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 too many students from China who do little but eat, sleep and study, making the institution dull and the competition almost impossible to keep up with for white students who want to do a little post-secondary partying.

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

The strong reaction to the article is more indicative of the elements of truth, than evidence that presenting facile generalizations of Asians as being studious bores is racist. The writers attempted to interview students and ask them what they think about the 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.

And 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 of the article as well.

As Tony Kellar points out in the National Post, the fact so many non-whites are attending universities serves as a successful example of the advantages to merit-based scholastic acceptance:

Taken together, the data suggests that Asians are the largest group at UBC-Vancouver, at close to 50% 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 rabble isn’t keen to lob criticism at the piece. After 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.

And though I hardly need to remind journalists, the general public should probably be aware that we don’t write our own headlines save for our opinionated blogs. Indeed, that jewel of an unfunny headline above was all my creation.