Thursday, January 22, 1998
Community Briefs
UCs keep growing, new numbers show
The enrollment figures for Fall 1997 are in, and the University
of California just keeps getting bigger.
The UCs enrolled 169,862 students this fall, the largest number
ever. That was 3,144 more than last fall, which was itself an
enrollment record. This is the third consecutive year that
enrollment has grown at the UCs.
Of that total, 129,257 were undergraduates, an increase of 2
percent over fall 1996. Graduate students increased by 1
percent.
UCLA actually went against this trend: enrollment fell, from
35,594 to 35,558. Of the nine campuses, UCLA and two others showed
slight decreases in enrollment.
The UCs showed a slight decrease in the number of students who
were members of underrepresented minority groups. The total number
of minority students fell from 28,522 last year to 28,185 this
year.
Underrepresented students make up 16.5 of the UC population, as
compared to 17.1 last fall. Although affirmative action, which
benefits minority students, has not yet been applied to
undergraduate enrollment, it has already been implemented for
graduate students.
Overall, the percentage of underrrepresented students fell,
while the percentage of non-underrrepresented students rose.
The number of Asian American students increased by 3 percent,
white students by 1 percent, and East Indians and Pakistanis by 1
percent. The number of African American studenst fll by 2 percent,
Chicano/Latino students by 0.9 percent, and American Indians by 1
percent.
And more students than ever declined to name their race or
ethnicity, five percent less than last year.
Candlelight vigil to honor hate crime victim
A candlenight vigil will be held Wednesday night to remember
Thien Min Ly, a UCLA alumni who was murdered by white supremacists
in 1994.
The vigil will be held after the screening of a film remembering
the UCLA alumni, titled "Letters to Thien." Thien, an Orange County
resident who had been a student leader in UCLA’s Vietnamese Student
Union, was visciously stabbed at Tustin High School while
rollerblading.
The trials of Ly’s killers concluded last fall, with a prison
sentence for one, and the death penalty for the other. Recent law
changes have stipulated that hate crimes are punishable by the
death penalty. The vigil to commemorate his detah is sponsoored by
VSU.
The film starts at 7 pm, lasts 55 minutes, and will be shown in
Moore 100. For more information and teh story behind the film, see
the Arts and Entertainment section today.
Two-alarm fire breaks out in Berkeley dorm
An unattended candle on the eighth floor of UC Berkeley’s Cheney
Hall kindled a two-alarm fire last night that forced 200 students
to evacuate the building.
The blaze and water from the sprinklers that quenched it caused
an estimate $15,000 in damages. At the time of the fire, students
could find no resident assistant in the building, even though one
was supposed to be on duty.
Residents were displaced for an hour and a half but were
eventually able to return to their rooms.
The fire started shortly after 8 p.m. inside room 806, while
residents Jonathon Peterson, a freshman, and Alex Brandmeyer, a
junior, ate pizza slices at Blondie’s. Witnesses said they became
aware of the blaze when the floor’s fire alarm went off and they
ran into the hall to see black wisps of smoke seeping from the
spaces above and underneath the door to 806.
"We had just finished watching ‘The Simpsons’ when we heard the
fire alarm go off in 806," said freshman Ryan Gomes, an eighth
floor resident.
"We were considering kicking and breaking the door down," said
eighth floor resident James Peetz. "Finally, I took the fire
extinguisher and told someone to look for an RA."
Compiled from Daily Bruin wire and staff reports