When I went to UCLA in the late 1980s, the white and Asian students came in with A averages, while many of the black and latino students got into this elite university with GPAs below a B. The academic differences were stark and created social divisions. A students typically don’t seek out C students to study with.
We had many football players at my Rieber Hall dormitory and I remember many of the black players struck me as the worst behaved students in the dorm. They’d trash the cafeteria. I’ll never forget this one group who’d deliberately drop their food on the floor for the staff to clean up. They ignored the rest of us. They were in their own world. They weren’t affirmative action beneficiaries, they were there on the special waiver provision to win games. On the bright side, the UCLA football team in 1988 was ranked number one in the nation for a couple of weeks.
