In the fiery debate that took place over Proposition 209 in the months leading up to November 5, 1996, the sides were clearly drawn: the pro-affirmative action camp vociferously opposed the conservative-championed measure, while the bill's proponents shouted its praises equally loudly.
A year and a half after the measure's passage, some of Prop 209's strongest supporters are wondering if eliminating racial preferences was the right thing to do. Today, the water of racial preferences appears far murkier than affirmative action foes would have either hoped for or predicted on November 6, 1996.
Two main issues are giving Californians pause over state prohibitions against race-based preference policies in the public higher education system, public employment and public contracting. First, and most prominently, the recently released numbers of under-represented minorities admitted to University of California undergraduate institutions are fairly striking, regardless of ideological bent.
The percentage of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans admitted to Berkeley fell from 23.1 percent of admitted freshman to 10.4, with blacks' admittance declining 57 percent. At UCLA, black admission numbers dropped 43 percent, with the share of the three minorities combined dropping from 19.9 percent to 12.7 percent.
The numbers, of course, are alarming liberals and have elicited renewed protests against Prop 209. For many of the bill's original supporters, however, the numbers simply confirm their fears that race always played too large a role in California college admissions.
But what does have some conservatives giving the new policies a second look is a largely unforeseen by-product. It seems that commitment to diversity in the California public school system is so entrenched that administrators are willing to lower admission and educational standards to limit the loss of minorities.
For the sake of opening doors to minorities and based on the premise that minorities have typically lower L.S.A.T. scores, admissions officers at the University of California-Berkeley law school, Boalt Hall, are considering eliminating the L.S.A.T. as a criterion for admittance, even though a task force admits the test is an accurate predictor of first-year grades.
Moreover, Boalt faculty voted to stop weighing undergraduate grade-point averages with respect to the quality of the undergraduate institution, thereby making a 3.8 from Dartmouth equivalent to a 3.8 from the University of New Hampshire in the admissions process -- apparently hoping to attract students from less prestigious and less costly institutions that bear the disproportionate weight of minority undergraduate education. California university wits, it seems, are willing to sacrifice educational standards for diversity -- on a scale apparently unimagined by Prop. 209's originators.
"What I didn't realize," says Boalt Hall acting-professor and longtime affirmative action opponent John Yoo in The New Yorker, "was how entrenched the desire to have racial diversity for its own sake was in the university system and how much pressure was going to be asserted to preserve that goal."
In short, the meritocracy that 209 supporters envisioned is far from the reality. Currently, both standards and diversity are suffering -- a system in which all applicants lose. Those admitted get less diversity and lower standards; those not admitted get nothing but a thin envelope with a warm condolence letter.
What's more, the falling standards as a result of Prop. 209 are apparently not limited to the educational arena, either. They exhibit themselves in such day-to-day details as firefighting and policing. In the San Francisco Fire Department, headed by African-American Robert L. Demmons, a move is afoot to de-emphasize merit-based, standardized written exams which have traditionally favored whites.
Demmons' commitment to diversity has already angered some firefighters who claim that public health is jeopardized when fuzzy criterion for employment such as "interest in firefighting and commitment to the department" are used in lieu of standardized tests.
But as City Attorney Louise Renne told the San Francisco Chronicle in defense of Fire Department hiring practices: "With or without 209, the city is committed to making sure the department reflects the diversity of the city, and we will be doing the right thing." Translation: we'll circumvent 209 however we can.
So now there are far more people questioning the utility of Proposition 209 than ever before. And rightly so. California's public institutions are so committed to diversity that they are willing to find and exploit every loophole in the racial preferences laws and wildly disregard the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.
Not only that, but the number of minorities admitted to state schools is plummeting anyway, which will likely only serve to strengthen the resolve of the 209 rebels. The fate of Proposition 209 is certainly a telling testament to the indominability of affirmative action in our age. Chalk one up for tough lessons learned.
