Diversity-mongers in the University of California system are retreating in some disarray from their long-hold position of secrecy. The retreat leaves open for public inspection the sorry record of how far the ideal of equal opportunity has been perverted, and makes this week's move by Gov. Pete Wilson toward ending state-sanctioned racism seem inevitable.
Administrators are trying to put a positive spin on their enforced disclosures. Chancellor Charles E. Young of UCLA says he's now in favor of candor about race-based admissions policies.
"We won't convince everyone we're right," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education (April 28), "but some may say, 'What they're doing isn't as bad as we thought.' "
In his dreams.
Under pressure from UC regents, who are expected to consider affirmative action policies when they meet June 15-16, the system has recently released data about admissions and graduation rates broken out by race. That information has been a closely guarded secret for years. Rae Lee Siporin, director of undergraduate admissions at UCLA, refused to give me the statistics when I interviewed her for a column a couple of years ago.
"It would be divisive," she said then.
She's probably right about that.
UCLA uses a three-tier admissions system. For the fall of 1994, the top tier, chosen strictly on the basis of grades and test scores, had an average GPA of 4.17 and consisted of 3,261 Asian-Americans, 2,725 whites, 321 Hispanics and 77 blacks.
The second tier included 1,600 applicants who are close to the cutoff for the top group, with an average GPA of 3.86, and satisfy some additional criterion, such as being non-white or low-income. But it's mostly the former, because only 76 in this group are white.
"We get over 8,000 applicants with a 4.0 G.P.A." Siporin told the Chronicle. "I don't think we can afford to accept only students who have a 4.0."
So the third tier reaches down even further, picking up another 352 black students with an average GPA of 3.34, which is barely above the official 3.3 minimum for admission. 
Socially and educationally, that's an impossible situation. Students may not have known the exact percentages, and the mix of students who attend is different from the group admitted. Still, it must be painfully apparent in the classroom that 95 percent of the whites were chosen for their grades, and 88 percent of the blacks were chosen for their skin color. 
Under circumstances like this, universities' claim that they aren't setting lower standards for some minorities is simply absurd. It may be true that nearly all the students they accept are "UC eligible," which at the moment means they are in the top 20 percent of California high school graduates, but that group spans a wide range of abilities. The results are apparent on Commencement Day, too. The graduation rate for blacks at UCLA is only 52 percent.
If you're looking for victims of this policy, that's where to look. Don't waste too much sympathy on the students who might have been admitted to UCLA in the absence of race-conscious admissions policy. They may have been treated unfairly, but life isn't fair, and most of them got over their disappointment and just went to college somewhere else.
The ones who suffer are the ones who flunk out, or who manage to stay in by switching to easier majors and still graduate with such low grades that they can't get into law school or med school without another helping of racial condescension.
They are "college material" by anyone's standards, they're in enormous demand, and yet their futures are being sacrificed to make administrators at UCLA and other schools look good.
Berkeley, too, has recently come clean about its race-based admissions policies. A report in CrossTalk, published by the California Higher Education Policy Center in San Jose, gives the mean Scholastic Assessment Test scores for students entering in 1994 as 1293 for Asians, 1256 for whites, 1032 for Latinos and 994 for blacks. Such a vast gap is almost insurmountable.
"We select from a pool of highly qualified students," said Patrick Hayashi, associate vice chancellor for admissions and enrollment. "We can expect 1,000 UC-eligible African Americans this year from California high schools. We expect 500 of them to apply here, competing against 22,000 other students. Absent racial preferences, it is hard to maintain a significant number of them."
Berkeley fills half its spaces on academic criteria alone, according to Bob Laird, the director of undergraduate admissions, and if it didn't use a variety of "social diversity" criteria, the percentage of black and Latino students admitted could drop to less than 5 percent.
"If I were an African-American student, why would I want to go to Berkeley and be one of 60 students in my class — and eventually, one of 240 in the whole school?" he asked.
I don't lightly characterize views as "racist," because the term is so casually thrown about as to have lost most of its meaning, but I think that statement qualifies. Most people want to go to Berkeley because it has a world-famous faculty, an outstanding student body and a lot of prestige. Laird seems to assume that the principal concern of African American students is whether they have someone to hang with.
If I were one of Laird's hypothetical 60 African Americans, I would want to go to Berkeley because I knew I had earned my place there; because I knew I would be accepted as an equal; because everyone I met for the rest of my life would know my Berkeley degree was as solid-gold as anybody else's.
The misguided condescension of affirmative action is turning the solid gold of minority achievement into tawdry glitter.