Growing Asian Enrollment Redefines UC Campuses : Education: Their influence has increased with visibility. But affirmative action rollback fuels backlash fear.

As a white male growing up in the predominantly white community of Irvine, James Frank never imagined that one day he would be cast as a minority in his hometown. But that’s exactly what happened when he transferred from Santa Barbara City College to UC Irvine in his junior year and decided to compete for the coveted role of student body president.

Although Frank, a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity, garnered support from the school’s mostly white Greek organizations, Michelle Tsui, his Chinese American opponent, reaped endorsements from what many consider the more powerful faction on campus: the ethnic coalitions.

After last spring’s hotly contested, racially charged campaign, Tsui defeated Frank by 55 votes, becoming the university’s first student body president of Asian descent.

The Asian American Student Assn. and other cross-cultural groups dominate this campus, Frank asserted. “And if you don’t have their support, it’s hard to win an election. I’ve always taken it for granted that people would include me. But during the election, I was taken aback because it was suggested that I was incapable of representing this school because of my race.”

His view of the election illustrates both the emerging influence of Asian Americans on UC campuses and the reverberations that their increasing numbers have had among students who now find themselves in the minority.

Bolstered by record-high enrollments and predictions of even greater growth, students of Asian descent--including Indians, Filipinos and Pacific Islanders--now make up the largest ethnic group among undergraduates at four of the state’s UC campuses, in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine and Riverside.

At UC Irvine, more than half of undergraduates and 47% of all students are of Asian descent. At UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Riverside, such students make up just under 40% of the undergraduate population. Whites still have the larger numbers when graduate figures are included but even that gap is shrinking.

“To be 50% of the population--that’s an incredibly high number,” said Phat X. Chiem, editor of UC Irvine’s newspaper, New University. “It’s so high that some people criticize the school for being monocultural.”

A New Visibility

As their ranks grow to record numbers, students of Asian descent increasingly are playing key roles in student government, campus clubs, university publications and other organizations. They are redefining the image of a typical UC student and creating new norms for California’s most prestigious public university system.

“Asians have made themselves very visible, so people have gotten used to seeing a lot of Asians in their classes and around campus” at UC Berkeley, said senior Shobha Mahadev, an Indian American. “I had a friend from UC San Diego who came to visit, and she was shocked by the number of Asians. But people here are so used to it that they don’t think much about it.”

And experts predict that the University of California’s recent rollback of affirmative action admissions will increase the number of students of Asian descent on campus, because most Asian Americans do not benefit from current admissions policies, which give preference to underrepresented minorities.

Asian Americans are also the state’s fastest-growing group and meet the university’s admission requirements at a higher rate than any other group.

Between 1980 and 1990, California’s Asian population grew by 1.5 million, according to the U.S. Census. The population is expected to increase even more dramatically, from almost 3 million in 1990 to as high as 8.5 million in 2020, said UCLA professor Paul Ong, who has done extensive demographic studies on Asian Americans.

And almost one-third of the state’s high school students of Asian descent qualified for admission to UC in 1990, compared with only 13% of whites, 5% of blacks and 4% of Latinos, according to the most recent figures from the California Postsecondary Education Commission. “There are large numbers of very qualified Asian American applicants applying to Berkeley,” said Pat Hayashi, UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor of admissions. “And I think it’s safe to predict that our numbers will continue to go up.”

Asian American students have long favored the more coveted UC schools, particularly UCLA and Berkeley, because they are centrally located and offer quality academic programs for a relatively low cost. But they also are the campuses with the most applicants vying for every seat.

“Historically, before [World War II], a lot of American universities were not admitting Asian American students, except for UC Berkeley and UCLA,” said professor L. Ling-Chi Wang, head of UC Berkeley’s Asian American Studies Department. “As a result, Asians have had a long affection and tie to these universities. They also have emerged to become leading research universities, and they are located in two of the most heavily populated areas for Asian Americans.”

Chiem, a senior English major from Costa Mesa, said many students of Asian descent select UC schools because they know there will be many other Asians on campus. “I think it goes along with the saying that there’s safety in numbers,” he said.

Shobha Mahadev said her college choices came down to UC Berkeley or Stanford University. After visiting both campuses, she selected UC Berkeley, partly because she knew she would meet more Indian students who shared her interest in bharatanatyam, a South Indian dance.

“I wanted to go somewhere where there would be a forum for me to dance,” said Mahadev, now a member of an informal campus troupe. “I think because there are so many Asian students here, there is a comfort level that we couldn’t find at most other campuses.”

Over the years, as their numbers have grown, Asian Americans have become increasingly visible at most UC campuses.

This year, Asian Americans were elected student body presidents at four UC campuses--Irvine, Los Angeles, Davis and Santa Cruz.

There are now dozens of Asian clubs and even pan-Asian coalitions that serve as umbrella organizations for the social, religious, cultural and academic clubs that attract different Asian groups.

At UC Irvine, the main path to the school’s student center is often jammed with students handing out information about Asian clubs. The school’s food court sells sushi and Chinese takeout, and fliers tacked up on campus walls announce events in Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese.

Social Backlash

White, black and Latino students at some UC campuses say they sometimes resent the unbalanced ethnic makeup at their schools, but most have learned to adjust.

“At first, it was a bit odd for me to see signs in all these different Asian languages and hear so many different languages,” said Ted Balaker, a white senior at UC Irvine from San Diego. “I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but after a while, I just got used to it.”

But sometimes, Balaker said, he is annoyed by the preponderance of campus ethnic clubs, whose members talk about diversity but socialize primarily within their own groups. “They’ll say, ‘We love and embrace diversity,’ but they don’t share their cultures with other people,” he said.

Indeed, the Asian groups themselves sometimes struggle for unity, as they try to promote pan-Asian collaborations that can lobby on behalf of the entire Asian American population.

Asian American student leaders say they would like to push administrators for more professors of Asian descent, support services geared to the needs of Asian students and larger Asian American studies programs. But they have had difficulty garnering support because the Asian population includes so many different groups.

“I know many [Indians], for example, don’t see themselves as Asians. They put themselves in separate categories,” said Mahadev, who is co-chair of UC Berkeley’s Asian Pacific Council, the umbrella group to about 20 Asian student groups. “A lot of groups are waiting to see which issues Asian American students are going to rally around.”

Ethan Walters, vice president of academic affairs for UC Irvine’s student body, observed: “Asian American students are going to have to rise up and make demands. Even if one-fourth of the students here raised a ruckus about something, it would be done the next day. If Asian American students can get more unified, they can do anything they want because they have the numbers behind them.”

Today, the large enrollment of students of Asian descent is accepted as the norm, but the rising numbers have generated much debate in the past. Indeed, UC officials openly acclaim the virtues of diversity, but past controversies involving Asian admissions appear to have made them hesitant to talk frankly about the repercussions of growing Asian enrollments.

In the mid- to late-1980s, Asian Americans accused many of the nation’s top universities--including UC Berkeley and UCLA--of discriminating against applicants of Asian descent out of fear that their numbers were growing too fast.

At UC Berkeley, various state agencies stepped in to examine the allegations that Asian American admissions had been declining because of a series of deliberate policy changes. Although the university initially denied the allegations, former Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman publicly apologized to the Asian community in 1989 for hindering Asian Americans in the admissions process.

Since then, UC’s Asian American population has steadily increased without much public debate. But after last July’s controversial decision by the UC Board of Regents to abolish affirmative action, Asian Americans are bracing for a backlash.

A recent UC task force report recommended that the university broaden its admission criteria, but members of the task force were not optimistic that such changes would maintain current levels of campus diversity.

Even if the university places greater weight on socioeconomic factors when it revises its admissions policies, the number of students of Asian descent is likely to increase because many come from poor, inner-city backgrounds.

One university study indicated that if the university disregarded race but added economic status to its admissions criteria, the population of those of Asian descent would increase by 15% to 25% across the system. At the same time, the black and Latino enrollment would drop by as much as 50% and 15%, and white students would see a modest 5% gain.

The issue of affirmative action has divided the state’s Asian community, because its members are torn between the community’s long commitment to civil rights and its desire for equal opportunities to attend the best schools.

“Asians are still minorities in California, but they get the shaft when they apply to colleges,” said Matt Belloni, opinion editor of UC Berkeley’s student newspaper.

Many students of Asian descent believe that they are routinely denied entrance to UC’s most elite schools--UCLA and Berkeley--while black, Latino and Native American students with lower academic qualifications sometimes are admitted.

“The impact of the policies are falling on the shoulders of poor, Asian immigrant children who’ve worked their butts off for four years, held down three jobs and made tremendous progress in English,” said Lee Cheng, a UC Berkeley law student.

Is Diversity Dead?

But others contend it is hypocritical and selfish for Asian Americans to oppose affirmative action in higher education while taking advantage of race-based benefits in the workplace.

They also fear that the end of affirmative action will lead to a fierce backlash against them because Californians may not tolerate a public university system that doesn’t reflect the state’s diverse population. Those of Asian descent already make up 30% of UC’s enrollment, but make up only 10% of the state’s total population.

“When Asians became the largest group on campus, we saw it as a very positive thing,” said Don Nakanishi, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. “But with projections that Asians will become 50% to 60% of the campus, many of us are not enthusiastic about that reality, both in terms of the backlash it will bring and in terms of the kind of education students will receive.”

And UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, the system’s highest-ranking Asian American, contends that dismantling affirmative action may, in the long term, hurt the very students who envision benefits from new race-neutral admissions policies.

“If we don’t make any efforts to maintain diversity, we may end up over 90% Asian and Caucasian,” Tien said. “I don’t think that would be good for the educational experience of Asians and Caucasians. We should prepare our future leaders and workers for a multicultural environment.”

Already, some students of Asian descent say they are enduring a backlash, which manifests itself in persistent campus jokes and offhand comments about Asians raising the grading curve and creating too much academic competition. UCLA, for instance, is sometimes referred to as the University of Caucasians Lost Among Asians, and UCI has been sarcastically called the University of Chinese Immigrants.

“I’ve heard comments from some students that if there are too many Asians in a class, they’ll leave because they say there will be too much academic competition,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, a senior at UC Berkeley.

Most Asian American students brush off such remarks, but they fear that the backlash will intensify as new admissions policies are created.

“Asians are considered the model minority, and in some cases, it’s getting to the point of resentment,” said York Chang, a Chinese American senior who is UCLA’s student body president. “I think it’s going to get even worse once certain populations are shut out of the school. Then the attention is going to focus on Asians.”

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Asians Ascend

At four University of California campuses, Asian students are now the predominant ethnic group among undergraduates--most conspicuously at UC Irvine, where they are a majority. Changes since the 1984-85 school year:

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IRVINE BERKELEY 1985-86 1995-96 1985-86 1995-96 Asian 28% 53% 27% 39% White 54% 25% 56% 30% Latino 7% 13% 7% 13% Black 3% 3% 5% 6% American Indian 1% 1% - 1% Other/don’t know 7% 5% 5% 11%

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****

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LOS ANGELES RIVERSIDE 1985-86 1995-96 1985-86 1995-96 Asian 23% 38% 17% 38% White 56% 33% 62% 33% Latino 10% 17% 10% 18% Black 6% 6% 5% 5% American Indian 1% 1% 1% 1% Other/don’t know 4% 5% 5% 5%

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Note: Asian category includes Filipinos and Pacific Islanders

Sources: Individual campuses

Researched by DIANE SEO / Los Angeles Times

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Changing Ethnicity

The ethnicity of the University of California undergraduate student body has changed considerably in the last decade, with Asians now comprising one-third of the total while whites have declined to less than one-half.

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1984/85 1994/95 White 63% 43% Asian 20% 33% Latino 7% 13% Black 4% 4% American Indian 1% 1% Other/don’t know 5% 6%

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Source: University of California

Researched by DIANE SEO / Los Angeles Times