In 1983, the East Coast Asian Student Union, a coalition of Asian American student organizations at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, analyzed the admissions data at twenty-five universities and concluded that an “alarming barrier” had been erected to prevent ethnic Asian students from “seeking higher education and better lives.” This inspired other studies, and from 1983 through the rest of the decade, students and administrators alike would search for evidence of racial bias. At Princeton, it was found, the admission rate for Asian Americans was only 14 percent, compared to 17 percent for white applicants and 48 percent for children of alumni. At Brown, research revealed that the admit rate for Asians had plummeted from 44 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 1987. At Stanford, Asians had filled out as many as one-third of the applications, but secured less than one-tenth of the enrollment. At Harvard, critics asserted that Asian Americans had the lowest rate of admissions for any racial group, even though the number of Asian applicants kept rising, and the applicants were “actually more qualified than anybody else.” After scrutinizing Harvard’s 1982 statistics, an outside team even concluded that, “in order to be offered admission, Asian Americans had to score an average of 112 points higher on the SAT than the Caucasians who were admitted.”

Even the state schools were turning away qualified Chinese American applicants. Traditionally, the best students in California had viewed Berkeley and other UC schools as safety nets in case they were rejected by more prestigious universities such as Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, and the Ivy League schools. For years, the only requirement for admission to Berkeley or UCLA was graduation within the top 12.5 percent of one’s high school class. Given the high concentration of Chinese and other Asian Americans on the West Coast, their numbers soared within the University of California system. Between 1966 and 1980, for example, the percentage of Asian American undergraduates at Berkeley had quadrupled from about 5 percent to 20 percent of the students. According to the New York Times in 1981, Berkeley officials fully expected 40 percent of the entering freshman class to be Asian American by 1990. But suddenly, in the mid-1980s, the pattern reversed and the numbers abruptly dropped.

In 1984, Ling-chi Wang, an ethnic studies professor at Berkeley and veteran activist, noticed that the number of Asian American enrollments fell 21 percent within a single year. Something, he believed, was terribly wrong. “As soon as the percentages of Asian students began reaching double digits at some universities, suddenly a red light went on,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t want to say there’s a conspiracy but university officials see the prevalence of Asians as a problem, and they have begun to look for ways to slow down the Asian American admissions. Are they scared of Berkeley’s becoming an Asian university? They’re shaking in their socks.”

A volunteer task force in the San Francisco Bay Area—including activists, judges, and professors of Chinese descent—quickly formed in 1984 to investigate the situation. They were shocked to discover that Berkeley had turned away students with perfect GPAs while admitting others who had not even submitted their grades or test scores. Reporting on the Berkeley controversy, the media began to draw parallels between the declining admission rates for Asian Americans and the stringent racial quotas that Jewish students had faced at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale between the 1920s and 1940s.

The media started to interview Chinese Americans who believed they had been unfairly treated by Berkeley. In 1987, Berkeley rejected Yat-Pang Au, the son of Hong Kong émigrés and a star student at Gunderson High School in San Jose, California. A straight-A student, Au had been the valedictorian of his class, won prizes for ten extracurricular activities, earned letters in cross-country and track, served as a justice on the school’s Supreme Court, and even operated a Junior Achievement company. When Au received the rejection letter in the mail, he read it over and over, “because I thought maybe I had misunderstood or that it wasn’t addressed to me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I had my mind and heart set on Berkeley. I’d thought about Berkeley for years; I’d worked hard in high school to get into Berkeley. I couldn’t believe I’d been turned down.”

Stunned to learn that ten other students with lower grades and test scores had been admitted, Au went to the press and publicly complained about the situation. When the Bay Area media reported the story, the Au family’s house was vandalized, and Au’s terrified mother ended up buying a gun and taking shooting lessons. For two years, Au attended De Anza, a local community college, before finally enrolling at Berkeley.