At highly selective colleges, the quotas are implicit, but very real. So are the psychological consequences. At Northwestern, Asian-American students tell me that they feel ashamed of their identity — that they feel viewed as a faceless bunch of geeks and virtuosos. When they succeed, their peers chalk it up to “being Asian.” They are too smart and hard-working for their own good.
In an act of solidarity with the late Aaron Swartz's crusade to liberate publicly funded knowledge for all, many academics have been posting open-access PDFs of their research. While it's been a noteworthy gesture, the problem of open access isn’t just about freeing and sharing scholarly information. It's also about the psychology and incentives around scholarly publishing.