The New Whiz Kids

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The performance of Asian Americans also triggers resentment and tension. "Anti-Asian activity in the form of violence, vandalism, harassment and intimidation continues to occur across the nation," the U.S. Civil Rights Commission declared last year. The situation can be particularly rough in inner-city schools. Young immigrant Asians complain that they are called "Chink" or "Chop Suey" and are constantly threatened. At New York City's Washington Irving High School, for example, there were reports last year of some 40 incidents of harassment and violence against Asian-American students.

To Asian-American activists, one of the most serious signs of discrimination is the admissions quotas they believe leading universities have established. "If you are an Asian-American student applying to Harvard, you have the lowest chance of getting in," says Peter Kiang, who teaches Asian-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. John Bunzel, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford, says he has found indications that Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and Brown discriminate against Asian Americans in their admissions policy.

For this fall's freshman class, Harvard's figures show it accepted 15% of the overall pool of 14,144 applicants, but only 12% of the Asian-American pool of 2,482. After a review of their admissions policies, Harvard and Princeton conceded that Asian-American applicants were accepted at lower rates than whites and other groups, but only because so many of them do not fall into two preferred categories: varsity athletes and children of alumni. Brown also concedes that it accepts a lower percentage of Asian-American candidates and explains that too many of these students have middle-class backgrounds, and that more than half expressed an interest in medicine. The college turns away a disproportionate number of them to enhance socioeconomic and academic diversity. Stanford, whose new freshman class will be 16% Asian-American, has acknowledged the possibility of an "unconscious bias" and no longer seeks ethnic identification on admissions forms.

The quota problem is not confined to colleges. At San Francisco's ultracompetitive Lowell High, Chinese Americans constitute 45% of the student body. But no city school may have more than 45% of its students from any ethnic group, a rule originally set by the courts to prevent de facto segregation of blacks and Hispanics. As a result, Lowell is having to turn away qualified Chinese-American students, a task that School Principal Alan Fibish describes as "odious."