With proponents of ethnic studies at Harvard still pressing their demands (they've planned a "teach-in" for this Wednesday), now is a good time to take another look at ethnic studies.

For the record, I was staunchly against setting up an ethnic studies concentration at Harvard last year, writing in The Crimson ("Multicultural Malaise," January 27, 1993) and speaking during Junior Parents' Weekend on a panel entitled "Expanding the Academic Perspective."

Now, I realize that ethnic studies is not necessarily a bad idea. But a balanced and nuanced approach to ethnic studies is not what Harvard minority activists seem to have in mind. So for them I have five caveats:

1. Ethnic studies should be even-handed and inclusive in its study of ethnic groups.

As it stands now, the ethnic studies movement at Harvard is really not all that inclusive. What these activists really want are the studies of non-white ethnic groups--namely, Asian-Americans and Latinos. They are not clamoring for Harvard to tenure a professor of Jewish-American or Italian-American history.

These ethnic studies advocates tend to operate on the false assumption that "ethnic" is synonymous with "people of color" and the opposite of "white." They want ethnic studies to be a counterpoise to the traditional study of American history and literature, which to them is really just the history and literature of dead white males.

But they forget that every "white" person descends from an "ethnic" person. And as a recent study on European immigrants by Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimers shows, many white immigrants faced a level of scorn that exceeds the discrimination Asians and Latinos face today.

Italian-American immigrants at the turn of the century were often beaten and called "just as bad as the Negroes." In 1875 The New York Times thought "it perhaps hopeless of civilizing [Italian-Americans], or keeping them in order, except by the arm of the law." Greeks were beaten and stereotyped as representatives of a lower species of human being. And Poles were called "animals."

Any proper ethnic studies program would see the experiences of these white immigrants as just as informative as the history of immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

2. Ethnic studies should not focus singlemindedly on discrimination and oppression.

Most ethnic groups in America have overcome discrimination, and there is no reason to assume that the most recent Asian and Latino immigrants cannot do the same.

As sociologist Christopher Jencks writes in a recent book, the "claim that many ethnic minorities overcame discrimination and achieved extraordinary affluence in America is clearly correct."

The best example is the Jews, who have historically suffered the most discrimination of any European group, yet are now by far the best-off ethnic group economically. Jewish households earn an average income that is 155 percent of the U.S. average. And at Ivy League schools, the gateways to success, Jewish students are overrepresented by a factor of ten.

There is little reason to suppose that the newest wave of Asian and Latino immigrants will not be able to repeat the success of their European forebears. The average Asian-American household income is now 127 percent of the U.S. average.

And according to a recent study by Linda Chavez, Latinos seem to be climbing and assimilating just the same. "Hispanics are succeeding as most other groups before them did," writes Chavez. "In fact, a careful examination of the voluminous data on the Hispanic population gathered by the Census Bureau and other federal agencies shows that, as a group, Hispanics have made progress in this society and that most of them have moved into the social and economic mainstream."