UC System, Business Groups to Explore Ways to Improve Campus Diversity

SACRAMENTO, Calif.
The University of California and an organization that promotes minority participation in economic and community development will spend two years looking for ways to improve campus diversity.
UC President Richard Atkinson and the Greenlining Institute of San Francisco recently announced a two-year pilot partnership.
Atkinson says the initiative will explore how to find and keep more minorities for undergraduate and professional education, for faculty and staff, for contracts and at the Merced campus set to open in 2005.
"How our society will take shape over the next few decades depends on how we start thinking about access today," Atkinson says.
Under the new partnership, the university system and the institute will form four committees to study outreach and retention ideas.
"California's 17 million minorities believe far more must be done to ensure equal educational opportunity for all," says John Gamboa, executive director of the institute, which includes 35 minority and low-income  civil rights, business and community organizations.
UC has been seeking ways to bring more minority students and staff to its nine current campuses since its Board of Regents and California voters dismantled most affirmative action programs.
University officials announced in January that a record number of minorities applied to the system in the first year of a new program guaranteeing eligibility to students in the top 4 percent of each high school graduating class (see related story, pg. 12).
Last fall, Atkinson proposed a program that would expand that eligibility to the top 12.5 percent at each high school, but would send the additional 8.5 percent first to a community college for two years.