“I said, ‘Norm, what an outrage. We need to do something about it,’” says Taylor, an active UCLA alumnus and former CFO of the University of California system. “Norm said, ‘You’re right. I’m going to start a task force and you can chair it.’”
While the seeds of that task force’s efforts continue to bear fruit, UCLA officials say, its two-year run officially ended in 2008.
During its tenure, the group had been razor-focused, says Taylor, on ensuring that not only Black students were admitted to UCLA but that they also graduated. The task force formed a continuing group of Black alumni donors that has raised millions of dollars.
“At the time, two-thirds of students’ [personal] essays didn’t get read,” says Taylor, now head of the Educational Credit Management Corporation Foundation, a philanthropy funding assorted efforts, including at UCLA, to prepare students from underresourced communities and schools for college. “We changed that practice,” he adds, “and helped created a more holistic approach that was fairer to all students — not just African-Americans.”
That former task force’s achievements — and subsequent collaborative efforts with UCLA itself and a racial array of UCLA alumni — have come despite the constraints of California’s Proposition 209. Passed in 1996, that landmark state law banned race-based college admissions and race-based allocations of scholarships and other student financial aid; UCLA’s then declining number of students of color — and, by extension, decreasing diversity tallies at other California colleges — has been linked, at least partly, to 209.
Historical pushback
