Regent Ward Connerly received no support for his proposal to
amend the undergraduate admissions application for the University
of California at the UC Board of Regents meeting on Wednesday.
The proposal would have added a check-box to the personal
section of the application that would allow students to designate
their identity as “multi-racial.”
Students came out to protest the check-box amendment, and many
see it as just one more reason to prevent Connerly from continuing
as a regent for a second term. Connerly’s 12-year term will
end in March and he may be up for re-appointment.
Connerly, a controversial figure who spearheaded the campaign
that banned the use of affirmative action in state agencies in the
late 1990s, presented his proposal as an addition to the UC
application that would give students another choice in how they
identify their race when applying to college.
“(It provides) additional flexibility to define the
student body the way they define themselves,” Connerly
said.
Currently, students who consider themselves part of more than
one ethnic group can check multiple boxes, but cannot specifically
define themselves as “multi-racial.”
This system is flawed, Connerly said, because the federal
government will then choose only one ethnic category to use in
their survey data, and will invariably choose the most
underrepresented category that is checked.
“This policy commands that anyone having one drop of black
blood will be classified as black,” Connerly said. “The
student is not consulted about that decision.”
Connerly said he personally, along with many other families,
have various blended ethnicities and identify themselves as
multi-racial. These people should not, he said, be restricted from
identifying themselves in this way on their application.
But students who came to the meeting from across California did
not see the multi-racial check-box as a positive or necessary
addition to the application because they say it will do a
disservice to students of mixed ethnicity.
And neither did the regents.
Not one of the 12 other regents present for the vote supported
Connerly in his proposal.
“These practices were developed after years of
study,” said UC President Robert Dynes. “I don’t
believe at this time that we should urge the federal government to
change their practices.”
Dynes opposed the proposal primarily on practical grounds,
saying a change to this section of the application may cause
problems in federal studies on the ethnic makeup of
universities.
“I’m concerned about the disruption of many years of
trend data,” he said.
The students who came to UCLA to rally against the proposal for
a check-box did so on different grounds and were vehement in their
opposition.
“We’re opposing Connerly’s latest proposal
that would obscure information and make it even more difficult to
track … what level of integration that we have,” said
Yvette Felarca, a ASUC senator at UC Berkeley.
But the high school and college students who came to the meeting
were interested in much more than opposing the check-box.
“We want (Connerly) off the regents,” said Tania
Kappner of By Any Means Necessary, a national group that fights for
what its calls the new civil rights movement, because of the
segregation they believe Connerly promotes in some of his
policies.
Students also tried to discourage the regents from appointing
him for another term.