But now, he says, things are different. The pace of faculty diversification is stagnant. And with the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, minority students--like himself--may not get that extra boost.

"I find it hard to accept remaining on a campus where such students [as myself] will increasingly not have a chance to receive an education," he wrote in a letter to the Daily Cal, Berkeley's student newspaper.

It is unconscionable, Noguera added, that there are only 98 African-American students in Berkeley's first-year class and two-thirds of the males are scholarship athletes.

"That's because black students who can entertain us on the football field or the basketball court will always be welcome at Berkeley, regardless of their grades or test scores," he wrote in his letter to the Daily Cal.

But Noguera does not fully blame the Berkeley administration for the decline in student diversity, realizing that the school's hands are tied by Proposition 209, the 1996 California initiative ending affirmative action.

Berkeley may be powerless to increase diversity in its student body, but the diversity of the faculty is a goal well within their reach, as faculty committees are largely responsible for hiring new professors. Noguera says he finds these committees' inaction, and the fact that they have failed to increase the numbers of women and minorities in their ranks, reprehensible.

"I haven't tried to attack people, but rather to make them aware that people out there exist with different backgrounds, " he says.

Noguera first publicly announced his negotiations with Harvard at the end of an Oct. 26 lecture for his class on race and ethnicity in education because, he told the Daily Cal, he wanted to stop a flurry of rumors.