The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action at the University of California

IN HIS FASCINATING memoir of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1930s sociologist Robert Nisbet describes the campus, with some exaggeration, as 99.99 percent white. I didn't know of a single American-bonl black student at Berkeley in the thirties, he recalls. Moreover, Nisbet claims, had anyone in the 1930s proposed an affirmative action policy at all like the one that prevailed until the passage of Proposition 209, it would have been rejected at just about every hand, student, and faculty irrespective of political ideology, or anything else.