SCARCE Student Coalition Against Racist and Classist Education and AALANAA African American Latino Asian and Native American student groups march on Whitmore Administration Building at UMass Amherst, 2/27/01. Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Javier Cevallos reads the Picketing Code. Black and Latino enrollment in higher education has declined at UMass as a result of the dismantling of Affirmative Action, in a struggle that saw the takeover of the Goodell Building in a week-long occupation. Labor and student struggles have rocked UMass as administrators and state legislators have delivered cuts in services, hikes in fees, a failure to replace faculty, and a wholesale gutting of the mission of the public university to the corporate gods of private profit.
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Reviewer:skamunist - - March 28, 2005 Subject: Defend Affirmative Action Mission of the UMass Anti-Racism Coalition: To organize and educate students and the community about racism and its negative, disruptive, and devastating impact on society and the world. Originally called the Chris Hani Anti-Racism Coalition, in honor of Comrade Chris Hani who spoke here at UMass in 1991, two years before he was slain by an assassin's bullet in South Africa for his just fight against apartheid, the ARC seeks to continue Comrade Hani's work by working for a just, non-racial, society where divisions by race and class are eliminated.
The elimination of affirmative action leads to resegregation.
After the Hopwood decision overturned affirmative action at the University of Texas (UT), the number of black students at the UT Law School dropped from 65 in 1996 to 11 in 1997. Only 4 black students enrolledin a first-year class of more than 400. At the University of Texas Law School, Latino/a student enrollment has been cut in half since affirmative action programs were outlawed in 1995. When the ban on affirmative action was implemented at the University of California (UC)-Berkeley law school, the number of black students admitted dropped from 75 in 1996 to 14 (out of 792 applicants) in 1997; none enrolled. In its first year without affirmative action, the UC-San Diego School of Medicine did not admit a single black applicant, of the 196 who applied. UC-Berkeley admitted 61% fewer minorities in 1998the year the state first implemented its ban on affirmative action at the undergraduate level. 800 black and other minority students with grade point averages of 4.0 and SAT scores of at least 1200 were denied admission to the 1998 freshman class.