Program helps students adapt, directs lives

Program helps students adapt, directs lives

By Jennifer K. Morita

Daily Bruin Staff

When the director of UCLA’s Academic Advancement Program was in
New Mexico in January, he visited an Indian pueblo in Taos. Snow
was everywhere, and he saw a Native American boy wrapped in a
blanket running across a creek.

"I remember thinking to myself what it must be like for someone
from Taos Pueblo, or a reservation, to leave their home and come to
a place like UCLA," C. Adolfo Bermeo said.

"The difference between life in a reservation and life at UCLA
is night and day."

Helping students ­ who come from vastly different
environments ­ adjust to UCLA is Bermeo’s goal as director of
the university’s Academic Advancement Program (AAP).

As the largest undergraduate affirmative action program in the
nation, AAP offers tutoring and counseling services to 6,000
historically underrepresented minority and low-income students.

But its existence is threatened by University of California
regents’ talk of a system-wide elimination of affirmative action
policies and programs.

In the recent debate over affirmative action, Bermeo is just one
of the advocates fighting to keep programs like AAP.

"Underrepresented students are coming into UCLA at a figure that
30 years ago was undreamed of," Bermeo said.

Since 1982, UCLA’s enrollment of underrepresented minority
students has increased dramatically, according to Bermeo. With a 13
percent increase in graduation, underrepresented minority students
are graduating at a rate of 65 percent, he said.

"Why would anyone want to eliminate a program that has worked
along with other departments on campus, to bring these results?"
Bermeo asked.

But some say there is no longer a need for affirmative
action.

"Since we do have the racial mix now … affirmative action
should be economically based rather than racially based," said
second-year psychology student Erin Matta. "Now there are
upper-middle-class minorities and poor white people."

To qualify for AAP services, a student must either have
underrepresented minority status, considered low-income or be the
first generation of his or her family to attend college.

"I think, at least for admissions, affirmative action should be
economically based," Matta said.

But a level playing field still doesn’t exist, Bermeo
contends.

"Graduate student admissions aren’t nearly as diverse as
undergraduate," Bermeo said.

"It’s like a pyramid," he added. "At the bottom of the structure
of the university are the undergraduate students ­ that’s the
most diverse population. When you get to graduate students it’s
(becoming more) diverse, but you’ve got a ways to go. Then you get
to faculty."

The higher up you go on this pyramid, he continued, the less
diversity exists.

AAP’s role is to retain underrepresented minorities once they
enroll at UCLA and help them graduate. The original goal of the
program has expanded to targeting students for graduate studies
through a graduate mentor program that started five years ago.

"In 1991, of all the Ph.Ds produced in the United States of
America, 3.5 percent went to African Americans, 2.9 percent went to
Latinos and .5 percent went to Native Americans," Bermeo said. "Are
those acceptable numbers?"

AAP has a unique way of dealing with its students.

"People have a myth about AAP students that these are people who
need tutoring, who are less prepared and less astute," said AAP
tutor Daniel Bernardi. "That’s just not the case."

From the very beginning, AAP students are reminded that they
qualified for admission to UCLA and have demonstrated through their
academic record that they have the potential to succeed.

"Racism is a violence," Bermeo said. "Oftentimes what happens
the victim internalizes the racism. We’ve got to turn that around
here and say, ‘You belong here. You’ve earned your right to be
here.’"

Second-year pre-med student Kimberly Dixon has been receiving
tutoring services since her freshman year.

"AAP has given me the courage to talk to my professors and TAs,"
Dixon said. "I worked really hard to stay here and AAP has taught
me the skills to survive."

Three years ago Bermeo interviewed one of his AAP students
­ a Vietnamese immigrant who had just been accepted into
medical school.

"I asked him what made him want to be a doctor," he said. "He
said that in Vietnam his grandmother had been the village’s
medicinal woman. She went around the countryside and picked herbs
to help cure the sick during the war. He saw the difference it made
so that from the time he came to the United States he wanted to be
a doctor.

"Those kinds of dreams are what make up AAP," Bermeo said.