As soon as Ward Connerly entered the hearing room in California's state Capitol one evening last month, a young black man rushed up and grabbed his hand. But this was no friendly welcome. "Mr. Connerly, you're a traitor," the man said angrily, gripping hard and not letting go. "You're an embarrassment to your race."
Connerly wrenched free and told the man to "have a nice day." For the courtly black businessman who led California's campaign to end race- and gender-based affirmative-action policies--first at the University of California, where he is on the board of regents, then throughout state and local government and education, with the 1996 ballot initiative known as Proposition 209--such epithets are commonplace. But the young man in the Capitol was especially upset because the initial consequences of the university's new race-neutral policy were just being felt. In the first year without affirmative action at U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, black admissions has dropped 81%, Hispanic admissions 50%. UCLA's law school reports a similar decline.
While many Americans recoil from the idea of a return to monochromatic college campuses, Connerly does not. "We have used racial preferences to prop up a system of artificial diversity," he says, "instead of doing the heavy lifting that leads to real equality." He sees some good news in the bad. Though California's new policy doesn't take effect for undergraduates until next spring, minority applications to elite universities such as Berkeley and UCLA are already dropping--while black enrollment is up at second-tier campuses like San Diego and Riverside. This suggests that the new policy won't shut minorities out of the system so much as bump them down to less prestigious schools in a "cascade effect" that will leave only the most competitive campuses overwhelmingly white and Asian. Connerly calls this a "self-correcting policy" that sends black undergraduates to colleges where they can best compete. But his point has been lost in the angry din being raised around the country. "We're seeing a radical revival of apartheid," thundered Jesse Jackson, who is working hard to fuel a backlash against Connerly's crusade, a backlash that is also being encouraged by Bill Clinton.
"It's not a good thing if we resegregate higher education," the President told TIME. So Clinton chose a commencement ceremony at U.C. San Diego last Saturday to deliver to the nation his much hyped address on racial reconciliation. In the days before the speech, Connerly launched a pre-emptive media campaign: a new poll showing strong public support for ending race- and gender-based preferences, and a radio spot, broadcast in San Diego, Washington and two other cities, in which Connerly asks Clinton to promise that "government will stop using race to decide who gets a job or who gets into school." But last weekend in San Diego, Clinton warned that plummeting minority enrollments at state schools would "leave it to the private universities to do the public's work." Afterward, when reporters needed a pithy quote from the other side, Connerly was available. As a U.C. regent, he had been sitting on the dais with Clinton. Then Connerly jumped into a plane and flew to Washington to debate Jackson on Meet the Press. "There's nothing like an attack by the President," Connerly says, "to help you get your message out."