Frank Riggs: “Mr. Chairman, I just again want to, for the benefit of all my colleagues, put matters in perspective in terms of what is…”

“Mr. Chairman, I just again want to, for the benefit of all my colleagues, put matters in perspective in terms of what is taking place in the University of California system. The latest systemwide data released by the University of California shows that this fall's freshman class will contain 675 fewer non-Asian minority students spread over the entire eight campuses. So the new freshman admissions are 15.4 percent non-Asian minority, interesting that they actually exclude Asians from the minority classification, compared with 17.6 percent for the 1997 freshman class. That is a decline of 2.2 percentage points. The drop may be even smaller since the university does not know the ethnicity of the huge number of admitted students, 6,346, who declined to list their ethnicity on application forms this year. So I want to suggest to my colleagues we have to treat these numbers that people are throwing around with a little bit of caution. The decline of black and Hispanic freshman enrollment in the 2 percent range is a lot smaller than many people predicted, a lot smaller, of course, than those who are quite up in arms, even hysterical over the passage and implementation of Proposition 209.”