Contempt for the California Constitution:

"Berkeley chancellor vows to increase minority enrollment" By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer

The chancellor at University of California, Berkeley, says black and Hispanic enrollment on campus is shockingly low and he doesn't think that's what voters intended when they banned affirmative action.

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, the former president of the University of Toronto who was appointed to lead Berkeley last September, stopped short of declaring war on Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure outlawing consideration of race or gender in public hiring, contracting and education.

Birgeneau owes his august position to his craven facilitating of Nancy Hopkins' conflict-of-interest laden "study" of discrimination at MIT. He quickly went from being an underling at MIT to top dog at the U. of Toronto to supremo of Berkeley on the strength of his "commitment to diversity" although it seems more like a commitment to knowing which way the wind is blowing.

However, he said campus officials will look for ways to work within the system to change the admissions picture and he hopes to keep the issue to the forefront by speaking out. Meanwhile, the campus is funding faculty positions for research on issues such as the impact of diversity on campuses and reasons for achievement gaps between different racial groups.

Do you somehow suspect that Berkeley professor Arthur Jensen, the world's leading authority on IQ, won't be asked to contribute to that research?

In 1997, the last year affirmative action was allowed at UC campuses, Berkeley enrolled 260 black students. Last fall, there were 108 out of a freshman class of more than 3,600.

Overall, the class breakdown was 3 percent black, 9.5 percent Hispanic, 0.4 percent American Indian, about 45 percent Asian-American and about 33 percent white. (The remaining 10 percent or so listed other races or declined to state race.)

So, Berkeley is less than 40% white and that's not "diverse" enough? Those damn Asians. They are just too smart and too studious for Birgeneau.

Birgeneau's contention that voters didn't bargain for the effects of Proposition 209 got a cold reception from Ward Connerly, the recently retired UC regent who fought for race-blind admissions and went on to chair the campaign for the proposition.

"Clearly the voters knew full well what the consequences would be," Connerly said Thursday. "They just concluded that at the most selective institutions of higher education in this state they did not want race to be a factor."

In a March op-ed piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Connerly said Birgeneau has "a higher level of contempt for the people than any UC official I encountered during my term as regent."

In the private world, wrote Connerly, "Birgeneau would either be fired or taken behind the woodshed for revealing such disregard for the people who pay the bills."

Looking 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.

But Birgeneau said that doesn't make the situation at Berkeley less pressing. He said he was particularly shocked to find out that no black students enrolled last fall in Berkeley's highly ranked engineering program.

So, if the problem is that no blacks at Berkeley are currently up to snuff to meet the standards of the University's rigorous engineering program, the only solution is to lower admissions standards? That's supposed to solve the problem? Does Not Compute.

All these struggles over who gets admitted as a freshman to UC are peculiarly phony because the UC has a policy of flunking out huge numbers of freshmen and sophomores and replacing them with transfers from community colleges. It makes no sense at all to have an affirmative action policy of admitting a black kid with an 1150 SAT score to Berkeley just to boost the "diversity" of the freshman class, and then flunk him out, and replace him with a community college grad with a 1050 SAT score who ends up getting a Berkeley degree instead of the smarter black. (The last two years at Berkeley are easier than the first two years.) The whole controversy over freshman admissions is nuts.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer