Before Harvard, Asian-Americans Were Thrust Into U. of California’s Acrimonious Affirmative-Action Debate

As the trial over Harvard University’s admissions practices played out in recent weeks, some Californians followed along with pangs of recognition.

“I feel like I’m living through, in some sense, the same history once again,” Carol T. Christ, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters during a recent meeting at The Chronicle.

Anyone who has spent much time at the University of California recognizes acutely the arguments facing Harvard, which has been accused in court of discriminating against Asian-American applicants in an effort to balance the racial and ethnic makeup of its student body. A judge is expected to rule on the matter in the coming months.

The argument at the center of the case, which positions a nonwhite cohort as the victim of race-conscious admissions, has gained new prominence, but it echoes a well-worn debate in California. There, demography and politics have often placed the state’s renowned public university system at the epicenter of disputes over whether affirmative action gives Asian-Americans short shrift.

Critics of this line of argument see it as pernicious, allowing white people to more palatably protest their own perceptions of unfairness in admissions by championing the cause of a minority group. For others, the notion that Asian-Americans face discrimination in admissions elucidates the folly of affirmative action, demonstrating that any policy that values diversity in one form risks devaluing it in another.

No strength of persuasion or legal decision is likely to bridge the gap between these deeply divided camps. What can be gleaned from California is that, then as now, inserting the specific welfare of Asian-Americans into an already difficult debate about values and fairness in college admissions only ratchets up the intensity and calls the motives of all sides further into question.

That much was on clear display at a meeting of the University of California’s Board of Regents nearly 15 years ago.

Regent vs. ‘Academic Whackos’

By the late winter of 2004, John J. Moores’s colleagues on California’s board had heard about enough from him. Years before, California voters had passed a ballot measure that forbids the consideration of race in public university admissions, and Moores had been on a public crusade to try to demonstrate that the Berkeley campus was violating that policy. Underrepresented-minority students with lower test scores had been admitted, he argued, at the expense of more qualified applicants — specifically Asian-Americans.

Moores, who was at the time the majority owner of the San Diego Padres and the regents’ chairman, had bankrolled his own study of admissions at Berkeley and concluded that the campus discriminated “blatantly against Asians.” He trumpeted these charges in a column published in Forbes, where Moores accused Berkeley of “thwarting the law” through a comprehensive review system that gave admissions officers sufficient wiggle room to admit lesser-qualified applicants based on income levels or difficult personal circumstances.

However noble its intentions, Moores argued, Berkeley’s admissions process masked what amounted to a race-based agenda that consciously admitted academically underprepared minority students who would have been better off at less selective institutions.

With his charge, which Berkeley’s chancellor at the time adamantly disputed, Moores had crossed accepted lines of propriety on the board. In a rare and personal slight, the regents passed a resolution that stated Moores did not speak for them.

One regent described the episode as a low point for collegiality on the board, whose members couldn’t bear dining together the previous evening.

That the regents saw fit to distance themselves from Moores by way of a formal resolution reflected not only their disappointment with his tactics, but also suggested sensitivity toward the charge that the university discriminated against Asian-Americans — a claim that has dogged California since at least the 1980s.

Harvard on Trial

Detailed background on the lawsuit over the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, the case’s implications for selective colleges, and coverage of the trial as it unfolded, in a federal court in Boston.

• Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants, U.S. Appeals Court Rules
• 3 Takeaways From the Appeal of the Harvard Admissions Lawsuit
• A Judge Advised Harvard to Give Its Admissions Officers Training to Stop Bias. Will That Help?

The episode highlighted another truism, which has been on display at the Harvard trial: When it comes to affirmative action, people can look at the same data and reach different conclusions.

As Moores’s campaign stirred unrest in the system, Lawrence H. Pitts, who chaired the Academic Senate at the time, sought to assure the regent that his concerns were off the mark. Over dinner with Moores, Pitts and a colleague showed Moores data that had convinced them that there was no evidence of discrimination.

Moores wasn’t buying it.

“He was a very forceful person,” recalls Pitts, a neurosurgeon who went on to become the university system’s provost, a position from which he retired in 2012. “He was frustrated that he wasn’t getting much traction with the Academic Senate.”

Moores labeled his detractors “academic whackos,” Pitts recalls, a moniker that faculty members seized upon and emblazoned on T-shirts. Then as now, the debate was infused with hot rhetoric and took on the feel of a political campaign in which clear lines were drawn between opposing camps.

“Our data failed to show that we were stacking the deck in favor of any particular group of students,” Pitts says. “I’m pretty sure we gave good data, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t accept it.”

Moores could not be reached for comment for this article.

It is understandable why Moores and some other regents remained skeptical. A university panel formed to examine the issue found that, on most campuses, Asian-Americans were admitted at somewhat lower rates than statistical models would explain, while black, Chicano, and Latino students were accepted at higher rates than could be predicted.

The findings warranted further study, the panel said. Moores scoffed at this suggestion, equating it to “asking the fox to go back and recount the eggs.”

In the years since Moores made his public stand, the percentage of Asian-American undergraduate students at Berkeley has fallen by 6.4 percentage points to 35 percent, according to the latest federal data. That decline has coincided with increases in international and Hispanic students.

Asians make up about 17 percent of California’s population, according to 2017 U.S. Census Bureau estimates. No other state has as many Asian residents as California, where there are 6.6 million, and only Hawaii has a greater share of Asians relative to its total population.

‘Asians Would Take Over’

The hullabaloo in 2004 was just the latest blip in California’s long-running debate over race and admissions. This was the university, after all, that had been at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bakke decision, which, in 1978, banned quotas but allowed colleges to give some consideration to race in admissions.

The effects of admissions policies on Asian-Americans took center stage a decade later, when a change in admissions practices at Berkeley led to a notable decline in the group’s enrollment. Amid intense backlash, Berkeley’s chancellor issued a public apology.

A few years later, in 1995, Ward Connerly emerged on the Board of Regents as a stalwart opponent of affirmative action, marshaling a successful effort to ban the consideration of race in the university’s admissions. The policy was a precursor to the statewide ban approved by voters the following year.

In a recent interview with The Chronicle, Connerly said he identified early on that Asian-Americans were particularly ill-served by California’s stated commitment to diversity. But making that case was taboo within the system, Connerly said, where some administrators worried about disrupting racial and ethnic balance.

“They were very, very fearful that Asians would take over,” says Connerly, who now is president of the American Civil Rights Institute, an anti-affirmative-action group. “They feared that this would eventually reflect negatively on the overall system.”

Connerly, who is black, was viewed in some quarters as a particularly credible opponent of race-conscious admissions, an advocate willing to stand on principle regardless of the consequences for underrepresented minorities like himself. At the same time, some in California were suspicious that Connerly was merely carrying the water for Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican who made banning affirmative action a central plank of his presidential campaign.

In the mid-1990s, public meetings about California’s admissions policies were often acrimonious. Far more revealing, however, were the conversations Connerly says he had in private. He recalls a black staff member, whom Connerly did not identify, appealing to him “as a brother.” The university needed the grit and tenacity of black students, Connerly says he was told, something that could not be captured in test scores. Asian-Americans, on the other hand, had strong credentials, but they were “dull and all they do is study,” Connerly remembers hearing.

“If you strip away all the fine clothing you put around that argument, it’s a very racist argument,” Connerly says. “And in my view it ill serves students who are working their butts off, who are also disadvantaged.”

Connerly said he has followed the Harvard trial with interest, and he considers Edward J. Blum, a conservative activist who is leading the effort, a fellow soldier in an important cause. The stakes of the case, which is widely expected to make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, could not be higher, Connerly says.

“If any institution that receives federal funding is found to be discriminating, funds should be and will be withheld from that institution,” Connerly says. “That is what is essential.”

It is exceedingly difficult, however, to demonstrate that a holistic admissions process amounts to discrimination, says Dana Y. Takagi, an emeritus professor of sociology at California’s Santa Cruz campus, who has written about affirmative action. For selective institutions with far more applicants than available seats, qualitative judgments are necessary, she says. That may disappoint Asian-Americans with perfect SAT scores, Takagi says, but colleges that seek to identify future leaders have to take into account a broad range of factors.

Asian-Americans “feel quite entitled because of test scores and grades,” says Takagi, who is Japanese-American. “It’s a cultural problem to explain that test scores and grades, sure they’re important, but they’re not everything.”

‘Racial Mascotting’

The argument that students of Asian descent might be disadvantaged by affirmative action started bubbling up in conservative circles in the late 1980s.

In a moment that scholars now regard as pivotal, William Bradford Reynolds, who headed the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the Reagan administration, advanced the notion in a 1988 speech before Congress. By creating a “floor” for “favored racial groups,” Reynolds said, elite colleges had constructed a “ceiling” for Asian-American applicants. This was “legally and morally wrong,” Reynolds asserted.

Asian-American groups immediately pushed back, objecting that their concerns about discrimination had been warped into an attack on affirmative action. Students of Asian descent might have believed that they were boxed out because of arbitrary caps on their enrollment, but it did not follow that this was a byproduct of race-conscious policies that benefited other groups.

There’s a term among scholars for the hijacking of Asian-American interests for an anti-affirmative action stance: “racial mascotting.” The coinage is often attributed to Sumi Cho, a law professor at DePaul University.

Explaining the phrase in a recent interview, Cho said, “It is a cynical deployment of faces and people to be able to promote one’s ends. People fear being called a racist, so they have to frame their argument as this is hurting another minority group.”

Diversity is a deeply held value in higher education, and the U.S. Supreme Court gives colleges deference to uphold it. It will take a savvy argument, Cho says, to undo policies that are designed to broaden racial and ethnic representation.

“That’s not going to be easily dislodged, and it’s certainly not going to be dislodged just by saying you’re hurting whites,” Cho said.

The lawyers representing Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiffs’ group that is suing Harvard, have been careful to say that they don’t oppose race-conscious admissions or diversity efforts in general. Rather, they object to what they describe as the penalization of Asian-Americans through subjective admissions criteria, particularly a personal rating that is said to measure applicants’ kindness and integrity, among other areas. Harvard has denied that the university ever penalizes applicants on the basis of race.

Whatever the stated motive, the plaintiffs’ legal complaint renders unambiguous what they want from the court: “a permanent injunction prohibiting Harvard from using race as a factor in future undergraduate admissions decisions.”

“It’s about knocking out all affirmative action,” says Frank H. Wu, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law, where he was previously chancellor and dean. “In public statements, they’ve avoided highlighting this. But you can just look at the complaint. It’s right there.”

An argument against any admissions criteria, including one that arbitrarily rejected people at random, could be framed as an affront to Asian-Americans because they have outsize representation among college applicants, Wu says.

“Asian-Americans are overrepresented in the applicant pool, and this means anything that you do will have a disproportionate impact on Asian-Americans,” says Wu, author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. “That’s important to recognize. When people say Asian-Americans are disproportionately affected, it’s true. They are disproportionately affected by everything.”

That fact has been clear in California for decades, and now it could change the law around college admissions for generations to come.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Dan Bauman contributed to this report.