This is the title of a NYT opinion piece by Carolyn
Chen, Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern. In it,
she argues forcefully for lifting the quotas for Asian Americans at top
universities, the way those were renoved for superachieving Jewish students
back in the 1960s. Of course, the Asian quotas can now only be secret, which
makes their fallout all the more devastating: “At
highly selective colleges, the quotas are implicit, but very real. So are the
psychological consequences. At Northwestern, Asian-American students tell me
that they feel ashamed of their identity — that they feel viewed as a faceless
bunch of geeks and virtuosos. When they succeed, their peers chalk it up to ‘being Asian.’ They are too smart and hard-working for their
own good.”
And Amy Chua’s “tiger mom” bravado comes in for a beating since it “set back Asian kids by attributing their successes to
overzealous (and even pathological) parenting rather than individual effort.”
Given the current Zeitgeist, it’s hard to argue
against such a passionate defense of true meritocracy (a vision whose presence
in Dr. Chen’s column is also implicit). Yet, for the sake of the argument, a
couple of possible concerns can be pondered briefly:
1. The word “meritocracy” had its origins in British
social satire back in the 1950s.
2. As Adam Curtis’s documentaries seek to demonstrate, some
individuals can, perhaps, be too smart for their own – and society’s – good (and no, he isn't picking on Asians - or Jews, for that matter).
3. The academic (and musical) successes of Asian
Americans are obviously not the result only of individual effort. There must be
some structural reason why a much larger proportion of any group would engage –
and often excel – in specific pursuits; or do the opposite.
4. Dr. Chen claims she would still support affirmative
action for underprivileged minorities. But once you make individual effort and
reward the measure of all things, it’s not quite clear on what grounds any
affirmative action can be supported.
These points, of course, would be mute from a mostly individualistic
perspective on social practices. Dr. Chen, by the way, is an associate
professor of sociology. So is Eric Klinenberg.
