Inside Higher Ed reports that the University of California at Berkeley has announced a new African-American Initiative designed to improve the campus “climate” by enrolling more black students and adding to the “diversity” of the faculty.
“Black undergraduate enrollment is about 3 percent,” the IHE article notes, “less than half the share of the black population in the state.” Unmentioned in the article, however, is whether or not Berkeley has an official or unacknowledged policy of seeking proportional representation of racial and ethnic groups.
Even if it does, however, why concentrate on increasing only black enrollment? Whites, as it happens, are even more “underrepresented” at Berkeley than blacks. According to UC Berkeley Fall Enrollment Data, whites were only 24.9% of new freshmen in Fall 2014 even though, according to US Census data, whites are 73.5% of California’s population.
According to Inside Higher Ed, “Berkeley is banned by a state constitutional amendment from considering race in admissions,” but Berkeley officials say the “$20 million scholarship fund” they are planning “will be administered privately to avoid violating the state ban on consideration of race.”
Gibor Basri, outgoing vice chancellor for “equity and inclusion,” explained in a Berkeley news release how those officials thought they could skirt the prohibitions imposed by Prop. 209, now enshrined in the California constitution.
We chose recruitment and yield specifically so as not to directly face the constraint of Prop. 209. I got particularly discouraged a little over a year ago, when a number of California legislators started the process of trying to pass a bill to exempt higher education from 209. They didn’t get too far before outside lobbies came in and killed it. That convinced me that we may not be at a place politically right now where it’s useful for an initiative like this to directly challenge 209.
Both the recruitment and the yield pieces of the African American initiative avoid that issue directly.
The Berkeley news release states directly that “Prop. 209 was the 1996 ballot initiative that prohibited public universities from considering race as a factor in admissions.” Basri, other Berkeley officials, and even Inside Higher Ed seem to think that’s all it did. That, presumably, is why they think that planning a $20 million fund whose declared purpose is to recruit and retain more blacks does not “directly” challenge the Prop. 209/California constitution prohibitions against race preferences. That prohibition, however, bars race preferences not just in admissions but everywhere in “public education” (as well as in public employment and contracting.)
The plan for a $20 million scholarship is at the core of the African American Initiative, and its avowed purpose, as explained forthrightly in this interview by Berkeley executive vice chancellor and provost Claude Steele, is to attract more black students so that current black students will feel more comfortable. “You know,” he told the Berkeley News interviewer, “how comfortable one feels is an assessment everybody does. And when there are enough other people like you there, then you can answer that more affirmatively.” Having this fund “administered” by a private group may be insufficient for it to pass legal muster.
As explained and justified by Berkeley officials, the African American Initiative is refreshingly free of “diversity” cant. It’s all about recruiting more blacks because blacks need to have more blacks around. As such, I suspect courts may see it as a more direct challenge to Prop. 209 than its sponsors appear to believe.