The park at Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square is an unlikely epicenter for a rebellion against the leadership of the University of California.
Most of the parents and grandparents who watch children from its benches still speak with one another in Mandarin or Cantonese. Those interviewed on a recent sunny afternoon sounded more concerned with assimilating than agitating, their focus on raising children who can get ahead.
Yet, largely because of their high aspirations for their children, many of the Chinese immigrants gathered here are acutely aware of the university’s new undergraduate-admissions policy. With the new policy, the Board of Regents hopes to widen the applicant pool and give campuses more flexibility in selecting students. But Asian-Americans bitterly oppose it, believing they’ll lose out. One university analysis supports their view, suggesting the Asian-American share of students would decline under the new system.
Echoing the sentiments of many here, Lynn Li, a mother of three who emigrated from China just over 20 years ago, says, “I still think the high achievers should be rewarded.”
Several of the state’s most prominent Asian-American leaders, feeling that the university blindsided them by adopting the admissions policy with little advance notice of how it would affect Asian enrollments, have responded by blindsiding the university with a campaign of resistance involving legislative pressure, threats of litigation, and angry letters and phone calls from Asian-American parents and alumni.
Although they come from across the political spectrum — and differ sharply on affirmative action — they are united in their demands that the university rethink the policy, which they see as discriminatory or, at the very least, insensitive to their concerns.
“Unless I am shown convincing data that Asian-Americans are not being singled out, I will fight against that decision,” says L. Ling-chi Wang, a professor emeritus of ethnic and Asian-American studies at the University of California at Berkeley who has helped organize the resistance.
Last week the California Legislature’s 11-member Joint Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus joined the State Senate’s select committee on Asian and Pacific Islander affairs in holding a hearing to scrutinize the policy change. Although the Legislature has little direct say over the university’s policies, State Assemblyman Ted Lieu, a Democrat who serves as the caucus’s co-chairman, said in an recent interview that its members can nonetheless pressure the university through their control of the state budget.
Should the university refuse to bend to such political pressure, it might face another battle — in the courts. Lee Cheng, a lawyer for the San Francisco-based Asian American Legal Foundation, says he “absolutely” expects the university to be sued for discrimination if it fails to alter the policy. “It is just a matter of time,” he says.
‘Proper Vetting’
In keeping with Proposition 209, a 1996 amendment to the state’s Constitution that barred public colleges from considering race in admissions, the new policy does not explicitly take applicants’ race or ethnicity into account.
Instead it has been framed as a means of giving officials at the system’s nine undergraduate campuses more flexibility in choosing their freshman classes. It reduces the number of students guaranteed admission based primarily on grades and test scores, and expands the overall applicant pool by a projected 40 percent through revisions such as the scrapping of the requirement that students take the SAT subject tests.
First proposed by faculty leaders last June, the policy attracted little attention from Asian-American activists until just eight days before the Board of Regents voted in February. At that point, state lawmakers held a legislative briefing to examine its likely impact on minority enrollments. There a university official presented the results of an analysis, based on 2007 state data, which estimated that the Asian-American share of students admitted that fall would have dropped from 36 percent to between 29 and 32 percent under the new policy. Both the black and Hispanic shares would have remained flat or rise slightly, while the white share would have risen from 34 percent to between 41 and 44 percent. (The state’s overall population is about 13 percent Asian or Pacific Islander and about 77 percent white.)
The Legislature’s Asian and Pacific Islander caucus sent the board a letter urging it to postpone voting on the policy change. The letter complained that the policy “has not received the proper vetting it deserves,” partly because the university had made no effort to run it by Asian-American lawmakers, civil-rights groups, and higher-education associations. It also said the university’s analysis of the policy’s impact on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders had failed to break out the data for specific ethnic groups, masking the potential impact on those that are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The board overwhelmingly approved the policy anyway. The university’s administration dismissed its own projections by saying that its analysis was based on outdated data that failed to account for the likelihood that Asian-Americans would adjust their behavior by, for example, putting more effort into the basic SAT test, which remains part of the admissions criteria.
The university’s president, Mark G. Yudof, angered Asian-Americans by seeming to brush off their concerns in a Los Angeles Times interview. “They’ll be fine,” he told the newspaper.
Friendly Fire
When Mr. Yudof recently spoke here at an Education Writers Association conference, some of the most aggressive questioning aimed at him came from reporters for newspapers published in Chinese.
“I know there is concern in the Asian-American community, but I really don’t think that it is well placed,” Mr. Yudof said in response to questions about the policy. “I think Asian-Americans will do well. That is my prediction.”
The state’s Asian-language media have played a key role in getting word of the admissions policy change to tens of thousands of people who speak little or no English, spurring resistance to it among segments of the population that otherwise might have been out of the loop.
Chinese for Affirmative Action, a California-based civil-rights group, has played a central role in leading the opposition. In a recent interview at its office overlooking Portsmouth Square, Vincent Pan, the organization’s executive director, said he suspects the university knows its new policy will have the effect of replacing Asian-American students with white ones, is fine with that development, and is hoping that its disavowal of its own projections will cause the opposition to go away.
Mr. Pan says he has seen enough past educational discrimination against Asian-Americans to justify his suspicions. Even today, he complains, the presidents of the nation’s selective colleges are almost never heard expressing pride over the large number of Asian-American students succeeding on their campuses. Instead, he said, such institutions discuss their Asian-American enrollments with “a sense of embarrassment or discomfort that we as a society need to get over.”
The declared goal of California’s new policy — producing enrollments that more closely reflect the population of the state — is one that Chinese for Affirmative Action normally might get behind. Throughout its 40-year history, the group has championed diversity, often working in tandem with black and Hispanic civil-rights groups in efforts such as the fight against Proposition 209. Other Asian-American civil-rights groups with histories of supporting diversity in education — such as the New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund — also have expressed concerns about the possible impact of the policy change.
Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, the policy has been questioned by students involved in a campus program that recruits students from underrepresented segments of the Asian-American population. “I am skeptical,” says Michelle Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American junior who assists such efforts. “I am just really concerned about how whites are still the top most accepted.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 55, Issue 31, Page A21
