Model victims.

JENNIFER RIEL's senior year at Sweetwater Union High School in Chula Vista, California, was a waltz from triumph to triumph. Student government leader, captain of the cheerleading  squad, class valedictorian--this Filipino-American, the daughter of immigrants, was a campus star. So how do you explain the rejection letter she got last spring from UC Berkeley? "They said I had to be a well-rounded student" Riel told the San Diego Union-Tribune. "Well, what else could I do?"

At least five of her classmates from Sweetwater were accepted at Berkeley. None had better grades. There was this difference: the others belonged to minority groups considered "underrepresented" in the system. What glass wall did Jennifer Riel run into? She and several Filipino classmates allege in a complaint to the U.S. Department of Education that UC's admission system is slanted unfairly against Filipino-Americans.

Here, then, is a flesh-and-blood example of how racial preferences tear at the social fabric. When merit is no longer the touchstone for advancement, you have a recipe for strife, as minority communities jostle each other in a clamor for ethnic spoils. Groups that have disdained easy charity in favor of hard-won achievement--Asians, for instance--lose out.

The UC system shrouds admission policies in opaque language, but the obsessive race-consciousness can't be hidden. Decipher the code, and it appears that at least 40 per cent of class places at UCLA and Berkeley are reserved for members of specially targeted minorities. To that privileged category, no Asians need apply.

In fact, anecdotes abound suggesting out-and-out bias against Asians in the form of ceilings on their numbers, just as Jews once experienced in the Ivy League. One of the most notorious was the complaint three years ago from an Asian-American woman who had applied to Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley's law school. One day she received a letter blandly informing her she was on "the Asian waiting list."

For all its ambiguities, the Bakke decision is clear in forbidding quotas. So are the relevant federal education statutes. The Department of Education has been looking into possible violations in the UC system for some time. When investigators announced that UCLA had indeed given illegal preference to whites over Asians in admissions to its mathematics grad programs, the chancellor scoffed. But he couldn't explain away the evidence. An internal memo from the school's admissions director, for instance, said the campus "will endeavor to curb the decline of Caucasian students" and implied the effort would result in fewer Asians on campus.

At Berkeley, the response to federal inquiries has been more contrite, on the surface. The chancellor there actually issued an apology of sorts in 1989: "It is clear that decisions made in the admissions process indisputably had a disproportionate impact on Asians." Said California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher: "That's academic gobbledygook for: `We discriminated.'"

Jennifer Riel's experience suggests Berkeley's repentance was long on lip service. True, administrative formulaties announce that "the University of California does not discriminate in any of its policies . . . on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, or handicap." But does anybody take it seriously--or has language at this great institution become so elastic that words are taken to convey the opposite of their actual meaning? In the winter 1991 issue of The American Scholar, Berkeley Professor Ernest Koeningsburg, who sat on an admissions panel, is quoted as saying members of a certain minority would be virtually guaranteed entrance with a 3.5 grade point and a 1200 SAT, while an Asian or white with those numbers would have less than a 5 per cent chance.

By one estimate from the late Eighties just over 19 per cent of students admitted to Berkeley were Asian-- about the percentage of Asians among the pool of California high-school grads academically eligible to attend UC. Given the celebrated achievement ethic of Asian immigrant communities, however, these figures still suggest an artificially low admission rate.

An Awkward Dilemma

THE problem with doing justice to this particular minority-- the awkward minority-is that it would require infusing more justice into the rest of the admission process. The web of reverse discrimination in favor of specially anointed groups couldn't be sustained if discrimination against Asians were ended.

Hence the angry response to critics such as Dana Rohrabacher. And hence the molasses-like pace of the Education Department's several probes. The assistant secretary for civil rights promised that at least one of the investigations would be concluded within four months; that promise came two years ago, and remains unfulfilled. With final reports in apparent limbo, there is no way for lay people to talk with confidence about the details of the situation; average citizens don't have access to the full range of data or its interpretation.

You have to wonder whether Washington would have taken so long to report back if it were other minority groups who were the alleged victims. Is racism OK when the targets are Asian Americans? As long as the feds keep dragging their feet on the UC inquiries, they're saying Yes.