Affirmative action ballot measure fails, but these students are still fighting to diversify their universities

Nona Claypool, a third year student at UC Berkeley and transfer student coordinator, at Mosswood Park in Oakland on Oct. 28, 2020. Claypool, who focuses her work on recruiting Native American transfer students from community colleges, says tt is often the students who would benefit most from higher education who are unable to access it.

Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters In summary Proposition 16 failed, but students at public colleges and universities in California have been trying to increase minority representation at their campuses for years and will continue their efforts. When Ayo Banjo arrived at the University of California, Santa Cruz for his freshman year, he was surprised to find that only a small fraction, about 4%, of the campus population was Black. I

t was “stressful,” he recalls, to not see other people who looked like him on campus. “Where’s the outreach?” Banjo, now a senior, remembers asking himself. “We’re supposed to be this diverse campus…but as a Black student, I didn’t feel that representation.” So Banjo got to work creating the community he was searching for. He started an NAACP chapter on campus and ran for student body president, becoming the first Black man to be […]

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