When Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English and Spanish.

當約納桑．胡到南加州郊區上高中時，他很少聽人說中文，但漫步穿過柏克萊加大校園去上課時，胡常聽到有人說中文，不管是在廣場、自助餐廳、教室、研習室、宿舍及速食店。這是這所明星大學的語言之一，另外還有廣東話、英語和西班牙語。

I ask Mr. Hu what it's like to be on a campus that is overwhelmingly Asian--what it's like to be of the demographic moment. This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian.

我問胡在這個亞裔占壓倒性多數的校園是什麼感覺，在這人口統計學上的關鍵時刻作何感想。今秋和去秋，柏克萊亞裔新生人數創新高，約占46%；整體而言，大學部學生有41%是亞裔。

Hu shrugs, saying there is a fair amount of "selective self-racial segregation," which is not unusual at a university this size: about 24,000 undergraduates. "The different ethnic groups don't really interact that much," he said. "There's definitely a sense of sticking with your community." But, he quickly added, "People of my generation don't look at race as that big of a deal. People here, the freshmen and sophomores, they're pretty much like your average American teenagers."

胡聳聳肩說，對一所大學部有24,000名學生的大學，出現相當數目的「選擇性自我種族隔離」沒什麼特別的。「不同族群間其實互動不多，」 他說。「肯定會對你的社群死忠。」但他很快又說：「我們這一代並不認為種族問題是什麼了不得的事。這裡的學生，不管大一還是大二，和一般美國青少年相當類似。」

This is a global campus in a global age.

在全球化時代，這是個全球化的校園。

The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill does not mirror the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state's vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.

柏克萊正進行一場靜默革命，移民力量和人口統計數據正緩緩轉變，某些人感到困擾的是山丘上這所公立學府並未反映加州的種族面貌，目前加州有12%亞裔，是全美平均值兩倍，但這是加州自豪的公立大學系統的新風貌，在加大九個大學部校園中，亞裔是唯一最大族裔，約占37%。

The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation's most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.

公立大學經常為人傳頌的目標是要成為一個小宇宙，以此為例，是美國人口最多、人口結構最充滿動能的州的縮影，並以不同的文化、經濟背景和觀點豐富教學經驗。

But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it —specifically, for ignoring highly qualified Asian-American applicants in favor of other minorities with less stellar test scores and grades.

但在加州通過209號決議案，投票消除公立學府系統種族優遇之後十年，大學行政主管發現很難取得平衡點。同時，矯正歧視行動在許多方面，包括法院和州政府投票，均遭到挑戰。精英大學院校最近也因實施這套政策而備受抨擊，尤以跳過超優的亞裔申請學生，而錄取測驗成績和學業分數相形見絀的其他少數族裔學生最為人詬病。

In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4,809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).

在加州，亞裔嚴格的英才教育制度興起，犧牲了長久以來入學比例偏低的非洲裔和拉丁裔。今年洛杉磯加大全班4809人中，只有一百名非洲裔新生，創33年來新低。在柏克萊，3.6%新生是非洲裔，幾乎不到全加州比率的一半。柏克萊拉丁裔新鮮人占11%，甚至不到全加州35%的三分之一；白人新生占29%，也低於全州平均值44%。

This is in part because getting into Berkeley — U.S. News & World Report's top-ranked public university — has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this year's freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better.

這部分歸因於要上柏克萊這所被「美國新聞與世界報導」評為頂尖公立大學的學府，從未面臨這麼嚴峻的競爭。今年新生只收4157人，但有41,750人申請，其中近半加權學業平均分數達4.0，甚至更高。

Across the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation's best colleges: In 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.

在全美精英公私立大學，亞裔入學率幾乎創新高，亞裔占所有美國人口不到5%，但在全美一流大學院校學生中通常占10%到30%。在2005這個有全面數字的最後一年，亞裔占卡內基美隆大學和史丹福大學大學部學生的24%，麻省理工學院約占27%，耶魯大學約14%，普林斯頓大學約13%。

Asians have become the "new Jews," in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates," is a polemic against university admissions policies. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants.

套句丹尼爾．高登的話，亞裔已經變成「新猶太人」。高登在近著《入學的代價：美國統治階級如何花錢上精英學府──誰被踢出校門外》中質疑大學入學政策，這位「華爾街日報」記者指證歷歷說，20世紀上半葉，雖然猶太裔學生學業成績優異，常春藤盟校仍限制猶太裔學生人數，以維持學生以上層社會的新教徒為主。

Today, he writes, "Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science."

今天，他寫道：「亞裔美國人是被孤立的族群，他們不像其他少數族裔享有種族優勢，也沒有上流社會白人所享有的財富和家世優勢。亞裔被大學入學辦公室形塑為半機器人，被父母設定在數理科學上要領先群倫。」（摘譯自紐約時報）

《詞解》
cafeteria 自助餐廳
iconic university 明星大學
racial segregation 種族隔離政策
manicured 樹木修剪整齊
microcosm 小宇宙
affirmative action 矯正歧視行動
meritocracy 英才教育制度
underrepresented 比例偏低的
across-the-board 全面
odd group out 被孤立的族群
quasi-robots 半機器人