UCLA to Probe Racial Melee Over Campus Election

UCLA officials said Friday that they will investigate Thursday’s melee over the disqualification of a Latino candidate for student body president, as the university community searched for reasons for the latest and most serious outbreak of racial violence on the campus in years.

Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Winston Doby said Friday that the investigation may result in disciplinary action against some participants in the fracas, which involved more than 200 students and brought a controversial election to an abrupt end.

The Undergraduate Students Assn. Council, the main governing body for lower-division students, scheduled a new election for Thursday and said polling areas will be heavily guarded by campus police.

Administrators, professors and students interviewed Friday said racial tension on the Westwood campus has been mounting over the last few years. Some said it is the result, ironically, of the university’s success in increasing minority enrollment.

Nearly 44% of UCLA’s more than 23,000 undergraduates are black, Latino or Asian--the highest level of minority enrollment in the university’s history, Doby said.

“One might argue that our increased tension is an indication of our success” in bringing more minorities to the university, Doby said. “When those proportions increase, other proportions have to go down. It is a zero sum game, and that is the challenge of the change we are dealing with here.”

The tension is aggravated by the increasing demand for admission to the Los Angeles campus, which, like other UC schools, has been so inundated with applications that it has had to turn away students with perfect grade-point averages, he added.

Thursday’s violence erupted after a heated rally on campus at Meyerhoff Park, during which minority student leaders, including Lloyd Monserratt, the disqualified candidate, accused the administration and other student leaders of racism. After the rally, more than 200 students stormed polling areas. Witnesses said fistfights broke out as voting booths were overturned and ballot boxes grabbed.

Monserratt had won a primary election three weeks ago but was disqualified by the Undergraduate Student Assn. Council because it was found that he lacked sufficient college credits. Monserratt blamed the university for failing to record the credits from an independent study class he took last year. University spokeswoman Darlene Skeels said it was against university policy to grant credits retroactively.

Other professors and students criticized the administration Friday for not doing more to dispel stereotypes and improve communications among whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians.

“We need to do a much better job of communicating to students about admissions policies,” said Prof. Raymund Paredes, who teaches Chicano literature and chairs an 18-member campuswide committee on promoting racial harmony. He said something has to be done to correct the widely held, but erroneous notion that most minority students are admitted under lax affirmative-action guidelines.

“The overwhelming majority of minority students are regular admits, and a lot of white students on campus don’t know that.”

Minority students interviewed Friday offered a litany of complaints to explain the outbreak of violence, including incidents of alleged racist practices in various college departments, dissatisfaction with university hiring and retention of minority faculty and the low graduation rates of black and Latino students.

Monserratt said one of the main issues behind minority students’ dissatisfaction has been university policy regarding an academic support program for minority students who need extra help to build up their writing skills. Many black and Latino students are not receiving the support they need to graduate.