In June 2023, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), striking down racial preferences that discriminated against whites but most blatantly against Asian-Americans in college admissions. It was one of the signal conservative judicial victories made possible by Donald Trump’s Court appointments. And, while colleges and universities have continued to resist it, it is clear that it marked, if not the beginning of the end of the “plot against merit” that has caught high-achieving Asian-American kids in its crosshairs, at least “the end of the beginning” of the effort to restore something resembling colorblind equality.

So, of course, there’s a certain kind of right-winger who just can’t stand it.

New Right writer Helen Andrews went on a Yellow Peril tweetstorm tear on X last month, bemoaning Asian “cheating” and “grind culture” and the “death spiral” of “unchecked meritocracy” seen in China, speculating that “the boom in Southern colleges is white flight from Asian educational norms,” criticizing high-skilled immigration, and fretting that, in the wake of the SFFA decision, the Harvard freshman class is now “over 40% Asian,” and “Asians outnumber whites” at many other top schools. She followed this up with a piece in Compact reiterating these themes and lamenting that the SFFA ruling had allegedly allowed affirmative action “to continue as long as it only harms whites and not Asians.”

In an echo of leftist elites, who, for years, defended the de facto Asian quotas resulting from affirmative action on the ground that white and black kids were “creative” while Asians were “textureless math grinds,” Andrews rhapsodized in her tweets about how the point of education should be to “find your passion,” unlike those grindy Asians focused only on “indiscriminately maximizing test scores.” This not only echoes the view of Harvard admissions officials who were found in SFFA to have offset the high scores of Asian applicants on objective measures of academic achievement like test scores by giving them consistently lower scores on a vague “personal rating” supposedly reflecting such wholly subjective traits as “kindness;” it also calls to mind an infamous “free to be you and me” quote from one-time conservative education reformer-turned-leftist culture warrior Diane Ravitch: “I don’t care if my grandsons have higher or lower scores than children in Japan or Korea. I care that they are curious about the world; are loved; learn to love learning; and are kind to their friends and to animals. Let’s all read Walden, read poetry, listen to good music, visit a museum, look at the stars.”

Andrews’s worry is that Asian “grind culture is absolutely going to kill off” America’s supposedly passion-based education system “if immigration continues,” and that “if America’s elite becomes over 40% Asian” like the Harvard freshman class, “we will come to resemble China and India in various ways,” including the increased normalization here of the “rampant cheating on tests in Asia.” This danger is so great, she says, that we should actually be more concerned about Asian immigration than that of less highly skilled groups, since “high-skilled immigration’s cultural effects are much greater because they shape the elite.”

In assessing her arguments, let’s start by stipulating that, as serious scholars once acknowledged, most ethnic and racial stereotypes contain a “kernel of truth.” For various complex historical, cultural, and maybe even biological reasons, many population subgroups—even ones as broadly defined as “Asians” or, say, “heritage Americans”—tend to, on average, exceed others on certain annoying traits, whether it’s “grind culture” or fentanyl addiction. And Andrews is surely right, as she argued in an earlier Compact article, that the culture of intense and unrelenting academic pressure in China and some other Asian countries has gone to harmful extremes. As she notes, even the Chinese government has recognized this and moved to curb it, for example, by banning most after-school tutoring.

But Andrews seems oblivious to the malleability of culture to assimilation, partic­ularly when we’re talking not about a resentful underclass culture but about a success-oriented culture eager to gain the acceptance of the native elite. In fact, as she herself unintentionally demonstrates, recent history teaches that assimilation into the American upper-middle class can not only “polish the rough edges” off an upstart, achievement-oriented immigrant group, but also make it less intensely achievement-oriented.

Andrews inadvertently highlights this when she first warns, none too subtly, that “the last ethnic succession in higher ed” rivalling the Asian ascendance now “was in the 1960s” with “the rise of meritocratic admissions” of another previously excluded demo­graphic group, and that it led directly to the radical campus upheavals of that era. She doesn’t expressly identify that group but sounds the alarm about “how the transition from a Jewish- to an Asian-inflected elite will affect the country’s culture and identity,” citing a 2023 Tablet article by Prof. Eric Kaufman titled “Trading Places.” But she misses a key piece—probably the key piece—of Kaufman’s findings: that Asians and Jews have traded places not just because of Asians’ inexorable grinding to the top, but because of what could be termed Jewish regression to the mean as they have grown more assimilated. “Jews are slowly fading from the American elite,” he notes at the outset, pointing to such incredible statistics as that Jews now constitute just six percent of the student body at Harvard, and seven percent in the Ivies—less than half of the infamous Jewish quota imposed on them a century ago, and barely a quarter of their 25 percent share before that quota.

There’s no reason to think that Asians, who have long been called the “New Jews,” won’t follow—indeed, aren’t already following—the same assimilation path, perhaps even including a climb-down from the most intense focus on academic success. Venture capitalist Garry Tan, responding to Andrews, documents that high-achieving Asian kids aren’t one-dimensional test-taking robots but participate in school sports and social life. And many Asian parents brought their families here precisely to get away from the brutal competition of Asian schools, so it follows that, even while maintaining the basic work ethic instilled in those schools, they do not wish to replicate its excesses or subject their children to them.

My experience raising my children in a predominantly white upper-middle-class New York neighborhood with a large Asian population confirms this. Far from the hellscape depicted by Andrews for white kids forced to attend school with Asians—”every day hearing that you’re white, you’re dumb”—the Chinese and Korean kids my kids went to school with fit in well with their white peers, while perhaps upping the scholastic game just a notch or two for them. And that’s not at all a bad thing for affluent white kids raised in our own soft culture of participation trophies and emotional coddling. You’d think that, contemplating our looming face-off with actual native Chinese, the nationalists of the New Right might appreciate that.

Andrews’s Compact follow-up rehashes some of her points on X, culminating in a renewed plea to limit high-skilled Asian immigration. But the aspect of the piece that has gotten the most buzz is her claim that after the SFFA decision, “Harvard did not stop discriminating by race, it simply stopped doing so against Asians.” Relatedly, Andrews seems to suggest that the decision actually permitted this outcome and that the plaintiffs made a strategic mistake in seeking such a ruling. These two assertions deserve separate treatment. Her numbers regarding Harvard’s behavior since the decision have some validity and illustrate how much work remains in pursuing colorblindness. But her foray into the law and legal strategy is simply wrong.

In fact, SFFA President Edward Blum and his lawyers, while laying out a damning case in their complaint that the cost of racial preferences for other minority groups had bizarrely come to be borne very largely by Asian-Americans, were crystal clear that “the proper response is the outright prohibition of racial preferences in university admissions—period.” And that is exactly the way Chief Justice John Roberts decided the case in his majority opinion, stressing that “[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Further, the Court decided the case along with a companion case brought by SFFA against the University of North Carolina, in which claims of anti-Asian discrimination were much less central, and which thus more squarely presented the issue of “reverse discrimination” against whites. The Chief Justice’s opinion did not distinguish between the two.

Andrews asserts that despite this, “[s]ince the ruling was issued, the share of Asians in Harvard’s freshman class has gone up from 26 percent … to 41 percent … but the share of whites has gone down [from] 47 percent [to] approximately 31 percent [while] Black and Latino shares have stayed roughly the same.” Her numbers may be slightly off. Most notably, as Robby Soave and Cathy Young have pointed out, the black and Latino shares have declined, though only by a few points to approximately 11 percent each in the current freshman class. The white share may also be slightly higher than her 31 percent estimate, which she acknowledges is an “inference” as Harvard does not disclose this figure.

Still, she is broadly correct about the trend lines and that the black and Latino proportions are far higher than one would expect from genuine compliance with the ruling. Harvard’s own research office estimated that eliminating preferences would yield an admitted class of at most 2.36 percent African-American and 4.07 percent Hispanic. She is also correct that Harvard’s apparent effort to redress its discrimination against Asian applicants—while keeping black and Latino representation as high as possible in defiance of the decision—has inevitably fallen hardest on white admissions.

Even if black and Latino shares had decreased to reflect a genuine end to preferences, the concomitant gains to other groups would have, quite fairly, gone overwhelmingly to Asian-Americans. Racial preferences in admissions for black and Latino applicants—particularly at elite colleges—have come almost entirely at the expense of Asians rather than whites. A 2005 study by two Princeton researchers reached the striking conclusion that if preferences were eliminated, nearly four out of every five places vacated by African-American and Hispanic students would be filled by Asians. An unpublished 2014 UCLA study similarly found that Asian-Americans were the only applicants negatively affected by “holistic admissions”—a euphemism for racial preferences—while whites were largely unaffected or even benefited slightly. Evidence in the Harvard case also showed that eliminating preferences would increase Asian enrollment by at least 2.5 to three times that of white enrollment.

This might seem incongruous, since there are many more white than Asian applicants even at elite schools. One would expect whites to bear at least a proportionate share of the cost of racial preferences. Yet they did not. Whites were apparently the last to go, while Asian-Americans were often the first. This pattern—along with the consistently lower “personal ratings” given to Asian applicants than to either blacks or whites at Harvard—suggests that admissions officers deciding who would give up seats in the name of diversity may have fallen back on familiar stereotypes of Asians as passionless, “textureless math grinds.” Ironically, these are the very stereotypes that Andrews, taking up the cudgels of the diversicrat left, continues to propagate.

In any event, Andrews has done a service in calling attention to Harvard’s apparent evasion of the Court’s ruling, even if its compliance would not redound primarily to her favored group. But Blum and those of us who have worked with him to end racial preferences always knew that the SFFA decision would at best be the “beginning of the end” of these preferences, and that there would be massive resistance from Harvard and other schools.

The answer to that, however, is to fight it, as Blum is doing, not to parrot, as Andrews does, every tired stereotype about Asian “grinds” that leftists used for years to defend discrimination.

Follow Dennis Saffran on X.