Hard work should pay off for Asian Americans, not block their education opportunities

In 1929, a few years after Yale instituted a quota for Jews, admissions chairman Robert Corwin received a letter from a Yale trustee complaining about too many Jewish names on the admissions list. "The list as published reads like some of the ‘begat’ portions of the Old Testament and might easily be mistaken for a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall,” Corwin agreed in his response.

Nearly a century later, according to a lawsuit filed by a former New York City Department of Education official, another department official implied that the most selective high school was taking too many Asians. “I walked into Stuyvesant HS, and I thought I was in Chinatown!” then-Deputy Chancellor Milady Baez told a 2018 staff meeting, the lawsuit claims.

In other words, these students are different from us. They are too hard-working, too high-achieving, too successful. They make us uncomfortable. They do not belong here.

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