BY GUILLERMO E. HERNÁNDEZ

California arrives in the new century amidst profound social and demographic changes. One needs only to drive through the streets of Los Angeles - or walk the campus at UCLA - to observe this transformation. In just a few years, faces of diversity have come to dominate public space. The term "minority" no longer conveys the meaning it did a short while ago. Today, no one group constitutes a majority - we are all minorities.

Nevertheless, the diversity evident in our streets, malls and classrooms does not translate into diversity in professional training, diversity in prestigious residential areas, or diversity in positions of influence, power and authority. To develop California's human capital, we need an imaginative leadership that is willing to forcefully push for three basic diversity goals:

• Promoting a social consciousness that fosters tolerance, understanding and change in order to achieve a multicultural, multiracial and multilinguistic environment;
• Rescuing the state's increasingly diversified population from the constraints of social hierarchies that were unsuitable even 20 or 30 years ago;
• Training and hiring professionals, managers and skilled personnel who reflect the state's changing demographic profile.

Because education is the great social equalizer, the University of California can play a vital role in addressing these problems. Current attempts to attract underrepresented students to UC by reaching out to elementary and secondary schools are commendable and seem promising, but efforts to diversify graduate students and faculty members have been neglected. If these goals are to be achieved, pipelines to graduate school must be established for underrepresented undergraduates; departments must recruit professors with diversity backgrounds; and senior administrative positions must reflect the diversity of the population. Finally, steps must be taken to replace the underrepresented professors who retire and to fill with diverse faculty some of the thousands of professors' positions that will open in the next few years. UCLA ought to be a model in this historic mission.

Otherwise, how will the UC system survive mounting political pressures if a growing majority of citizens find the UC educational mission a failure and its existence irrelevant to the needs of the state? Will California come to resemble a third-world economy or a region from the old South with a large, untrained and poorly schooled population paired with a privileged and alienated elite only concerned with its own welfare?

One is tempted to respond by paraphrasing Malcolm X when he said that it is impossible for a chicken to lay a duck egg because organisms can only produce what they were designed to create. Yet, Malcolm also said that if a chicken were ever to lay a duck egg, it would certainly be considered a revolutionary act. Such is the challenge confronting California today. It is, therefore, time to begin addressing these vital issues. For we only have a short window of opportunity to get positioned for California's next historical period: the era of diversity.

Guillermo E. Hernández is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center.