THE PRIVATE-UNIVERSITY PICTURE

THE UNIVERSITY of California is not the only institution dogged by charges of anti-Asian bias.

Such complaints first surfaced in the Ivy League. In 1983, Brown University’s Asian-American Student Assn. charged that Brown used quotas to limit the number of Asians on campus. The association noted that between 1975 and 1983, the number of Asian-American applicants had soared 848%, while the number of students admitted rose only 276%. Beginning in 1980, the admission rate for Asian-Americans had dipped below that for whites and had never recovered.

In response, Brown’s governing board authorized a study by a blue-ribbon panel from outside the university. The panel found no evidence of quotas but said that Brown’s reliance on “historical benchmarks”--to quote the panel’s polite terminology--had impeded Asian progress. Problems were created by the practice of modeling each incoming class on its predecessor, thus perpetuating the university’s racial composition. Brown’s administration since has taken remedial measures, but it still remains slightly harder, statistically, for an Asian-American than a non-Asian to gain admission to Brown.

The same holds true at Harvard, where about 12% of Asian-American applicants are admitted, contrasted with an overall admission rate of about 15.2%. Harvard blames this differential on two factors: There are few Asians either among athletes or the children of alumni, two groups of applicants awarded preferences in the admissions process. But John H. Bunzel and Jeffrey K. D. Au, two Hoover Institution researchers writing in The Public Interest, a scholarly journal, have suggested that an Asian-American must be much more qualified than a white to win admission to Harvard. Confidential documents they obtained showed, for example, that in 1982, Asian-Americans in the Harvard freshman class on the average scored 112 points higher on the SAT than their white classmates.

Stanford, too, has been forced to confront accusations that it discriminates against Asian applicants. Last year, a faculty senate committee investigated why the admission rate for Asian-Americans was only 65% to 70% that for whites. The committee concluded that the differential “did not arise from an implicit quota.” But it acknowledged that “unconscious bias” could have crept into the admissions process.

The Stanford faculty responded by reaffirming that the university would never discriminate on the basis of race and decreed that the dean of admissions would have to justify any discrepancies in admissions rates among ethnic groups. Since then, the admission rate for Asian-Americans has climbed--it stands at about 91% of the rate for whites--and this fall, Stanford will have its largest contingent ever of Asian-American freshmen, accounting for about 17% of the class--up from 8% in 1985.

“It may look as if I cooked the figures, but I didn’t--Girl Scout’s honor,” said Jean Fetter, Stanford’s dean of undergraduate admissions. “There is a highlighted sensitivity to Asians in our office, but I think we are judging all our applicants by the same criteria. (The increased percentage) is a tribute to the high quality of our Asian applicants.”

Oddly, though their Asian-American populations lag far behind the University of California’s in actual numbers and percentages, the private universities have been spared the harsh criticism directed at the UC system.

That, say the experts, is because Asian-Americans have different expectations of the UC system. “Everybody assumes that the private, elite universities engage in social engineering,” said UCLA assistant professor Don T. Nakanishi, himself a graduate of Yale. “Those universities say, up front, that academic merit is only one factor in the admissions process. They openly seek diversity.

“But a public university is different,” Nakanishi insisted. “The University of California has been a traditional avenue of opportunity. . . . Its admission criteria are established by the Legislature and the Regents; they’re supposed to be largely objective. They’re supposed to be set out in black and white so every high school student in the state knows what he’s shooting for.’