Doctor at crux of affirmative action debate killed

Patrick Chavis, a former Los Angeles-area physician whose medical career was cited by both supporters and opponents of affirmative action as evidence for their case, was killed July 23 in Los Angeles. He was 50.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide office said Chavis was shot during a carjacking. The spokesman said Chavis was leaving a store and entering his car when three men tried to take his car and shot him.

Chavis received a degree of fame through the quest of Allan Bakke to gain admission to the medical school at the University of California-Davis in the 1970s. The medical school rejected the application of Bakke, who was white, but accepted five black applicants, including Chavis, who had lower test scores and lower college grades than Bakke. The five won admission under a special racial-preference quota.

Bakke sued. What became a landmark case, Bakke vs. Regents of the Board of the University of California, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the school's affirmative action program was struck down in 1978. The court maintained that while an applicant's race could be used as an admissions factor, it could not be the only factor. Bakke was admitted to the school and later graduated, as did Chavis.

There it might all have ended but for the partisans on both sides of the affirmative action issue. By 1995, Bakke was an anesthesiologist in Rochester, Minn., and Chavis was an obstetrician-gynecologist in an inner-city section of Los Angeles where his patients were largely poor women of color.

Nicholas Lemann, in the New York Times Magazine, Tom Hayden, in the Nation magazine, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, speaking before a Senate committee, all called attention to the careers of the two medical school graduates. They pointed out that while Chavis was helping the poor of California, Bakke made his practice among much wealthier, largely white patients in the upper Midwest.

They suggested that the state of California was being repaid much higher dividends on the education it had given the poor California black student than by Bakke.

Then, it all started to go wrong for Chavis. As reported by conservative commentators as well as by such newspapers as The Washington Post and the Boston Globe, Chavis lost his medical license in 1997. He had switched his practice from obstetrics and gynecology to cosmetic surgery, including liposuction, areas in which he met with difficulties and was accused of malpractice.

An administrative law judge found Chavis guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in the treatment of three women, one of whom died, and the California medical board suspended his license, saying he had an "inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician."

Chavis's career was then taken up by opponents of affirmative action in their belief that it illustrated the policy's moral and intellectual failure. Others contended that although Chavis deserved to be criticized for his actions, those actions did not prove anything about affirmative action. These commentators pointed out that there was no statistical correlation between affirmative action admissions to medical school and later malpractice charges.

Chavis was raised in South Central Los Angeles by a mother on welfare. Following medical school, he completed his residency at the University of Southern California in 1981. He received a master's degree in public health from the University of California at Los Angeles.

He opened his offices in Compton, a largely black and Latino town adjacent to Los Angeles. He delivered about 1,000 babies a year before switching specialties.