UC Berkeley's new chancellor believes in diversity before ability

Charles Burress:

UC Berkeley's new chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, sounded the opening priority for his administration Thursday by issuing a call to action on a student diversity crisis at the highly ranked university.

Citing the drop in under-represented minorities on campus, especially African Americans, Birgeneau called for research into refining admissions standards and finding the best ways to create a more multicultural campus.

"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.

Birgeneau's diversity campaign -- including an op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times on March 27 -- represents his first major public initiative since becoming chancellor in September. The former University of Toronto president will have his formal inauguration ceremony on April 15.

"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.

Birgeneau blamed the drop in numbers on Proposition 209, the 1996 voter-approved initiative that banned affirmative action based on race and gender for state and local agencies, including the university.

The number of African Americans in Cal's 1996-97 freshman class, before Prop. 209 took effect, was 260, while the 2004-05 class has only 108, with fewer than 40 males, he said.

"Out of 3,600 freshman students, that's just a shocking number," he said.

Even more striking, he said, is that there is not even one African American among the approximately 800 entering students in engineering, whose faculty was ranked best in the world in a recent survey by The Times of London newspaper.

He said enrollment numbers for Latino and Native American students were similarly deplorable.

UC Berkeley is failing in its responsibility to be "educating the leadership of the state," he 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.

What Birgeneau doesn't seem to understand is that one of the reasons why so many people want to go to UC Berkeley is because it is seen as a university that is very selective in the students that it accepts. If Berkeley decides that diversity is more important than ability then in the long term it will become a university that students of superior ability will no longer want to attend.