Diversity and Its Discontents: The End of Affirmative Action at Boalt Hall

Abstract

In 1995, the Regents of the University of California abolished the use of racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in admissions. The following year, the state's voters cemented the Regents' decision by constitutionalizing the ban on preferences. In response, Boalt Hall did away with its affirmative action program. The impact was immediate and dramatic. In 1997, the entering class included only one Black student and fourteen Latino students. Although these numbers increased somewhat in succeeding admissions cycles, the representation of Black and Latino students remains substantially below what it was when affirmative action was permissible. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell justified affirmative action programs on the basis of the pedagogical benefits that a diverse student body brings. The sudden shift in Boalt's admissions policy provided an unprecedented opportunity to guage the impact of diversity on legal education. In the spring of 1998, fifty-nine Boalt students participated in hour-long interviews that explored their reasons for coming to law school, their classroom experience, their relations with faculty, their participation in study groups and extracurricular activities, their friendships, and their views on admissions policy. The results reveal that even with affirmative action, hierarchical instruction and competition for grades and other credentials have made it difficult to realize Powell's vision of a diverse pedagogy, at least in the first year of law school. When students draw on their identity and perspective, they sometimes are limited to the margins of the educational process, for example, in student-sponsored organizations and activities. Racial and ethnic organizations have been blamed for balkanizing the student body. As affirmative action draws to a close, however, students recognize that Black students in particular may become tokenized and that Whites and Asian Americans may form separate cliques. As a result, Boalt will not necessarily reap the benefits of colorblindness that the end of affirmative action was supposed to achieve.