Race-based admissions roil again

Lawsuit against Harvard latest blow in fight for student rights

SAN FRANCISCO — Time and again, Chinese-American students consistently delivered top academic scores, only to be denied admission to their dream school. Parents bemoaned what they saw as an unfair racial advantage given to black and Latino children while their own children were overlooked.

“Every year hundreds of Chinese-American parents would be in anguish,” said Lee Cheng, a 46-year-old intellectual property attorney, who sought to end the practice. “I remember the disappointment in some of my friends who were the kids of immigrants, of very, very poor people who worked in Chinatown.”

This may sound like the fights going on today over testing in elite public schools in New York City or lawsuits against prestigious universities such as Harvard over affirmative action.

But the scenario played out more than three decades ago on the other side of the country over a public high school, demonstrating the enduring nature of a controversy in which Asian-Americans have played a key role despite some feeling shut out of the broader conversation.

In the 1980s, San Francisco’s prestigious Lowell High School required Chinese applicants to score higher on an admissions index than whites, blacks and even other Asians as part of a legal mandate to diversify its schools.

Cheng, a Lowell graduate, couldn’t believe that was fair or even legal. But when he turned to Asian-American civil rights groups, they were of no help.

“These organizations, which all came of age largely as the ‘yellow’ affiliates of the NAACP and civil rights establishment, they said, ‘Hey there’s nothing to see here,’” Cheng said.

So he helped form a legal foundation and sued.

Race-based affirmative action has long polarized Asian-Americans, with critics feeling demonized and advocates chagrined by the attention to what they call minority-within-minority views.

Now, critics of the policy sense an opening for change, led by a White House hostile to the idea of considering race in admissions.

The US Department of Justice is backing a 2014 lawsuit against Harvard University by Asian-American applicants, who say the Ivy League college unlawfully

We came here for opportunities, but this young man, our society is not doing him justice.”

Swan Lee, a founder of The Asian-American Coalition for Education, the nonpartisan organization that filed the complaint against Harvard over its admission policies

suppresses the number of Asians admitted. The DOJ also said last year it would investigate a May 2015 complaint filed against Harvard by a coalition of AsianAmerican groups.

The 2014 lawsuit, led by conservative strategist Ed Blum, is being closely watched as it goes to trial in October.

Swan Lee, a founder of The Asian-American Coalition for Education, the nonpartisan organization that filed the complaint against Harvard, said she got involved after the brother of her daughter’s friend was rejected by what she described as basic four-year colleges despite his high test scores and grades.

‘This cannot be right’

He ended up employed as a waiter at the Chinese restaurant where his father worked, a victim of the “Asian tax”, she said.

“I said, ‘This cannot be right.’ We came here for opportunities, but this young man, our society is not doing him justice,” says Lee, who moved to the United States in 1996 for graduate school. “What happened to his American dream?”

After Cheng graduated from Harvard, he helped found the Asian-American Legal Foundation and sued San Francisco schools in 1994.

At issue was a 1983 consent decree aimed at desegregating San Francisco schools, the result of a lawsuit filed by the local NAACP. The parties agreed to settle in 1999, and the quota system was eventually dropped.

Cheng recalls the fight as a lonely one.

“We never really wanted to be the leaders in the fight,” he said. “It’s just that nobody wanted to do it.”