Piloting Berkeley in the Prop. 209 Storm

In his first four months on the job, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert H. Berdahl has been sued by opponents of affirmative action for encouraging law school alumni to raise private funds to sponsor scholarships for minority students. And he has been challenged by student demonstrators who support affirmative action--54 were arrested for occupying a law school office. Berdahl, though, is no stranger to the volatile issue. He came from the University of Texas, which had to redesign law school admissions criteria after white students sued because lower-scoring minority applicants were accepted ahead of them. Now he is leading the University of California’s flagship campus at a time when UC regents--and voter-approved Proposition 209--insist that the campus eliminate all preferences based on race and gender. UC officials expect the issue to heat up as admissions offices prepare to select undergraduates under those new marching orders. Speaking with Times editors and reporters, Berdahl indicated that Berkeley is making other changes in its admissions procedures--ones that are likely to help minority candidates but also prompt legal challenges.

Question: Studies have shown that UCLA and Berkeley will experience a big drop in black and Latino undergraduates next fall. What is your prediction?

Answer: I don’t really want to predict that. I’m so afraid it is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is such a volatile issue. We’ll see a decline. I hope it will be minimal. I think it will be less steep than in the professional schools. But I don’t think for a minute that we won’t have some slippage.

Q: Do you see this as a problem?

A: I think it is. I don’t think we can be a public university, serving all of the people of California, unless we have a balance of representation from people who have historically not had access to a place like Berkeley.

Q: A lot has been written about Boalt Hall’s drop in minority student. How did other graduate programs fare?

A: We did not have the decline in minority enrollment in other graduate programs. I think the reason is that the students applying to do graduate work are reviewed more thoroughly without the focus on the objective criteria: the test scores and grades. Boalt and other law schools have relied heavily on [Law School Admission Test] scores and undergraduate grades, whereas other departments look at where the students come from. They probably rely more heavily on the references because they know the faculty from those institutions. The consequence is that we are up in African American enrollment in first-year graduate students. What Boalt is going to be doing next year is look a bit more fully at the applications and try to de-emphasize the objective criteria.

Q: Is that approach going to be applied to picking next fall’s undergraduate class too?

A: Our admissions process will try to measure achievement in a more complete fashion. I’m anxious to see what a kid does with the hand he or she has been dealt. It’s very hard for us to penalize kids who have gone to schools that don’t have Advanced Placement classes, where there aren’t some of the upper-level science or math classes. And that’s where I think a lot of those kids are affected in their ability to score well in standardized tests. The question is: How well has that kid done in the environment where they have been placed? We are really looking at kids who have achieved something significant in the face of obstacles. We can’t take race as one of the obstacles. But we can consider a kid who has had to contribute the financial support of the home.

Q: With thousands of applications, how are you going to do this?

A: We are going to put a lot more money in the admissions process. Every application that is submitted to Berkeley will be read twice and scored on a scale of 1 to 7. If there is more than 1 1/2 points between the assessments of those two readers, then it gets read by a third. We have had a committee at work looking at dozens of applications to look at different criteria than SATs, grade-point averages and class rank.

Q: Is all this leading up to dumping the SATs, as recommended by the Latino Eligibility Task Force?

A: Not throwing out the SATs, but looking at it a little differently. The SAT has gotten fixated in the American mind as a real measure of ability, when it is only marginally predictive. There is no predictive difference to speak of between a kid getting 1,300 and a kid getting 1,500. We need to deal with it in terms of bands of achievement rather than, as some people think, that someone getting 1,150 is a better candidate than someone getting 1,100. That’s crazy.

Q: When you adjust admissions, are you going to give a point ranking for overcoming adversity?

A: Something like that. I cannot speak specifically to how it will be done. But that’s what they are trying to do.

Q: Wouldn’t you expect to be sued over that?

A: We have to make decisions that are defensible. I think there is almost nothing in this environment that you don’t get sued over. The question is: Are we working consistently with Prop. 209 and the regents’ resolution? I believe we have to obey that law and we will. At the same time, as we change admission criteria, this is not just for minority kids. There are a lot of poor white kids who have gone to rural schools and who have had adversity to overcome.

‘We can’t take race [into account]. But we can consider a kid who has had to contribute the financial support of the home and has had to work substantially. . . . We have had a committee at work looking at dozens of applications to look at different criteria than SATs, grade-point averages and class rank.’