John Leo

Reality check: There is no whiteout, closing doors, or a Caucasian University. In the eight-college University of California system, only two out of every five students are white. At Berkeley, the figure is one in three. (The "all-white" theorists manage to overlook Asian-American students, or simply dismiss them as whites.) The dramatic "plunge" (for example, 64.3 percent fewer black freshmen admitted this fall at Berkeley) was only at two leading campuses, Berkeley and UCLA.

For maximum impact, pro-preference activists put out those numbers first. The systemwide data, released two days later by the university, show a more modest drop, 18 percent for blacks and seven percent for Hispanics. But this news never caught up with the selected numbers pushed by advocates and endlessly repeated in the media.

The University of California’s official admission numbers on this fall’s freshman class show 675 fewer non-Asian minority students spread over the eight campuses, so the new freshmen admissions are 15.4 percent non-Asian minority, compared with 17.6 percent for the 1997 freshman class, a decline of 2.2 percent.

The drop may be even smaller, since the university does not know the ethnicity of the huge number of admitted freshmen (6,346) who declined to list their ethnicity on application forms this year. Non-checkers tripled this year to 14.3 percent of freshman admissions, partly, at least, because the new application form put the ethnicity box in an obscure place and made filling it out more difficult.

All these numbers must be treated with caution. But a decline of black and Hispanic freshman enrollment in the two percent range is smaller than many expected. What the early reports treated as a mass exclusion of "underrepresented" students is actually a shift within the system: Many students who had been pushed onto a faster track than they were ready for (Berkeley and UCLA) will now attend less prestigious but good schools within the university system. In fact, the drive to raise minority numbers at the top two campuses had the effect of creating racial imbalances at the other six. Judson King, provost of the University of California, acknowledged this by saying that the end of preferences was the "evening out" of diversity in the university system.

The fast-track problem becomes clear in the dropout rates. At Berkeley, the most selective public university in the country, the dropout rate for black students is 42 percent, more than double the 16 percent dropout rate for whites. This is an appalling statistic, and the most obvious way to interpret it is to conclude that diversity lobbyists cared far more about numbers than about graduation rates or actual learning.

Stephan and Abigail Therstrom, authors of America in Black and White, argue that the percentage of black and Hispanic students at the elite schools will fall in the short run, but the percentage who earn degrees somewhere in the system rise quickly. Remember, too, that California has a three-tiered system, with the UCal campuses on top, then the Cal State colleges and the community colleges, all allowing upward mobility through transfers. You don’t have to start out at UCLA to end up with a UCLA degree.

Though there is no real shortage of hysterical commentary about the end of preferences, few people have bothered to talk about the strong positive aspects. For one thing, a great burden has been lifted from the shoulders of black and Hispanic students at the University of California: Nobody can patronize or stigmatize them as unfit for their campuses. From now on, all students in the system make it solely on brains and effort, and everybody knows it.

The end of preferences will help make the campuses far more open and honest places. The deep secrecy that surrounds the campus culture of racial preferences has compromised many officials and led to much deceit and outright lawbreaking. Martin Trow, a Berkeley professor, spoke at a recent academic convention about all the cover-ups and lying that preferences have spawned, citing as one minor example an Iranian student at Berkeley who said he had been encouraged to list himself as Hispanic to qualify for a preference. No wonder that columnist William Raspberry says that the defenders of affirmative action preferences have lost the moral high ground.

Those defenders have been determined not to notice the disastrous effects of racially polarizing policies instilled without democratic input or honest debate. Whatever legitimacy the policies once had is gone. Soon the racial preferences will be gone, too.