Hard work should pay off for Asian Americans, not block their education opportunities We’ve seen a burst of long-overdue attention to anti-Asian hate crimes. The assault on educational meritocracy threatens Asians in a different way. Jonathan Zimmerman Opinion contributor 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.