Arthur Hu: One Man's Fight For `Fairness In Diversity'

WHO is Arthur Hu?

He has been dubbed the "Rush Limbaugh of the Asian community" by affirmative-action bureaucrats. His work has been cited by economist Thomas Sowell, conservative scholars Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein (in "The Bell Curve"), and author Dinesh D'Souza (in "Illiberal Education and The End of Racism"). By day, he's a software engineer in Seattle; by night, he's a one-man, number-crunching, in-your-face truth squad fighting for the principle of "Fairness in Diversity."

Ivory-tower liberals "are screwing everyone," Hu said to me last week in an interview. Their notion of campus diversity, "diversity of skin color only," is "a joke."

"The biggest beneficiaries of race-based policies aren't the students," Hu complains, "but the people who make a living designing them."

In 1989, Hu filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. After conducting an independent analysis of undergraduate admissions data, Hu had concluded that the University of California at Berkeley's "policy of parity" - admitting students "in proportions at least equal to their racial proportion among state high-school graduates" - resulted in illegal quotas for nonwhite students. He alerted the feds to "quotas and differential admissions standards at UC Berkeley" that discriminated "not only against Asians, but against all racial groups."

As Hu noted bluntly in the complaint, "We cannot pretend to enforce a civil-rights law which prohibits discrimination by race or gender if that same law effectively requires the use of racial preference to address numerical `imbalance.' " He called on the Office of Civil Rights to rule any affirmative-action program based on strict proportional representation to be discriminatory and illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In addition, Hu demanded full disclosure of all university admission rates and test scores broken down by race. As he discovered, "it is almost impossible for independent researchers to get (leading universities) to release" this data.

After seven long years, the feds finally got around to responding to Hu last week. They determined that UC Berkeley was "in compliance" with federal civil-rights law and they ignored his call for full disclosure. As the Los Angeles Times headline read: "Probe Finds No Bias in Admissions at Berkeley."

Surprise, surprise. As Hu pointed out to me, the diversity mandarins in California had retreated from their most explicit quotas, racial preferences and strict proportionalism almost immediately after he filed his complaint. "But they're still playing games behind closed doors," Hu warns. As evidence, he observes that the proponents of race-based preferences apply their ideal of proportional representation selectively. Black students, who comprise about 7 percent of the undergraduate student body at Berkeley, have now reached "parity" with their numbers in the state's population of high-school graduates.

Whites, on the other hand, make up 31 percent of Berkeley undergrads - despite accounting for about half of all high-school graduates in California. Yet, guess which group continues to get special treatment as "underrepresented" minorities?

Then there's the astounding 288-point gap in SAT scores between blacks and whites at Berkeley, the highest in the nation reported by the Consortium on Financing Higher Education. Whatever the reason for the discrepancy, the university code of silence about it is intolerable. As Hu insists, "Any dean of admissions who claims to be color blind while actually using vastly different grade and test scores standards should be fired or at least publicly ridiculed."

The Asian dilemma poses even thornier problems. Over a decade ago, Chinese and Japanese-American activists expressed outrage over "underrepresentation" of their groups at Berkeley; now they are "overrepresented" on many elite campuses and at risk of being quota-ed out. It has already happened at the secondary level; until this year, Chinese applicants to Lowell High School, a prestigious public high school in San Francisco, were openly forced to score higher on entrance exams than any other racial group.

Many Asian leaders remain shamefully silent about such disparate treatment in order to maintain solidarity with liberal minority coalitions. As Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield noted recently, "Representation has to do with political power, not with academic excellence."

That is why Arthur Hu argues for abandonment of strict proportionalism and adoption of "Fairness in Diversity." Fairness demands that high achievers be "let alone" to succeed, rather than penalized by unjust caps and race-norming. It requires full disclosure of all preferences and uses of differential standards. And it requires recognition that the mere existence of statistical disparities on campus and in the workplace does not justify massive, racially motivated government intervention.

(Internet users can visit Hu's Fairness in Diversity web site at http://www.halcyon.com/arthurhu/. His "Index of Diversity" is one of the most comprehensive databases on race and affirmative action available to the public.)

The software engineer from Seattle is not alone in combatting social engineers of race-based policies. As the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week, "the classification of persons on the basis of race for the purpose of diversity frustrates, rather than facilitates, the goals of equal protection." If there is any lesson government can teach, the judges concluded, it is that "in all we do in life, whatever we do in life, to treat any person less well than another or to favor any more than another for being black or white or brown or red, is wrong."

To those who continue to defend race-based preferences, one question lingers: Just what part of "equal" don't you understand?

Michelle Malkin is currently the Warren Brookes Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Her column appears Tuesday on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is: malkin1@ix.netcom.com.