SAN FRANCISCO - The University of California Board of Regents chairman charged Thursday the university has been discriminating against high-achieving Asian-American applicants in favor of diversifying its campuses with lower-achieving black and Latino students.

Regent John Moores reignited a debate among UC officials that has raged all winter, also accusing UC administrators of unnecessarily withholding data about race and admissions for 18 months to avoid bad publicity.

University officials countered that a report released earlier this month showing UC campuses accepted more black and Latino high school seniors than statistics would predict -- albeit a small number -- doesn't necessarily mean racial preferences are being used.

And Moores' fellow regents voted to denounce a letter he wrote to Forbes Magazine about undergraduate admissions in the nine-campus UC system.

Administrators are now using a more refined statistical analysis to definitively determine the cause of the difference between actual admissions and what models predict.

Officials vehemently deny they ever intentionally withheld data that should have been released.

"Our admissions standards for the university are quite low," Moores said at the regents' meeting Thursday in San Francisco. "The way our eligibility index works is that a student with average grades and with below-average test scores is deemed to be in the top one-eighth (of graduating high school seniors). The average Californian understands the 'top' doesn't mean you're in the bottom. ... I'm very concerned that Asians are being discriminated against."

In a report the university released last week, UC Berkeley said it offered admission to 355 African-American applicants when a statistical model predicted 234 should have been offered admission in 2003. Among Latino applicants that year, 1,222 were offered admission, when the model predicted 1,076 should have been.

Since Proposition 209 went into effect in 1998 banning racial preferences in university admissions, state hiring and public contracting, the percentage of black and Latino applicants admitted to the flagship campuses of Berkeley and UCLA has substantially declined, the report found.

"We make sure our procedures are fully compliant with Proposition 209," said UC President Robert Dynes. "We are looking at these issues seriously. ... Overall the results should bolster our confidence in the admissions process."

Although Moores accused the university of withholding from the regents more than one admissions study, university officials said there was just one early draft of the recently released report -- from early 2002 -- that he could be talking about.

Using a rough statistical model that used applicants of different races with similar characteristics, the study found a black applicant had a 56 percent chance of getting into UC Berkeley, while a Latino applicant had a 36 percent chance and an Asian-American or white applicant had a 24 percent chance. But university officials warned the data didn't include all admissions factors and therefore the percentages aren't reliable.

"I wouldn't bring it to any group," Associate Vice President for Student Academic Services Dennis Galligani said of not showing it immediately to the regents. "This would be like a first draft. It did point us in a direction. We did talk with campuses."

Moores also accused university officials of not telling regents for a long time that UC was admitting more than the top 12.5 percent or one-eighth of high school graduates called for by the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education.

The university may indeed be admitting from the top 15.3 percent but is awaiting a study by the California Postsecondary Education Commission to find out definitively, said Senior Vice President for University Affairs Bruce Darling.

Moores has been a vocal critic of a relatively new admissions policy at the university known as comprehensive review, which allows campuses to consider a candidate's entire application, not just grades and test scores. Moores considers the way the process is being used on some campuses an end run around affirmative action. In a controversial study he did last fall, Moores accused Berkeley of admitting too many students with low SAT scores, using comprehensive review.

In an 8-to-6 vote, the board passed a resolution affirming comprehensive review and denouncing Moores' commentary in Forbes magazine this month as not the views of the board.

"Sadly, today's UC admissions policies are victimizing students -- not just those unfairly denied admissions but also many with low college entrance exam scores who were admitted and can't compete," he wrote in the March 29 issue of Forbes currently out.

"How did the university get away with discriminating so blatantly against Asians?"

Regent Odessa Johnson said the resolution was important in light of all the questioning that's gone on regarding black students at the university's flagship campuses. She pointed to several student speakers from Cal who impassionedly told the regents they felt discriminated against at Berkeley because of it.

"We as a university have a responsibility to ensure all our students feel welcome on campus," Johnson said. "They belong at Berkeley as well as other students who are there."

At the same meeting, the regents named former California Gov. George Deukmejian to lead a task force to examine the university's willed body program following the discovery that donated body parts were illegally resold for profit at UCLA.