Class News

Brad Reynolds '64 quoted on college admissions

September 1, 2019

Brad Reynolds '64 was referenced in a New York Times Magazine article titled “Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?”

It’s a long article (well worth reading), so here is the excerpt that Brad appears in:

In 1988, William Bradford Reynolds, who was an assistant attorney general and chief of the civil rights division in the Reagan administration’s Justice Department, spoke at a symposium on Asian-American university admissions sponsored by Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a Democrat. By this point, official complaints of discrimination had been filed by Asian-American students at several top universities. In 1984, after a lengthy internal review, Brown University concluded that Asian-American applicants had been “treated unfairly.” By the time Reynolds took the stage to give his remarks, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education had begun investigating admissions at several schools, including Harvard and UCLA.

Until Reynolds’s speech, the question of discrimination against Asian applicants had not been explicitly placed within the context of affirmative action, at least not by someone in such a prominent position. But he noted “substantial statistical evidence” that Asian-Americans faced “higher hurdles than academically less qualified candidates of other races,” and he added that “rejection of such applicants ironically appears to be driven by the universities’ ‘affirmative-action’ policies aimed at favoring other, preferred racial minorities.” In this formulation, Asian students were being pitted against other minority groups for scarce, precious opportunities.

Over the next two years, the rules of the racial zero-sum game of college admissions took shape. The solidarity movements that started at Harvard in the late ’70s were supplanted by an uneasy coalition of conservative white politicians, writers and attorneys and Asian-American legal activists. In 1990, according to a lengthy study by Dana Y. Takagi, a professor at U.C. Santa Cruz, the Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into whether white applicants had been discriminated against at U.C. Berkeley. One of the original complainants was Arthur Hu, a Chinese-American software programmer who, using data made public by the school, had painstakingly charted the test scores and academic credentials of black, white, and Asian applicants.

Thirty years after Reynolds’s speech, Students for Fair Admissions revisited the 1988 playbook and filed its lawsuit against Harvard, claiming that its admissions process had discriminated against Asian applicants. During that time, the Asian population in the United States has grown to more than 21 million in 2016 from roughly 3.5 million in 1980, and a relatively narrowly defined group that used to apply mostly to Chinese and Japanese immigrants has been expanded to include everyone from the Hmong people to Koreans to South Asians. Attempts to corral all these peoples into one monolithic identity have become increasingly harder to reconcile. Asians are found throughout the socioeconomic spectrum. If it’s a silly endeavor to quantify racial oppression, it’s also absurd to equate the experience of a Sikh kid in Wisconsin with that of a Korean-American kid in Los Angeles.