LibertasPost

Maclean’s contributors Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Köhler wrote a controversial article recently called ‘Too Asian’? that explores the demographic curiosities of Canadian universities. In particular the University of Toronto was cited as being full of students from China who do little but eat, sleep and study. As a result, the school is dull and the competition brutally hard for white students who enjoy a little post-secondary partying.

You may judge the journalistic merits of the article yourself, but I thought that — other than it being a tad ambitious for a magazine to find authoritative interview sources to speak about the relative whiteness or non-whiteness of a university—the authors did a good attempt at discussing a topic generally ignored.

The article inspired a strong backlash from people who believed it presented facile generalizations of Asians as studious bores, and thus was racist. In truth, the writers attempted to interview students and ask them what they think about demographic trends and they were given answers that some people didn’t want to hear.

But that’s hardly a reason to shoot the messenger.

Let’s face it. Our society has cultivated an over-sensitivity to racial profiling to the point that legitimate statistical evidence is wrongly construed. It seems most people missed the big success story outlined in the article as well.

As Tony Kellar points out in The National Post, the fact so many non-whites are attending universities aply demonstrates the advantages of merit-based scholastic acceptance:

“Taken together, the data suggests that Asians are the largest group at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, making up nearly half of the undergrad student body. That’s above the proportion of Asian-Canadians in Vancouver’s population and far above the proportion in the population of B.C., or Canada.

To which we should say: hallelujah. Break out the champagne already. Canadian visible minorities are somewhat more likely than white Canadians to attend university. And Asian Canadians, the country’s largest immigrant and minority group, appear to be more likely to attend university than the majority white population. This is a problem?”

Even noted left-wing website rabble.ca isn’t keen to lob criticism at the piece. Priming himself to be enraged about an article he had heard was warning of an “Asian invasion,” Amarnath Amarasingam writes:

“After reading the article, I suspected that many of the critics had not bothered to read past the title before concluding that Maclean’s was engaging in moral panic, fear mongering, irresponsible journalism and racism.

[...] I suspect that if the article was entitled “Asian students working hard at Canadian universities” instead of “‘Too Asian’?” it would not have incited much controversy.”

Though I hardly need to remind journalists, the general public should also be aware that reporters generally don’t write their own headlines. So don’t blame the Maclean’s reporters for provocative headlines and contentious (but honest) reporting.