Pushing the legal limits

Dean Edley, Chancellor Birgenau plan to take on Prop 209

By Andrew R Quinio
From the April 2005 Print Edition

The use of race-based admissions preferences, a type of affirmative action, was a major topic of discussion at the UC Berkeley Diversity Forum held on March 3.

“We are a great university in a state that has made a terrible mistake,” keynote speaker Boalt Law School Dean Christopher Edley Jr. said about the 1996 Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences in state and public entities. Edley sought a thorough study of Proposition 209 in order to determine how the university could “push the envelope of Prop. 209 compliance.” He continued, “I’ve been warned that there is a lot of identity politics on campus. It won’t be the end of the world that a few people get offended, provided we focus on being inclusive.”

The UC Berkeley Diversity Forum, which hosted students, faculty, and experts on “diversity,” revealed plans by Edley and others in the UC administration to legally circumvent Proposition 209. Each of the main speakers expressed his dismay with the voter-backed measure that eliminated state-sponsored racial profiling in California’s public universities. Participants contributed their thoughts and ideas about how to expand diversity, and heard a panel of speakers who were experts in ethnicity, equality, and racial issues.

The forum was assembled because of a recommendation from the Academic Senate’s Diversity Project Coordinating Committee, which was created in the spring of 2003 to develop a set of proposals on how diversity could be achieved. The forum featured the keynote address by Edley, who worked previously as the national issues director for Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign, and later served as a special counsel to President Bill Clinton, directing a White House review of affirmative action. He is the co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, a think tank focusing on racial justice.

Accompanying his speech with a PowerPoint slide presentation, Edley revealed his plans to introduce to Berkeley a project similar to the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Race-based preferences for academic admissions were not excluded from this project. He declared, “Diversity — or, as I prefer to all it, ‘inclusivity’ — is a critical component of excellence.” Edley elaborated, “Race is harder than rocket science.”

Edley listed several reasons that diversity has been hindered in California, opining, “fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, we still can’t get it right.” He cited the obstacles of bureaucracy and added that the policies of Reagan and the era of McCarthyism “had enormous repercussions.” He also cited the “regulatory trauma of the No Child Left Behind Act,” which has allegedly damaged diversity.

Edley shared with the audience several titles that the new diversity institute could bear. He proffered, “The Berkeley Civil Rights Institute,” “Institute for Race, Ethnicity, and Policy,” and more facetiously, “Colored Folks and Their Friends.” The last title received uproarious laughter from the audience.

Edley then proposed the California Diversity Initiative, a piece of public policy that would address racial justice. The initiative would be researched and created by the impending Berkeley Civil Rights Institute. The Institute would also look at the “unequal treatment of citizens within the health care system, immigration-policy reform, measurements of discrimination, and environmental justice.”

Academic Senate Chair Robert Knapp followed up with his remarks. On the causes of the lack of diversity, he proclaimed, “we have met the enemy and the enemy is us.” Knapp continued with optimism saying, “The diversity project offers hope.”

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau gave the closing remarks. He mentioned that many of his colleagues liken his position to a chief executive officer or CEO. Birgeneau said, “I would prefer that CEO stood for Chief Equality Officer.” He too expressed his disappointment in Proposition 209, and also sought ways to work around it. “We need to test the legal limits, to find what is and isn’t possible under 209 … we must be prepared to get our hands slapped.” The chancellor ended with the message that diversity, or “inclusion,” was a “fight for our souls.”

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