Groups charge UC with discrimination

Several civil rights organizations filed a joint complaint with the federal Education Department's Civil Rights Office last Wednesday, accusing the University of California of discriminating against female and minority applicants. The California system's Regents voted to eliminate race and gender-based affirmative action criteria from consideration in the UC admissions process in July 1995. Graduate programs have already been affected by the controversial decision, which will affect undergraduate admissions for the 1998 spring quarter. The UC schools currently base 40 to 60 percent of their undergraduate admission decisions on an index combining high school grades and standardized test scores, but the policy will increase the number of decisions based on such criteria to between 50 and 75 percent. Several civil rights organizations -- including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and California Women's Law Center -- allege that the ban has caused discrimination against female and minority graduate school applicants. "This is the resegregation of the public university system," MALDEF attorney Joseph Jaramillo said. He noted that the Boalt School of Law at UC Berkeley, which typically has as many as 70 minority students per class, is predicting that fewer than 12 minorities will enroll next fall. And Berkeley's graduate engineering programs are expecting the number of females and minorities enrolling next fall to decline by as much as 30 percent. Jaramillo said the new policy places too much emphasis on standardized test scores. He said the affirmative action ban eliminates "any experiences relating to race or gender, which disproportionally disadvantages women and minorities." But he expressed optimism that the complaint will force the Education Department to "investigate the complaint and hopefully ask the UC system to get rid of these practices," noting that the government could threaten to withhold or withdraw billions of dollars in federal funding from the UC system if it does not comply. The Los Angeles branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has also taken legal action against the ban, said its director, Mark Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum explained that the UC Regents are "using the guise of meritocracy to justify discrimination against females and minorities," adding that the affirmative action ban does not prevent admissions officers from giving preferential treatment to children of alumni or major donors. And he noted that the Regents are unqualified to make decisions involving issues such as affirmative action. "[The Regents] are distinguished only by the political favors they have done for the governor," he said.