BACK TO THE FUTURE

By S.C. Gwynne/Austin

Anyone curious to know what America's universities might look like in the absence of affirmative action got a chilling glimpse of the future last week in California and Texas. The best law schools in both states--recently ordered not to consider the race of their applicants--said the number of blacks and Hispanics enrolling for next year had fallen to levels not seen in decades. At the University of Texas, which has produced more minority lawyers than any other school in the country--and where, typically, 30 to 40 blacks enter each year--only 11 blacks were accepted and none had enrolled; the number of Hispanics dropped from more than 50 to 14. In California the schools at both Berkeley and UCLA saw black admissions drop 80%, while the number of Hispanic students fell 50% and 32%, respectively.

What happened at these schools was a mystery to no one. Blacks and Hispanics generally do not do as well as whites and Asian Americans on law boards or have high grade-point averages, both factors which law schools--in the absence of other criteria, such as race--give enormous weight. "We foresaw this," says Michael Sharlot, dean of the U.T. law school, adding that "one has to distinguish between a surprise and a tragedy. We warned the Texas legislature about this. It's a disaster."

In most of the U.S., the 1978 Bakke decision--forbidding racial quotas but allowing schools to use race as a factor in admissions--remains the law of the land. Most schools see real value in maintaining a racially diverse student body. But Texas and California, for different reasons, find themselves on the leading edge of a movement to roll back even such nonquota efforts at affirmative action. The entire Texas university system was forced to change its policies when the Supreme Court let stand an appeals court's 1996 ruling in favor of four white students who sued U.T. law school for racial discrimination. This has caused significant drops in undergraduate minority admissions at U.T. and Texas A&M, the leading schools in the state system, and may result in an even greater drop-off in enrollment, since financial aid must also now be color-blind. In California's case, the impetus for revising its university admissions policies is Proposition 209, the successful 1996 ballot initiative. The changes implemented by the law schools this year won't apply to undergraduates until 1998.

Critics of affirmative action say the results in California and Texas bear out what they have been saying all along--that selective schools rely far too heavily on racial double standards. Some, like Abigail Thernstrom, co-author of a forthcoming book on race, used the new numbers to zero in on what she feels is the real problem: the public schools. "Our high schools graduate black and Hispanic students who are way behind whites and Asians in basic cognitive skills," she says. Admitting minorities with lower scores "lets these schools off the hook." That is why even such anti-affirmative-action crusaders as Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who led the Proposition 209 campaign, are calling for "outreach": targeted efforts to help minority high school students perform better. "I am in favor of things that will reach out to those families who have never had anyone go to the University of California or go to college," he told a TIME town meeting last week in Sacramento. The University of California is proposing such a program; it wants to spend tens of millions of dollars to mentor students in some of the state's poorest school districts.

In Texas, meanwhile, a group of minority state senators threatened to cut off funding for the University of Texas if it did not find a way to maintain minority enrollment, and the legislature just passed a bill that attempts to redress the problem by requiring state universities to automatically admit students in the top 10% of their high school classes and allowing the universities to consider "a variety of other factors" in assessing the top 15% to 25%. Some schools, such as the state-owned University of Houston law school, encourage applicants to write about their family background as a way around the requirement that the application contain no "race" box to check.

A recent study of 90,000 law-school applicants by Linda Wightman of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro illustrates both the challenge of recruiting minorities and the payoff. She found that of the 3,485 blacks accepted by law schools in 1991, just 687 would have been admitted only on the basis of board exams and grades. Yet these same minority students had graduation and bar-exam pass rates similar to whites'--and they had an incalculable value to the black community, as both professionals and role models.

--With reporting by Julie Grace/Sacramento

With reporting by JULIE GRACE/SACRAMENTO