The firestorm over a recent New York Times 

The revelations came via the discovery phase of a lawsuit targeting Harvard for allegedly having de facto quotas meant to limit Asian-Americans to about 20 percent of incoming freshman classes – a percentage that has held relatively firm for decades. Internal documents appeared to confirm that low marks for alleged personality traits reduced how many Asian-Americans would have been accepted by about half. Several other Ivy League schools have also been accused of similar practices.

University of California campuses wouldn’t seem likely to face such potential headaches. Proposition 209, passed in 1996, bans the use of race as a consideration in college admissions and other state government functions. Some of UC’s most elite campuses – at Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego – have student bodies that are more than 40 percent Asian-American.

But when it comes to UCLA, where 32 percent of students are Asian-American, according to collegedata.com, the school could face embarrassment if its internal admissions processes were exposed by a lawsuit as happened with Harvard. That’s because there’s a long paper trail showing UCLA employed the same sort of subjective evaluations of applicants as Harvard.

In 2006, responding to disappointingly low enrollment numbers for African-Americans, UCLA officials adopted a “holistic” approach that they said represented the “most dramatic” changes in admissions in years – an approach they explicitly compared to those seen in Ivy League schools. This approach looked not just at grades and test scores but at life circumstances.

But even as the change was introduced, Ward Conerly – the African-American former UC regent who championed Proposition 209 – ridiculed the idea that the policy would be “fairer” to all groups, as acting Chancellor Norman Abrams then said.

Two years later, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned from the university’s undergraduate admissions committee, alleging it had become obvious that UCLA was using the latitude provided by subjective assessments of applicants to favor African-Americans over others. Groseclose challenged UCLA’s assertion that it was using socioeconomic backgrounds – not race – in evaluating what obstacles that applicants had overcome. He noted that after the UCLA policy change, admissions of students from Vietnamese-American families – among the poorer subsets of Asian-Americans – had actually fallen.

In defending its “holistic” approach, UCLA officials have pushed back, then and now, saying critics had agendas and were cherry-picking statistics.

Ex-UCLA professor: Rich black applicants favored over poor Asians

But in April 2014, soon after leaving UCLA for George Mason University, Groseclose published “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.” It cited internal documents that showed that an applicant from a wealthy African-American family had a likelihood of admission that was “almost double that of a poor Asian, even when the two applicants have identical grades, SAT scores and other factors.”

The book was published amid intense debate in the California Legislature over Senate Constitutional Amendment 5, which would have asked state voters to repeal part of Proposition 209 to allow for race to be considered in college admissions. It passed the state Senate in January 2014, with Lieu – then a state senator – among the yes votes.

But the constitutional amendment was never voted on in the Assembly. By May 2014, it had been scrapped after an intense backlash from Chinese-Americans who believed it would suppress Asian-American enrollment in UC’s most elite campuses.

The backlash was strongly criticized by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which urged a continuation of traditional Asian-American support for affirmative-action-type programs. But then-Rosemead Councilwoman Polly Low, a leader of the Chinese American Elected Officials Association, told the Los Angeles Times that many in the local Chinese community were incensed with SCA5. “I have never seen so many people so mad,” she said.

Surveys and anecdotal evidence show that Asian-Americans are generally more entrepreneurial and more suspicious of government, which should incline them to the GOP. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Now, however, we’re seeing just the sort of fracture we would expect if Asian-Americans acted in the traditional, what’s-in-it-for-me? way of interest groups. They’ve figured out that affirmative action in college admissions punishes Asians in the name of atoning for the history of white racism. Check out the lead paragraph of this Pasadena Star-News story — the Vietnamese-American reporter isn’t buying the “racial justice” sales pitch at all:

“SAN GABRIEL — Asians in the San Gabriel Valley and beyond joined forces Friday to rally against a proposed Senate constitutional amendment that they said would punish their children for working hard to achieve the American Dream.

“Olivia Liao, president of the Joint Chinese University Alumni Association, said Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5 is racist because it allows public education institutions to give preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.

“'(Legislators) feel like the Chinese-American community isn’t paying attention to politics,’ Liao said. ‘We are concerned citizens. We need to stand up when things are not right; we need to be heard. We shouldn’t have any (exceptions) related to race. After all, America is a free country.’

 “State Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, is sponsoring SCA 5, an amendment that would repeal portions of Proposition 209, which prohibited discrimination against people based on their unchangeable identities. If passed, the amendment would allow public education institutions to give preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.”

Affirmative action = racial preferences

Wow. That’s as free of lefty spin as any news account I have ever seen of how California’s college admissions practices worked before Prop 209’s passage in 1996.

To paraphrase and condense what I wrote back in 2012, what the media almost never point out is that the UC admissions status quo before 1996 indisputably punished a minority. This is from the March 31, 1996, N.Y. Times story about UC’s adoption of a plan that even before Prop. 209 was passed would have phased out the use of race as a factor in deciding college admissions by spring 1998:

“An internal [UC} report in May 1995, based on a computer simulation, predicted that such a change would result in a 15 to 25 percent overall rise of Asian-Americans at the University of California, and as much as 25 to 35 percent increase at Berkeley and U.C.L.A., where 75 percent of students would be admitted on merit. The number of whites would remain about the same, but Hispanic students would dip 5 to 15 percent and African-Americans would drop somewhere between 40 and 50 percent.”

So without affirmative action, white student numbers would have been unchanged, but Asian-American student enrollment would have exploded. For some reason, in 1996, this didn’t resonate with California’s Asian population. Now it seems to be.

Good. As John Roberts said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”