Reverse Discrimination Seen at Berkeley Law School

IN a throwback to the Allan Bakke reverse-discrimination case, the United States Department of Education said Monday a program that set goals of 23 percent to 27 percent minority enrollment at the University of California at Berkeley's prestigious Boalt Hall School of Law amounts to a racial quota which discriminates against whites. The university denied using quotas but agreed to modify its program, starting with next year's entering class.

Boalt Hall is the first law school investigated by the Department's Office for Civil Rights.

The school compared special-admission minority candidates only to others in the same racial group and made selections from waiting lists along racial lines.

In the Bakke case, a white man successfully challenged an admissions program of the University of California at Davis medical school that was reserved for poor minorities. The Supreme Court ruled that preferential treatment of minorities to promote diversity could be justified, but strict racial quotas violated civil rights laws. -PATHNAME- /usr/local/etc/httpd/plweb/DBGROUPS/paper/database/tape/92/sep/day30/30083.