L*****E
发帖数: 658 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Military 讨论区 】
发信人: gshjj (各输己键), 信区: Military
标 题: Too Asian zt
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Fri Nov 19 10:11:31 2010, 美东)
When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal
College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go
to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The
only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains
Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia
billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and
McGill.”
Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger
brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head
“either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in
keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit
him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra,
who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for
a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation
that can be a bit of a killjoy.
Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this
article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “
reputation of being Asian.”
Discussing the role that race plays in the self-selecting communities that
more and more characterize university campuses makes many people
uncomfortable. Still, an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so
academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or
have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing
cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions
that they’re “too Asian.” It’s a term being used in some U.S. academic
circles to describe a phenomenon that’s become such a cause for concern to
university admissions officers and high school guidance counsellors that
several elite universities to the south have faced scandals in recent years
over limiting Asian applicants and keeping the numbers of white students
artificially high.
Although university administrators here are loath to discuss the issue,
students talk about it all the time. “Too Asian” is not about racism, say
students like Alexandra: many white students simply believe that competing
with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a
sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain
that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as
much as they’d like (too bad for them, most will say). Asian kids,
meanwhile, say they are resented for taking the spots of white kids. “At
graduation a Canadian—i.e. ‘white’—mother told me that I’m the reason
her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the
country are taking up university spots,” says Frankie Mao, a 22-year-old
arts student at the University of British Columbia. “I knew it was wrong,
being generalized in this category,” says Mao, “but f–k, I worked hard
for it.”
That Asian students work harder is a fact born out by hard data. They tend
to be strivers, high achievers and single-minded in their approach to
university. Stephen Hsu, a physics prof at the University of Oregon who has
written about the often subtle forms of discrimination faced by Asian-
American university applicants, describes them as doing “disproportionately
well—they tend to have high SAT scores, good grades in high school, and a
lot of them really want to go to top universities.” In Canada, say Canadian
high school guidance counsellors, that means the top-tier post-secondary
institutions with international profiles specializing in math, science and
business: U of T, UBC and the University of Waterloo. White students, by
contrast, are more likely to choose universities and build their school
lives around social interaction, athletics and self-actualization—and, yes,
alcohol. When the two styles collide, the result is separation rather than
integration.
The dilemma is this: Canadian institutions operate as pure meritocracies
when it comes to admissions, and admirably so. Privately, however, many in
the education community worry that universities risk becoming too skewed one
way, changing campus life—a debate that’s been more or less out in the
open in the U.S. for years but remains muted here. And that puts Canadian
universities in a quandary. If they openly address the issue of race they
expose themselves to criticisms that they are profiling and committing
an injustice. If they don’t, Canada’s universities, far from the cultural
mosaics they’re supposed to be—oases of dialogue, mutual understanding
and diversity—risk becoming places of many solitudes, deserts of non-
communication. It’s a tough question to have to think about.
Asian-Canadian students are far more likely to talk about and assert their
ethnic identities than white students. “I’m Asian,” says 21-year-old
Susie Su, a third-year student at UBC’s Sauder School of Business. “I do
have traditional Asian parents. I feel the pressure of finding a good job
and raising a good family.” That pressure helps shape more than just the
way Su handles study and school assignments; it shapes the way she interacts
with her colleagues. “If I feel like it’s going to be an event where it’
s all white people, I probably wouldn’t want to go,” she says. “There’s
a lot of just drinking. It’s not that I don’t like white people. But you
tend to hang out with people of the same race.”
Catherine Costigan, a psychology assistant prof at the University of
Victoria, says it’s unsurprising that Asian students are segregated from “
mainstream” campus life. She cites studies that show Chinese youth are
bullied more than their non-Asian peers. As a so-called “model minority,”
they are more frequently targeted because of being “too smart” and “
teachers’ pets.” To counter peer ostracism and resentment, Costigan says
Chinese students reaffirm their ethnicity.
The value of education has been drilled into Asian students by their parents
, likely for cultural and socio-economic reasons. “It’s often described
that Asians are the new Jews,” says Jon Reider, director of college
counselling at San Francisco University High School and a former Stanford
University admissions officer. “That in the face of discrimination, what
you do is you study. And there’s a long tradition in Chinese culture, for
example, going back to Confucius, of social mobility based on merit.”
Demographics contribute to the high degree of academic success among Asian-
Canadian students. “Our highly selective immigration process means that we
get many highly educated parents, so they have similar aspirations for their
children,” says Robert Sweet, a retired Lakehead University education prof
who has studied the parenting styles of immigrants as they relate to
education. Sweet’s latest study, “Post-high school pathways of immigrant
youth,” released last month, found that more than 70 per cent of students
in the Toronto District School Board who immigrated from East Asia went on
to university, compared to 52 per cent of Europeans, the next highest group,
and 12 per cent of Caribbean, the lowest. This is in contrast to English-
speaking Toronto students born in Canada—of which just 42 per cent
confirmed admission to university.
Diane Bondy, a recently retired Ottawa-area guidance counsellor, notes that
by the end of her 20-year career, competition among some Asian parents had
reached a fever pitch. “Asian parents do their homework and the students
are going to U of T or they’re going to Queen’s,” says Bondy, who points
out that “Asians get more support from their parents financially and
academically.” She also observed that the focus on academics was often to
the exclusion of social interaction. “The kids were getting 98 per cent but
they didn’t have other skills,” she says. “Their parents would come in
and write in the resumé letters that they were in clubs. But the kids weren
’t able to do anything in those clubs because they were academically
focused.”
Students can carry that narrow scope into university, where they risk
alienating their more fun-loving peers. The division is perhaps most extreme
at Waterloo, where students have dubbed the MC and DC buildings—the
Mathematics & Computer Building and the William G. Davis Computer Research
Centre, respectively—“mainland China” and “downtown China,” and where
some students told Maclean’s they can go for days without speaking English.
Writes one Waterloo mathematics graduate on an online forum: “I once had a
tutorial session for the whole class where the TA got frustrated with
speaking English and started giving the answer in Mandarin. A lot of the
class understood his answer.”
“My dad said if you don’t go into engineering, I won’t pay your tuition,
” says Jason Yin, a Taiwanese software engineering student at Waterloo. “
They are very traditional. They believe school is about work, studying, go
home and studying some more.” Hard-studying Waterloo lends itself
particularly to those goals. “We had a problem getting students out of
their bedrooms,” says Nikki Best, a former residence don who sits on
Waterloo’s student government, who explains they “didn’t want to get
behind in their grades because of coming out to social events.”
That’s not to say Asian students form any sort of monolithic presence on
Canadian campuses. “The mainland China group tends to stick together,”
says Anthony Wong, 19, a Waterloo software engineering student. “We can
talk to them,” says Jonathan Ing, also 19 and in Waterloo’s software
engineering program, “but we don’t mingle.” Complains Waterloo student
Simon Wang, a Chinese national who is frustrated by the segregation at
Waterloo: “Why bother to come to Canada and pay five times as much to speak
Chinese?” Meanwhile, Calgarian Joyce Chau identifies as “completely
whitewashed,” a “banana”: “I look Asian but I’m white in all other
respects.” Chau, a 19-year-old UBC business student, lived in residence her
first year, where she met the majority of her (white) friends. “It’s
harder to integrate into a group with Asians—you may or may not get
introduced,” says Chau, who accepts the segregation as just “part of the
university experience.”
Such balkanization is reflected in official student organizations: there is
little Asian representation on student government, campus newspapers or
college radio stations. At UBC, where the student body is roughly 40 per
cent Asian, not one Asian sits on the student executive. Same goes for
Waterloo. Asian students do, however, participate in organizations beyond
the university mainstream, and long-standing cultural clubs function as a
sort of ad hoc government. “After you graduate you won’t care about
student government, but you’ll care about your club,” says Stan He,
president of the Dragon Seed Connection, an on-campus Chinese club with over
300 members. (His business cards feature both dragon and robot motifs.) The
Dragon Seed offers its members social functions, tutoring help, volunteer
opportunities, poker and mah-jong tournaments, and special holiday parties—
including at Halloween and Christmas. It even has an exclusive partnership
with Solid Entertainment, a promotions and events-planning company that
sponsors massive fundraising events and gives Dragon Seed exclusive selling
rights on campus. He says that the dozen or so Asian clubs at UBC serve well
over 4,000 students and cater to the whole spectrum of cultural
identification—from “whitewashed” to “Honger,” a once-pejorative term
now adopted by students with Hong Kong backgrounds. The Dragon Seed lies
somewhere in between—“We’re the middle ground,” He says. “We have
international students, but we all speak English.”
Or take the Chinese Varsity Club. With upwards of 500 members, it’s the
largest student social club at UBC. The executives say they’ve captured a
niche market: Chinese commuter students from the outlying Richmond, Burnaby
and North Vancouver communities who hope to find a social network at the big
school. “Students from high school already hear about us from older
brothers and sisters,” says Peter Yang, the 21-year-old accounting student
who is the club’s VP external. “You want to break out of the cycle of
studying and being lonely,” says Brian Cheung, its president.
The impact of high admissions rates for Asian students has been an issue for
years in the U.S., where high school guidance counsellors have come to
accept that it’s just more difficult to sell their Asian applicants to
elite colleges. In 2006, at its annual meeting, the National Association for
College Admission Counseling explored the issue in an expert panel
discussion called “Too Asian?” One panellist, Rachel Cederberg—an Asian-
American then working as an admissions official at Colorado College—
described fellow admissions officers complaining of “yet another Asian
student who wants to major in math and science and who plays the violin.” A
Boston Globe article early this year asked, “Do colleges redline Asian-
Americans?” and concluded there’s likely an “Asian ceiling” at elite U.S
. universities. After California passed Proposition 209 in 1996 forbidding
affirmative action in the state’s public dealings, Asians soared to 40 per
cent of the population at public universities, even though they make up just
13 per cent of state residents. And U.S. studies suggest Ivy League schools
have taken the issue of Asian academic prowess so seriously that they’ve
operated with secret quotas for decades to maintain their WASP credentials.
In his 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton University
sociologist Thomas Espenshade surveyed 10 elite U.S. universities and found
that Asian applicants needed an extra 140 points on their SAT scores to be
on equal footing with white applicants. Scandals over such unfair admissions
practices have surfaced in recent years at Stanford, Harvard University,
the University of California at Berkeley and elsewhere. Hsu, the Oregon
physicist, draws a comparison between Asian-Americans and Jewish students
who began arriving at the Ivy League in the first half of the last century.
“You can find well-documented internal discussions at places like Harvard
and Yale and Princeton about why we shouldn’t admit these people, they’re
working so hard and they’re so obviously ambitious, but we want to keep our
WASP pedigree here.”
To quell the influx of Jewish students, Ivy League schools abandoned their
meritocratic admissions processes in favour of one that focused on the
details of an applicant’s private life—questions about race, religion,
even about the maiden name of an applicant’s mother. Schools also began
looking at such intangibles as character, personality and leadership
potential. Canadian universities, apart from highly competitive professional
programs and faculties, don’t quiz applicants the same way, and rely
entirely on transcripts. Likely that is a good thing. And yet, that
meritocratic process results, especially in Canada’s elite university
programs, in a concentration of Asian students.
The upshot is that race is defining Canadian university campuses in a way it
did not 25 years ago. Diversity has enriched these schools, but it has also
put them at risk of being increasingly fractured along ethnic lines. It’s
a superficial form of multiculturalism that is expressed in the main through
segregated, self-selecting, discrete communities. It would behoove the
leadership of our universities to recognize these issues and take them
seriously. And yet, that’s exactly what’s not happening. Indeed,
discussions with Canada’s top university presidents reveal for the most
part that they are in a state of denial.
“This is a non-issue,” wrote U of T president David Naylor in an email. “
We’ve never had a student complain about this. In fact, this is a false
stereotype, as we know that Asian students are fully engaged in
extracurricular activities. So the whole concept is false.”
As Cheryl Misak, the U of T’s VP and provost, puts it: “We have a properly
diverse mix, with no particular group extra prominent—we’re the rainbow
nation and we’ve got every sort of student and everyone is on merit.”
Waterloo president Feridun Hamdullahpur echoes a similar sentiment. “There
is a great tendency in our society to learn more about other nations and
other cultures,” he says. “Universities are the hotbed of these kind of
activities. If you want to see more economic and political diversity, I
think they star.”
These positions arguably represent a missed opportunity. Universities have
the potential of establishing real cultural change. It makes sense that the
head of the Canadian university with perhaps the highest number of Asian
students is the most candid and the most concerned. Indeed, Stephen Toope
has, since his arrival in 2006 as UBC president, made the issue central to
his agenda—including outreach and newspaper op-ed pieces touting the
importance of making the university campus a meeting place not only of
diversity but also of dialogue.
Among Canadian universities, UBC is one of the few institutions that
publishes the ethnic makeup of its student body. Toope says that the
university’s Asian student population is not “widely out of whack with the
community,” although the stats tell a slightly different story. According
to a 2009 UBC report on direct undergraduate entrants, 43 per cent of its
students self-identify as ethnically Chinese, Korean or Japanese, as
compared to 38 per cent who self-identify as white. Although Vancouver is a
richly diverse city, according to data from the 2006 census, just 21.5 per
cent of its residents identify as a Chinese, Korean or Japanese visible
minority.
Toope says drawing the various communities present on Canadian campuses into
a common medium can be challenging. “Across Canada it isn’t always the
case that you’re seeing as much engagement from the new communities as
perhaps we should,” he says. Toope uses the experience of Turkish
immigrants in Germany as a cautionary tale—“there are groups that never
find a way to participate in the broader community.” Such circumstances
persist precisely because the issue of race is not attacked head on. “I don
’t want to pretend that just because you have people from different
backgrounds they’re going to interact—they’re not,” Toope says. “We
have to actually create mechanisms, programs and opportunities for people to
interact. A university is one of the places that has the greatest capacity
to work through demographic change.”
Toope points us in the right direction. It’s unfair to change the
meritocratic entry system, so all universities can do—all they should do—
is encourage groups to mingle. Though it’s true that universities—U of T
and Waterloo included—do have diversity programs and policies for students,
newer, fresher ways are needed to help pry the ethnic ghettos open so
everyone hangs out together. Or at least they have the chance to. The white
kids may not find it’s too Asian after all. Alexandra, who chose to
go to Western for the party scene, found she “hated being away from home”
and moved back to Toronto. In retrospect, she didn’t like the vibe. “Some
people just want to drink 23 hours a day.” Alexandra says she still has
friends at Western who live in an “all-blond house” and are “stick thin.
” Rachel, Alexandra’s friend, says Western suits them—“they work hard,
get good grades, then slap on their clubbing clothes.” But it didn’t suit
Alexandra. She now studies at U of T. |
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