BERKELEY, Calif. - Michigan has a question for California: Was it a good idea to prohibit, as your voters did in 1996, the use of race- and gender-based affirmative action by public schools and government agencies for hiring, contracting and admissions decisions?
Ten years ago, the issue raged in California just as it does now in Michigan in the run-up to the Nov. 7 election and a vote on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, or MCRI.
Like backers of the MCRI, proponents of the nearly identical California Civil Rights Initiative, known as Proposition 209, promised a pathway to a colorblind society. Its opponents forecast an end to opportunity for women and minorities.
A decade later, some results are tangible: fewer African Americans at elite state universities and an apparent reduction in cost for road contracts awarded without consideration of race and gender.
But would California do it again?
"In a heartbeat," said Ward Connerly, the former University of California regent who led the campaign to pass 209. Connerly is also a principal organizer of the MCRI campaign.
Even opponents agree that Californians aren't ready to repeal the proposition.
But Eva Paterson, who heads a coalition dedicated to doing away with 209, said she thinks that California voters someday will realize their mistake.
"There are fewer opportunities for minorities and women," Paterson said. "California is worse off."
Hard evidence about the effect of 209 is fragmentary and hard to interpret.
After its enactment, black and Hispanic enrollment declined sharply at the University of California system's elite schools - Berkeley and UCLA.
At UCLA, this fall's freshman class includes just 96 African Americans (about 2 percent) - a 30-year low. Other reports have documented drops in minority and female faculty on some campuses and suggested a decline in the number of government contracts awarded to minority- and female-owned businesses.
But other research shows that overall minority enrollment at the elite schools has stabilized at lower levels, that overall minority enrollment is at or above pre-209 levels and that system-wide, California was among the national leaders in degrees awarded to nonwhite students.
Still, African Americans, 6 percent of California's population, did not keep pace with the increases in the attainment of college degrees by white, Asian or Hispanic Californians during the last 10 years.
On a broader scale, many of the traditional measures of progress - income, educational attainment, poverty rates - show that progress for California's minorities and women has outpaced that of whites and men during the last decade.
According to data from the California Demographic Research Unit:
The median income for women rose slightly more than that for men between 1995 and 2003. The growth in median household income for blacks, Hispanics and Asians between 1995 and 2004 was significantly higher than it was for whites.
Poverty rates fell sharply for blacks, Hispanics and Asians while rising for whites between 1996 and 2004.
Hans Johnson, an economist at the Public Policy Institute of California, urged caution in linking the passage of 209 to those changes. The ban applied only to public schools and government agencies, Johnson said. In the larger, private California economy, affirmative action remains common - as it would in Michigan if the MCRI were adopted.
Deborah Reed, another researcher and a former associate professor at the University of Michigan, said economic trends for all groups in California were positive in the post-209 decade.
"Right now, the research on 209 is too scant to tell us if it was bad or good," Reed said.
Justin Marion, a professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said he is reasonably confident that 209 has saved taxpayers money on road building.
Marion analyzed spending after 1996, when state and local road projects no longer required that a portion of all contracts be set aside for businesses owned by minorities and women. Since federal projects were still subject to set-asides, it was possible to test the effect on cost.
He found that removing race and gender preferences cut contract costs 3.7 percent to 6 percent.
Supporters of affirmative action argue that the premium for taxpayers is small and offset by greater opportunities for historically disadvantaged people. But measuring the effectiveness of affirmative-action programs and the impact of ending them has been tough.
The Discrimination Research Center, an affirmative-action advocacy organization founded in Berkeley in 1998, found fewer women in construction trades and attributed that to 209. But the authors cited shortcomings in data and acknowledged that even post-209 "women are better represented in the construction industry in California than nationally."
On the other hand, the race and gender composition of the California state government workforce has changed little.
Whites and African Americans, both shrinking portions of the population, are also a declining portion of the state workforce; Hispanics and Asians, both increasing, occupy a larger share.
Connerly said the measure of 209's success is in the way individuals are treated.
"The vision should be, 'Did you have a fair and equal chance to compete?'"
More important, he said, is that 209's biggest impact was cultural.
"The weight of the law was no longer in favor of using preferences. That is an attitudinal change that may take decades to be absorbed. But it's in the fabric of everyday life now."
