(FORTUNE Magazine) – It had to happen, so now it is happening. Racial preference in college admissions, legitimized by the Supreme Court's infamous Bakke decision in 1978, is now being used against the wrong people. Even as we tap out these words, the U.S. Department of Education is looking into highly plausible complaints that certain colleges now go around discriminating against Asian American students when they are supposed to discriminate only against white kids. In the final year of the Reagan Administration, the President, the Secretary of Education, and the assistant attorney general for civil rights all sounded off loudly about the problem. It is clear enough what has happened to the Asian Americans. The logic of affirmative action has finally caught up with them. When this logic first took hold on the campuses, Asian American students were a barely visible minority. At elite universities in the mid-Seventies, they typically represented 1% or 2% of the students and were invariably included among the groups targeted for preferential treatment. The preference was always something of an anomaly, since the kids in question were known to be superior students who regularly outscored whites on the math portions of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. (Because so many of them grew up in non-English-speaking households, their ! verbal scores and total scores were somewhat below those of whites.) Still, just about all top-flight universities gave Asian Americans a break on admissions until the Eighties, when preference began turning into a major embarrassment. The embarrassment had several dimensions. First, it was no longer possible to think of Asian Americans in general as socially disadvantaged. The 1980 census data showed that they had higher median family incomes than did whites and were less likely than whites to be unemployed. They are also less likely to have dropped out of high school, more likely to have completed college, and more likely to be in technical, professional, and other high-status occupations. Furthermore, it was no longer possible for elite universities to tell themselves that they needed more Asian Americans in the interests of ''diversity'' (the alleged need for which was a major theme in Bakke). By the mid-Eighties, Asian Americans had come to represent 10% or so of the student body at many superior schools like Harvard and Brown, and 20% or so at many top-flight California schools, like Berkeley, which are of course much closer to Asian American population centers. In the pregnant word at the core of affirmative-action logic, they are ''overrepresented'' on campus. Could this logic be related to the recent declines in Asian American acceptance rates at Berkeley, UCLA, and other top schools? But of course. Affirmative-action logic states firmly that Asian Americans should now suffer reverse discrimination, just as the whities have suffered it for years. In California, furthermore, the same logic implies even more restrictive policies toward Asian Americans than toward whites. Berkeley, for example, is supposed to be striving for a student body racially representative of the state. But the state is 60% white, and only about 40% of recent freshman classes have been white. About 25% of those freshmen have been Asian American -- even though this group is less than 8% of the state's population. If you believe in affirmative-action logic, you should now favor preferences for whites over Asian Americans. Oddly enough, many fans of affirmative action are unwilling to see it this way. Editorializing on the DOE investigations the other day, the Washington Post brought forth a fascinating proposition. It happens to be one your correspondent approves of all the way, but he is puzzled to see it sitting on an editorial page where they keep drooling over affirmative action. - Proposition: ''The idea that there is anything intrinsically 'wrong' with a student body's being heavily Asian, if those students represent the best and ablest ones available, is . . . pernicious -- not to mention bad for the institutions involved.'' Could that sentence have appeared in the paper with ''white'' substituted for ''Asian''? One wonders, does not one?