New Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, whose logic I just lampooned below, has recently held breakfast meetings with reporters to issue “a call to action on a student diversity crisis at the highly ranked university.”
“Part of what I’m trying to accomplish as a new chancellor here is to say this really is a crisis,” Birgeneau said in outlining his agenda to reporters at a campus faculty club….
“We’re not meeting our obligation as a public institution because we’re underserving in an extreme way a significant and increasingly important part of the population, which actually is going to be the majority population,” he said.
An article based on this same meeting that appeared in the Sacramento Union noted the dimensions of the “crisis”: blacks will make up only 3% of next year’s freshman class at Berkeley. That article also noted, however, that
[l]ooking at the aggregate totals for UC campuses, the number of blacks and Hispanics is above 1997 levels as enrollment of those students has increased at other schools in the system. [1997 was the last year of preferences.]
But does 3% really represent a “crisis”? Birgeneau is new to California (he came last September from the University of Toronto), and perhaps he would have gotten himself less bent out of shape if someone on his staff had pointed out to him that the percentage of blacks in the California legislature, 5% (6 out of 180), is not all that different from Berkeley’s entering class. That’s not so surprising, or crisis-indicating, since for more than the past decade blacks have been holding steady at 7% of California’s population.
White Non-Hispanics were 57 percent of the population in 1990 but only 47 percent of the population by 2000…. The Asian & Pacific Islander Non-Hispanic population grew from 9 to 12 percent of the total over the same period. The shares of both the Black or African American Non-Hispanic and American Indian and Alaskan Native Non-Hispanic populations have remained constant over the course of the decade, at 7 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
Blacks are “underrepresented” (are selective universities really supposed to be representative?), but then so are whites, who are 47% of the population but only 33% of next year’s freshmen. Asians, by contrast, are dramatically “overrepresented”: they make up 12% of California’s population but about 45% of next year’s freshmen. [These numbers for whites and Asians are taken from the Sacramento Union article linked above.]
Assuming that Chancellor Birgeneau is successful in figuring out a way to skirt Proposition 209’s colorblindness requirement, would he make room for the additional blacks by reducing the number of whites, thus making them even more “underrepresented” than they are now, or would he instead introduce a harder if still invisible quota on Asians? Or maybe both.
In any event, Birgeneau’s “crisis” is not new. For last year’s version of precisely the same complaint, and almost precisely the same response, see here.
I thought the crisis at UC was that the state of California is paying a $10K per year subsidy for students to learn skills that have no relevance in the job market.
One would assume from looking at California data that the affirmative action issue centered around “Asians vs. Hispanics,” yet the AP and Chronicle articles barely mention these groups.
“UC Berkeley is failing in its responsibility to be “educating the leadership of the state,” [Birgeneau] said, noting that African Americans and Latinos were projected to make up about 60 percent of the state’s population in 20 years, yet represent less than 10 percent of the university’s students.
According to state projections, between the years 2000 and 2030 the black population will “rise” from 6.5% to 6.6%.
Of course Birgeneau never even mentions Asian-Americans, or that 1 out of every 3 students at Berkeley is an Asian-American who would not be there if strict “representation” was imposed (45%-12%=33% equals one-third). According to the illogical, decietful vocabulary of liberals, Asian-Americans are not “minorities”, they’re somehow white.
I think that Asians (and all applicants) should get all the spots they’re qualified for, but if the Supreme Court, the President, college chancellors continue to support policies of A) having minimum quotas for blacks & Hispanics, B) not having maximum quotas for Asians, which in combination is done for the purpose of deliberately minimizing the white student population…someday white Americans (especially in California) might just take the advice of Pat Buchannan and insist on minimum quotas for white kids. After all, in California, whites are an “underrepresented minority” who can play the quota game like other groups.
If whites just gave in and accepted strict admission quotas for all groups, instead of 33% of UCBerkeley freshman, they’d be 47% (based on total population) or about 42% (I believe 42% is close to the white % of total California high school grads). It would be much better than the situation right now, in terms of overall white representation, if not in terms of preserving merit-based admissions.