TAKING IT ALL BACK

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/BERKELEY

If the importance of a historical event can be measured by the noise that surrounds it, then the University of California's Board of Regents could be sure it was making history last week. During 12 hours of passionate, sometimes ferocious debate, the board met to consider whether to end a 30-year effort to include more blacks, Latinos and Native Americans among the system's some 160,000 students. The meeting was interrupted by a bomb threat, punctuated by protests from radical feminists and brought to a halt when the Rev. Jesse Jackson linked arms with other protesters to sing We Shall Overcome. At that point, the regents fled to a separate meeting room.

That was where the real history was made, in relative quiet. In a divided vote, the board ended affirmative action throughout the nine campuses that are the jewels of the California state system, prohibiting the consideration of race, gender or ethnic origin in admissions as well as in hiring and dealing with contracts. At a moment when affirmative action is under attack across the country -- and just one day after President Bill Clinton told Americans that it had been ''good for America'' -- the vote made California the first state to eliminate race preferences in college admissions and put the state at the forefront of eliminating them nationwide.

''This is a historic moment,'' exulted Governor Pete Wilson. ''This is the beginning of the end of racial preferences.'' He would also be pleased if it marked the beginning of an upsurge for his slow-moving presidential campaign. Though Wilson serves as president of the 26-member board, until last week he had not attended a regular meeting since 1992. But after he had been kept offstage for much of the summer by throat surgery, he won national attention with his high profile in the regents' vote. With polls showing that two-thirds of Californians and a growing majority of Americans oppose quotas, that could bring Wilson the political equivalent of brand-name identification as an opponent of affirmative action. ''The Governor got his victory, and I'm sure we'll see a campaign commercial shortly,'' grumbled Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat who also serves as a regent.

It took some doing. The repeal of affirmative action was opposed by the president of the university system, the chancellors of all nine campuses and many faculty and student leaders. But the regents, 18 of whom were appointed by Wilson or previous Republican Governors, were influenced by months of lobbying by the Governor. They also enjoyed political cover: a leader of the rollback effort was one of the board's three black members, Ward Connerly, a Wilson appointee. ''We are turning down Asians and whites with 4.0 averages to take in blacks and Chicanos with 2.8,'' says Connerly. ''We can't go into the 21st century with half the people entitled to preferences because of their race and the rest standing on the sidelines boiling with anger.''

Opponents of the preference system argue that blacks and Hispanics who don't make the cut can still be admitted to one of the state's 22 less selective public campuses. The nine campuses of the University of California, they argue, were meant to be reserved for the state's academic achievers. As it stands now, however, only about half of all U.C. students are admitted solely on the basis of grades and test scores. The rest have benefited from a complex equation that awarded points for race or gender, including an ethnic-origin formula so hairsplitting that Mexican Americans were given more weight than other Latinos.

Despite these backbreaking efforts, the U.C. student body clearly does not mirror the state's ethnic diversity. Latinos account for a quarter of California's population but only 15.5% of U.C. students. African Americans, 7% of the state population, are just 4.4% of the student body. Only whites are represented among the students and the population at large in about the same proportion.

Asian Americans are the overachievers by far: only 10% of the state's population but 30.7% of U.C. students, though they are not accorded any of the preferences given other ethnic and racial groups. That adds a further complication to the tangled racial politics of affirmative action in California. Cut out preferences, university officials estimate, and the number of white students will increase only slightly.

Asian Americans, however, could shoot as high as 35.4% system-wide and 54% at Berkeley. ''Berkeley will be 92% or 93% white and Asian,'' predicts Bob Laird, admissions director at the Berkeley campus. ''The lack of diversity will diminish the education of all the students who remain at Berkeley.''

After the regents voted, Jackson, who has been hinting about mounting a presidential run for 1996, promised to challenge their decision in the courts and in the streets. ''The protests will escalate,'' he said. ''This is not over.'' He's right about that, but perhaps not entirely in the way he has in mind. Next year Californians will vote in a referendum on a measure that would forbid the state to use affirmative action not only in public education but also in state employment and contracting. Polls show three-fourths of the state's voters supporting it.