Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, case decided in 1978 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court held in a closely divided decision that race could be one of the factors considered in choosing a diverse student body in university admissions decisions. The Court also held, however, that the use of quotas in such affirmative action programs was not permissible; thus the Univ. of California, Davis, medical school had, by maintaining a 16% minority quota, discriminated against Allan Bakke, 1940-, a white applicant. The legal implications of the decision were clouded by the Court's division. Bakke had twice been rejected by the medical school, even though he had a higher grade point average than a number of minority candidates who were admitted. As a result of the decision, Bakke was admitted to the medical school and graduated in 1982.

U.S. public university with campuses at Berkeley (main campus), Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego (La Jolla), San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. Established in 1868 in Oakland, it has become one of the largest university systems in the U.S. The Berkeley campus, which replaced the Oakland campus in 1873, remains a leader in scientific fields as well as in many other academic areas. In the 1930s researchers there produced the first cyclotron, isolated the human polio virus, and discovered several new chemical elements. The San Francisco campus, originally a medical college, joined the University of California in 1873 and remains a centre for medical research and education. The San Diego campus, founded as a marine station, became part of the university in 1912; it includes the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Los Angeles branch (UCLA), founded in 1919, includes schools of law, medicine, and engineering. The Santa Barbara campus, originally founded as a teachers college, joined the university system in 1944. The Davis and Riverside campuses grew out of agricultural institutes and were added in 1959. To answer a growing need for broad-based education and research, the university opened campuses at Santa Cruz and Irvine in 1965 and added the Merced campus in 2005. The University of California operates nuclear research centres at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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formally Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

(1978) Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that ruled unconstitutional the use of fixed quotas for minority applicants at professional schools. At issue was a state medical school's affirmative action program that, because it required a certain number of minority admissions, twice denied entrance to an otherwise qualified white candidate (Allan Bakke). Though the court outlawed quota programs on the grounds that they violated the equal-protection clause of the Constitution of the United States, it allowed colleges to use race as a factor in making college admissions decisions.

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