution prompted a recall effort against SBA President Nguyen, whom critics allege pushed the measure through before a majority of students had a chance to consider it. The group, which has remained mostly anonymous, also charges that Nguyen’s decision to send the resolution and a letter to law firms may hurt students’ job prospects.

At a tense meeting of La Raza on Sept. 22, student Evan Spiegel explained the reasons for the recall. He insists that the recall has nothing to do with the issue of affirmative action, but rather is a matter of democratic procedure. Following remarks from Nguyen, the group voted unanimously against the recall.

For all the debate, most students and professors remain focused on academics, even if the issue keeps coming back into focus. Today, the Coalition for Diversity will hold a campuswide rally featuring Jesse Jackson to send a message to the rest of the country not to follow California’s example. “The national debate is really focusing on California,” says Claudia Martinez, co-editor of the Chicano / Latino Law Review.

While decrying the regents’ ban and Proposition 209, Dean Rappaport, for one, hopes the current crisis will force a deeper examination of the issues. “Why aren’t blacks and Latinos able to get into schools on their own without any kind of special consideration? Is it the school system, the communities, attitudes toward education, residual racism? One of the interesting things that’s resulted from the ban on affirmative action is that it’s going to force all of us--the education establishment, the community, the political structure--to start asking these difficult questions. It’s all of our problem. We can’t solve it at the law school.”