lpetrich
Contributor
How the Ivy League's Jewish quotas shaped higher education
Back then, they wanted mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.We’re talking literally about exactly a century ago, give or take a year, when Columbia, Harvard and Yale all first ventured into artificially restricting the number of Jews who would be admitted. Simply put, the big difference is that back then, diversity was seen as an unquestionably bad thing. And now diversity is seen as unquestionably a good thing
So instead of saying that they don't want Jews, they said that want more variety in their student body, like Southerners and Westerners. But that had the same effect, because there weren't as many Jews among those possible students.The same devices that were being used back then are being used today. Think about the idea of geographical diversity. It seems so completely benign on the surface, a college saying that we have students from all 50 states. But that idea was invented by Columbia, and quickly adopted by other Ivy League schools, because they found that they were admitting an extraordinary number of New Yorkers who were disproportionately Jewish.
So in an effort to keep them out, being very studious was held against them, despite the broader society claiming that it is a virtue and attacking people for supposedly not being very studious.All of these things that are baked into the admission process today—geographical diversity, the interview, legacy preferences—were invented expressly to keep the number of Jews down.
Q: Isn’t imposing quotas to increase diversity better than imposing them to limit diversity?
A: I mean, it’s very tricky. On the one hand, I think it’s progress that nobody is sitting in admissions offices right now talking about the “good” kind of Jew versus the “bad” kind of Jew—the assimilable Jew versus the unassimilable Jew. It’s progress that they’re no longer having conversations, as Dartmouth did, asking Jewish alumni to counsel the admissions office on how to get the “right” kind of Jew from among their own people.
On the other hand, the ways that a school like Harvard, it seems, is achieving its more admirable kind of diversity now, inevitably turn on mechanisms that reduce individual candidates to stereotypes. And the same stereotype that admissions officers had of Jews back in 1920—that they were nerds, they were grinds, they didn’t have the character to take full advantage of all of the extracurricular offerings because they would just go home at night to study—are absolutely the same stereotypes that are at play when Harvard assigns a ranking to something like character or courage and disproportionately grades down Asian American applicants. These things were pernicious then, and they’re pernicious now. And the other thing that they do in both cases, is they insert an element of dishonesty into the process.