Ward Connerly on Asian Discrimination at UC
Asian groups have complained that the University of California’s (UC) recent admissions changes will negatively impact students of Asian descent. These students account for 40 percent of all undergraduates at Los Angeles, 43 percent at Berkeley, 50 percent at San Diego, and 54 percent at Irvine. Americans of Asian descent account for about 12 percent of California’s population and four percent of the U.S. population.
The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly wrote a piece for the Sacramento Bee about this issue. He recounts a conversation he had with a UC administrator:
“I asked him why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. In an unguarded moment, he told me that unless the university took steps to ‘guide’ admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, ‘What would be wrong with that?’ I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment.
“The UC administrator told me that Asians are ‘too dull – they study, study, study.’ He then said, ‘If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it.’ I won’t betray the individual’s anonymity because to do so would put him in a world of trouble. Yet, it is time to confront the not-so-subtle hand of discrimination against Asians that masquerades as ‘building diversity’ at many campuses.”
As Connerly notes, the effort to attract more black students to a campus isn’t a bad thing per se; it becomes so when schools discriminate against other racial groups to achieve this goal. Since California voters barred their government from preferring or discriminating against individuals or groups in hiring, contracting, and admissions based on factors like race, Asian admissions to the UC system have risen.
Consequently, UC eliminated its policy to automatically admit the top 12.5 percent of all students based on statewide performance and reduced reliance on grades and scores. Since Asian students tend to score higher on standardized tests and achieve higher grades than whites, blacks, Hispanics, and other groups, the new policy likely would reduce their numbers.
UC didn’t count on Asian groups protesting the new policy, but the “proposed UC admissions policies are so egregious and so dramatically discriminatory against Asians that these groups could not remain silent – and have credibility within their communities – as the grass-roots opposition from within specific Asians groups began to surface,” Connerly writes.
Americans of Asian descent are not a typical grievance group. Will UC’s discriminatory polices change that?
