Campus Profile

Egalitarian at the gates

Top admissions officer Richard Black wraps up a quarter-century of shaping the student body and carrying out UC Berkeley’s mandate ‘to educate students from all of California’s communities’

By Barry Bergman

Richard Black (Deborah Stalford photo)

Winter 2007 | From his second-floor Sproul Hall office, Richard Black had a bird’s-eye view of the buzzing throngs of Berkeley undergrads who stream through Sather Gate every day of the academic year.

But Black, who retired recently as associate vice chancellor for admissions and enrollment, was anything but a disinterested observer of the passing parade. During his 23 years on campus, in fact, he was instrumental in shaping the student body here, laboring not only to maintain Berkeley’s rigorous academic standards but to extend world-class educational opportunities to the full range of California’s brightest students, including those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

When Black arrived at Berkeley in 1983, he says, the enrollment services provided to undergraduates left much to be desired. “We had lines at registration and financial aid that would go down the hall and literally down the stairs,” he recalls. “And these lines would stay there until the early weeks of October before we would finally get things straightened out.”

“I knew there were a lot better ways to do what we were doing. And the satisfaction of the past 23 years has been to see that we’ve been able to do all of these things,” says Black. “When a student comes on campus now for the first day of class, the student can go to class. The student can go to the library. The student can go to the lab. The student is not going to spend [his] time here in Sproul Hall.”

Procedural problems, alas, proved easier to crack than financial ones. “A lot of people look back on the ’80s as the good old days,” when fees were “several hundred dollars” — compared with $3,900 currently for state residents — per semester. “The amount that a student has to earn or borrow to finance a Berkeley education is a major concern right now, and it was not in those days.”

In 1983, Black’s first year on campus, a student receiving financial aid could typically get by with a part-time job of 15 to 20 hours a week for a single semester each year, he says. Today, it’s common for students not only to work that much throughout the fall and spring semesters, but to supplement their income by borrowing as much as $15,000 a year.

His advice to financially strapped students: Don’t worry too much about debt, and don’t spend too many hours behind that Starbucks counter. “Some of these students, I think, are making a mistake working more than 20 hours a week so they don’t have to borrow,” he says. “I would like to tell them that when you get out of here — or when you get out of graduate school — you’re going to get a job that’s going to allow you to make the payments.”

We know who we are — and aren’t
In addition to rising fees and dwindling state support for higher education, Black’s office has faced intense scrutiny — from inside and outside the UC system — over its efforts on behalf of ethnic and economic diversity. Opponents of affirmative action delivered a body blow with the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, which bars state-funded institutions from considering race in hiring and enrollment decisions. Questions were later raised about so-called comprehensive review, an explicitly color-blind admissions process — albeit a more subjective one than those based solely on grades and test scores — that was already taking shape when Black assumed his current job.

“What comprehensive review says is that we’re going to look at the student in the context of the opportunities that the student has had, and we’re going to form an overall impression,” he explains. “I think it is absolutely the fairest way” to judge applicants for admission to Berkeley.

The numbers of admits from underrepresented groups have improved since the plunge that followed the enactment of Proposition 209. “I’m proud of the modest gains that we have made in spite of the constraints of Proposition 209,” Black says. “And I hope that at some point in the future, California will be able to implement the federal model, which says that race can be one consideration among many in an admissions decision.”

In late fall, Black's longtime colleague Susie Castillo-Robson (for 12 years the campus registrar) was named as his successor. Before her appointment was announced, Black was asked to consider what advice he'd give the new associate vice chancellor. He didn't hesitate.

“I certainly would tell that person that they are entrusted with this mandate that Berkeley has to educate students from all of California’s communities,” says Black. “We do it so well now, and we must keep doing it.

“There’s no point in trying to make Berkeley mirror an institution that charges $45,000 a year to educate its students — a Harvard, an MIT, a Stanford, and so forth,” he says. “Those schools do what they do very well, and they should continue to do that. But that’s not who we are. And I’m confident that my successor will assure that Berkeley keeps true to its purposes of educating outstanding students from all economic levels of California.”