Too Smart for Your Own Good
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6
The call was scheduled for seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening, which meant Soo Yee had a full school day to get through first. She did this without difficulty. She had always been able to compartmentalize in the way that people who thought in systems could compartmentalize — the relevant process running in the background while the foreground handled whatever was immediately in front of it. She took notes in calculus. She ate lunch. She answered Mr. Castillo’s checking-in look in the hallway with a small nod that told him everything was fine and he nodded back and didn’t stop her.
What she was running in the background all day was not anxiety. It was preparation.
She had read everything publicly available on the two litigators Sung Min had named. Percy Givens had argued before the Supreme Court four times, twice on education cases. His record in federal civil rights litigation over twenty-two years was the kind of record that got cited in law review articles rather than just reported on. Maya Reinholt had spent eight years at the ACLU before going into private practice and had a particular history with institutional discrimination cases — universities, federal contractors, municipal employers — where the discriminatory mechanism was embedded in procedure rather than explicit policy. She understood invisible systems. That was her specialty.
The Georgetown professor was named Harold Sung, which Soo Yee noted without comment. He had written the definitive academic paper on disparate impact doctrine in higher education admissions and had been following the Harvard case since its inception.
These were serious people. She intended to be serious in return.
Her father moved his reading to the bedroom without being asked, which was his way of giving her the space without making a production of it. Her mother made tea and left it on the table and also withdrew. The apartment had the particular quiet of people being careful around something important.
Sung Min’s face appeared on the laptop screen at six fifty-five. He was in a conference room at Yale Law, which told her he had arranged access specifically for this call. Behind him the room was empty and the overhead lights gave everything the flat institutional brightness of a space designed for work rather than comfort.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“You asked me that before I published the site.”
“I’m asking again.”
“The same answer applies.”
He almost smiled. “They’re going to test you a little. Not to be difficult — they need to know how you hold up when someone pushes on the methodology. Givens in particular is going to want to see how you respond to a challenge.”
“If the challenge is legitimate I’ll incorporate it. If it isn’t I’ll explain why.”
“That’s the right answer. Just — “ He paused. “Remember what Mr. Castillo said. They’ll be processing at a different speed than you. Let them get there.”
“I remember.”
At seven o’clock exactly three new windows opened on her screen. Givens was a large man in his fifties with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and the unhurried manner of someone who had sat across from difficult people for decades and had stopped finding it interesting. Reinholt was younger, sharp-faced, with the focused attention of someone who listened for the thing underneath the thing being said. Professor Sung was slight and precise and had a yellow legal pad in front of him with writing already on it.
“Soo Yee,” Givens said. Not a question. Just establishing that they were beginning.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to skip the introductions since Sung Min has covered those. I want to go directly to your methodology because that’s where any challenge to this record is going to land first. Walk me through the cross-referencing process.”
She did. Precisely, in the order she had constructed it, with the decision points explained and the alternative approaches she had considered and rejected and why. She spoke for six minutes without interruption. When she finished Givens looked at something off-screen — she assumed his own copy of the site — and then looked back.
“You controlled for legacy applicants,” he said.
“Yes. Legacy status correlates with both demographic profile and admissions outcome, so it needed to be isolated as a variable. Removing legacy applicants from the comparison pool actually strengthens the pattern rather than weakening it because it eliminates a confounding factor that could otherwise be used to explain part of the disparity.”
“You anticipated that objection.”
“I anticipated most of the obvious ones. They’re addressed in the methodology note.”
Reinholt leaned forward slightly. “What about athlete recruitment? Same variable problem.”
“Controlled for. Athletic recruits follow a separate admissions track that produces different score distributions across all categories including personal score. Including them distorts the comparison. Excluding them isolates the pattern in the general applicant pool where the disparity is most consistent.”
Reinholt looked at Givens. Something passed between them that Soo Yee read as confirmation of something they had already discussed before this call.
Professor Sung spoke for the first time. “Your significance threshold. You used 0.003 percent. That’s considerably more conservative than the standard p-value used in most social science research.”
“I know. I used a more conservative threshold specifically because I anticipated that the standard threshold would be challenged as insufficient for a claim of this magnitude. If the pattern holds at 0.003 percent it holds at any threshold a court is likely to apply.”
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