BERKELEY, Calif.
James Marshall didn’t expect it would be easy, being one of just a handful of Black students at the University of California, Berkeley’s, high-ranking business school.

It wasn’t.

But his payoff came after graduation — job interviews with some of the country’s most prestigious firms.

“It’s about getting that set of rules: OK, this is how you engage an employer; this is how you get this job,” says Marshall.

This fall, preliminary figures put 129 new Black freshmen at Berkeley out of a class of about 4,000, slightly higher than last year, but still an extreme minority. About 11 percent of the class will be Hispanic, well out of step with a state where Hispanics make up about 30 percent of the population and are projected to be the largest ethnic group by 2011.
For Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, it’s a disturbing trend in diverse California.

“There are very talented people out there, I believe, who for a whole variety of reasons end up not coming to Berkeley, or to another of the flagship campuses in the UC system,” he says.

“Where are the leaders going to come from?” asks Christopher Edley, dean of UC Berkeley’s Boalt law school, where just nine Black students are expected in the incoming class of 268. “It’s been such a short period of time in which our universities have begun producing minority graduates in substantial numbers that to let the door swing shut now would really be a calamity of historic proportions.”

Birgeneau, who took over the top job at Berkeley last year, has been outspoken in his dismay at enrollment figures and the need to change them. He questions whether voters intended these kinds of consequences when they passed Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure banning consideration of race in public hiring, contracting and education.

But Ward Connerly, the former UC regent who chaired the Proposition 209 campaign, bristles at the idea that there’s a problem with race-blind policies.