The field of Asian-American Studies has a problem. Consider the Association for Asian-American Studies (AAAS), whose 2018 conference theme was “Solidarity and Resistance: Toward Asian-American Commitment To Fierce Alliances.” As the organization’s president, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials explains, that theme flows out of the history of Asian-American Studies–a field brought to life by “student activists and faculty protestors” in the 1960s. But the left-wing politics that led the AAAS to endorse the boycott of Israel and to disregard anti-Semitism within the boycott movement also blinds its adherents to some forms of discrimination against Asian Americans.

Janelle Wong, a professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies took to the Chronicle of Higher Education last week to complain about the situation at Harvard, which is being sued over its affirmative action policies. The plaintiffs contend that those policies discriminate against Asian applicants. Professor Wong’s complaint is that, well, Asian-Americans are complaining.

First, Wong argues, Asian-Americans are a much higher percentage of the student body at places like Harvard and Yale than they are of the U.S. population. At Yale, for example, they are matriculated “at a rate three times greater than their numbers in the population.” Though Wong doesn’t claim this evidence is decisive, she plainly considers it a strong reason to doubt that Ivy League schools discriminate against Asians. But it isn’t.

In 1922, Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell sought to institute a Jewish quota. He had discovered that a major cause of anti-Semitism is the presence of Jews. “The anti-Semitic feeling among students is increasing,” he worried, “and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews.” At the time, though, Jews constituted over 20 percent of Harvard’s student body and only around 3.5 percent of the U.S. population. According to Wong’s logic, they had nothing to complain about. Lowell didn’t get the quota he wanted, but new standards did put downward pressure on the troublingly high Jewish population in universities.

But Wong is not done. She is positively eager to deny that “Asian-Americans need higher test scores than non-Asian-Americans to get into a highly selective college.” She explains that this “myth” has been “debunked” and refers us to a book that came out this month. I’d be surprised if it explained away the fact that Asian students make up 43 percent of the student body at the California Institute of Technology, which does not consider race in admissions decisions, and 26 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which does.

That comparison is not dispositive, and it isn’t proof of discrimination. Perhaps Caltech favors areas of study in which Asian students are overrepresented or simply gets more Asian applicants. Professor Wong’s argument is nonetheless a rare and surprising spectacle. How often does one see a person of the left, usually eager to make the leap from disparity to discrimination, mount a vociferous attack on those who acknowledge what appears to be an obvious case of discrimination?

Jews see that sort of thing often, and many have stuck with the left nonetheless. Let’s hope Asian-Americans prove less inclined to shrug and let it pass.