SACRAMENTO, Calif. ― Bowing to pressure from within their party, Democrats in the legislature on Monday abandoned an attempt to repeal California’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action in the state’s higher education system.
Assembly Speaker John Perez said he does not have enough support to place the constitutional amendment before voters in November. Instead, he said lawmakers will form a task force to study the issue of access to higher education.
California voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996, banning the use of race and ethnicity in public university admissions, state hiring and contracting. The amendment, SCA5, was initiated to address the drop-off in Black and Latino college admissions, primarily in the University of California system. The fall in enrollment was especially pronounced in California’s most competitive public schools, UC Berkeley and UCLA.
Sen. Ed Hernandez, the amendment’s author, asked Perez to spike the effort until there was broader debate. It drew loud opposition from Republicans and Asians, whose enrollment in the UC system has been more than double their share of California’s total population since the ban on racial preferences took effect.
“There’s a lot of misinformation, so I’m going to slow it down to make sure that everybody, every concern is heard,” Hernandez told reporters, saying that groups falsely claimed his measure would lead to racial quotas.
Hernandez, D-Covina, stands by his proposal to allow schools to consider race and ethnicity and says experts will back him up.
“Stanford, USC, Harvard, Yale ― they are actively recruiting the best and brightest minority students and diversifying their campuses, but yet it’s a bad thing when we talk about it at the University of California or CSU?” Hernandez said.
