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  • At UCLA, Shifting Racial Terrain

    AT UCLA, SHIFTING RACIAL TERRAIN
    [email protected]

    Los Angeles Times
    12:02 PM PDT, September 30, 2008
    CA

    A professor recently quit the admissions board out of suspicion that
    black students were being disproportionately favored. But on campus,
    a search for reaction quickly becomes a lesson in itself.

    It's kind of hard to talk about affirmative action in college
    admissions when you have a black man from the Ivy League leading in
    the home stretch of the race for the nation's presidency.

    How much more proof of equal opportunity do we need?

    But I was alarmed last month by the stance of a UCLA political science
    professor who resigned from the school's admissions committee because
    he suspects that "cheating" on the admissions process accounts for
    the recent jump in blacks. He quit in protest after UCLA officials,
    citing privacy concerns, declined to give him access to student
    applications to test his suspicions.

    The number of black freshmen jumped from 96 students in 2006 to 235
    students this fall. That's in a freshman class of almost 5,000.

    Dwindling black admission at UCLA has been a source of hand-wringing
    for years, since the state voted to outlaw the use of race as a factor
    in admissions decisions. Now numbers are beginning to climb, thanks
    to outreach efforts and a switch to a holistic admissions process that
    considers students' life circumstances, not just GPA and SAT scores.

    I worried about the message the professor's protest would send to
    UCLA's black students. So I visited the campus Monday to find out
    how they were faring during this first week of classes.

    Did they feel isolated, unwelcome, invisible?

    I worried about not finding enough black students to talk to. What
    I didn't count on was my own confusion:

    I couldn't tell who the black students were.

    The first girl I approached looked at me blankly when I began my
    interview. Turns out she's not black, but Indian. The daughter of a
    convenience store owner, the first in her family to attend college.

    The brown-skinned guy with big sunglasses and bushy hair? Not black,
    but Armenian.

    The young man on the skateboard, wearing a polo shirt and an Afro pik
    in his hair, was black, but waved me off. He was late to political
    science class.

    Most of the black students I spoke with didn't want me to use their
    names. "It's counterproductive to complain," one freshman from Long
    Beach said. "I'm here, I'm grateful for the opportunity. I'm not
    going to get caught up in what people think."

    And I found myself pondering my own awkward position. How long do I
    hover, waiting to approach a black girl who is deep in conversation
    with a white classmate, to talk about racism and isolation?

    It made my mission seem like an irony. And I felt like a dinosaur,
    trying to use my circa-1970s orientation to interpret today's shifting
    racial terrain.

    I was looking for someone to "represent," to give voice to my own
    concerns and frustrations over black access to higher education.

    They were worried about finding Haines Hall, cramming for the
    semester's first test, making it to biology class.

    Then I spotted Steven Williams seated alone at a patio table on the
    commons near the School of Law. I figured he wasn't a freshman; not
    just by the gray in his beard but the look of detached bemusement on
    his face as he surveyed the bustling yard.

    At 43, he's not your typical UCLA student. He's a Fairfax High graduate
    with a checkered history: a series of dead-end jobs, a 10-month prison
    term for passing bad checks, unrelenting family drama.

    Four years ago, he got serious about education, enrolled in Los Angeles
    City College and resurrected his high school dream of becoming a
    Bruin. With a 3.75 GPA and a resume loaded with community service
    commitments, he transferred from City College to UCLA as a junior
    this fall -- one of 100 black students admitted as transfers.

    Does the controversy over black admissions bother him? Yes, but he's
    a generation older than most new students -- closer in age to me than
    to them. "My first thought was 'Here it is 2008 and we're still caught
    up in this '40s mindset, people trying to hold us back,' " he said.

    But like me, he got a quick reality check.

    On his first day of class, he had a set-to with a professor over
    a scheduling error. He was fuming, until he encountered a black
    administrator who noticed his distress. She talked him down and shared
    another perspective.

    "She told me it was just a difficult day for everybody. They were
    busy, frustrated . . . Not to take it personally. Because it wasn't
    about me at all.

    "I was ready to believe it was racism, but she kind of took me behind
    the scenes to look at it from another way."

    Chalk that up as the first lesson of the new semester, for the new
    student and the dinosaur.
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