Journalist Mark Oppenheimer wrote an opinion article in the New York Times, describing the long history of antiSemitism at elite colleges. Stanford University apologized for its limited enrollment of Jews in the 1950. The apology came at a time when anti-Semitism is surging on college campuses and in society.
But restricting the number of Jews admitted to Ivy League campuses is nothing new. The top Ivy League colleges introduced strict quotas in the 1920s, fearful of being overwhelmed by Jewish students.
To anyone who understands the history of Jewish exclusion on elite campuses, the central findings of a recently released, long-awaited report from Stanford University were no shock. The report confirmed that Stanford admissions officers purposefully limited the enrollment of Jewish students in the 1950s, in part by greatly reducing the number of applicants admitted from heavily Jewish public high schools.
What’s surprising is that these discriminatory measures were, comparatively, so mild and so late to come about. Elite Northeastern schools perfected Jewish exclusion decades before Stanford got in on the act.
In the 1920s, Columbia and Harvard began seeking students from the South and West as a means of limiting the number of students from more Jewish school systems in the Northeast — the very idea of “geographical diversity” was invented to keep out Jews. From 1928 through 1938, Columbia operated Seth Low Junior College, a two-year school in Brooklyn to which Jews were relegated to keep the student body of its Manhattan campus more Protestant. And Yale decided, in 1922, to restrict Jewish enrollment, which it did until the 1960s.
Given that history, and the increase in antisemitism today in the United States, the most noteworthy aspect of the Stanford report is its long list of proposed steps for atonement, or teshuvah, to use the Hebrew word invoked by its authors. The recommendations show noble intentions, but they also reveal the limitations of official university action in fighting what may be the world’s most enduring prejudice.
How universities balance the ethnic compositions of their student bodies is an urgent question right now, as the Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments on two cases challenging affirmative action, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In several months, when it rules on the legality of their admissions practices, the court may forbid the use of race or ethnicity as considerations. If so, partisans on both sides will argue about what such a change means for “diversity,” especially the imperative to admit historically underrepresented people of color, like Black and Hispanic Americans.
These fights are nothing new. As the plaintiffs note in their brief on the Harvard case, in 1922 Harvard began to suss out which applicants were Jewish, in part by asking questions like, “What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully.)” Indeed, as scholars like Jerome Karabel and Robert McCaughey haveshown, the modern college application process, from the form to the interview, were developed to weed out Jews.
Stanford adopted some of this playbook midway through the last century, so its reckoning is welcome. Some of its report’s recommended steps for atonement are symbolic, like issuing an official apology (which Stanford just did). Other steps are more concrete, like better accommodating students who need kosher food or don’t use technology on the Sabbath, and thus can’t use electronic key cards on Saturday. The report recommends paying better attention to the Jewish calendar, so the start of school does not conflict with Jewish holidays — as it did this year, when first-quarter classes started on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year….
Jewish students today are faced with a growing antisemitism that is rooted in widespread ignorance. In September, the Wellesley student newspaper published an editorial that relied on the blatantly antisemitic Mapping Project, a crude website that implies that institutions in Massachusetts including Emerson, Tufts and Harvard, a Boston-area Jewish high school, and even a public school system (Newton) are part of a web of conspiratorial Zionism. (The newspaper later said it did not “endorse” the Mapping Project.) Other institutions, like Northwestern, near Chicago, have seen incidents of swastika graffiti on their campuses.
And this year, students at a Jewish fraternity at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo told me that fellow students regularly shouted anti-Jewish slurs at them when they walked by the fraternity house. The Cal Poly students told me the hate speech is so common that they don’t even bother to report it.
College campuses are merely reflections of the national mood. The Anti-Defamation Leaguesays there was a 167 percent increase in antisemitic assaults from 2020 to 2021. But given that context, what might address the problem at schools?
Leadership, for one thing — like the kind modeled by Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, who condemned the Mapping Project as promoting antisemitism. A renewed focus on the humanities is another part of the solution. As students rush to major in subjects deemed useful — fields like economics and computer science — they are leaving history and philosophy in the dust.
As a college lecturer, most recently for 15 years at Yale, I have been surprised by the gaps in students’ historical knowledge. I’ve had students who thought that President John F. Kennedy had email and that American slavery ended in the 20th century. Some students didn’t realize Holocaust survivors still walk the earth, and many knew nothing of other genocides, from Rwanda to Cambodia.
Paradoxically, ignorance is flourishing at a time when many students seem more interested than ever in history. They are dismayed that their dormitories and classroom buildings are named after slaveholders, and they know that there is something problematic about Christopher Columbus, even if they can’t always say what. These students are ill served by curriculums that have downgraded the study of history, literature and philosophy.
Narrow-mindedness hurts us all, not only Jews. But encouraging and empowering students to discuss the history of Jews — to know anything about Jews — is the one indispensable way for schools to atone for their antisemitic past. I suspect that more Stanford students have learned about antisemitism from their school’s mea culpa than from classes they’ve taken there.
I am a graduate of Wellesley College, and I was very proud when the College’s President Paula Johnson called out the student newspaper for supporting The Mapping Project, an attempt to name and shame Jews who did not follow the newspaper’s politically correct views. Dr. Johnson did not interfere with the publication, but she said forcefully that there’s no room on campus for bigotry.
Any restriction during admissions which is unrelated to the preparadness of the student for her studies is questionable.
Read “The Big Test: The Secret History of America’s Meritocracy,” by Nicholas Lemann. It’s about how the SAT was engineered to keep Jews out of the Ivies.
My husband is Jewish and went to U Virginia for undergrad and med school. I asked him if they had quotas there. (They didn’t admit women or Blacks when he was an undergraduate.) He replied, “Well, I noticed they admitted just enough Jews to fill three fraternity houses.”
I second the recommendation of The Big Test. Great stuff. Diane has also written quite a bit about this topic.
My high school was at least 80% Jewish. On the Jewish holidays a few us “shiksas” and Blacks would show up to a mostly empty school. Most of my friends were Christian whites and blacks. While I never had any overt negative social experiences in the school, I felt as though there was a social divide at the school. I didn’t travel in the same cultural circles as most of the Jewish students. My one Jewish friend was the pharmacist’s daughter who also lived in my blue collar neighborhood. Part of the divide may have been socioeconomic as well. Overall, it gave me some perspective into what it was like to be a minority without the trauma of being beaten or unfairly arrested like so many minority groups.
Agreed on the downgrading of history and geography. My 9th grade students come to the only geography class they will ever take not knowing how many continents or oceans there are and not knowing the difference between a country and a continent. They have never been taught any history or geography until 7th grade because of the rigid focus on ELA and STEM to the exclusion of everything else. No arts, no history, no geography. And this is one of the few states that actually requires geography for graduation. I can’t imagine how bad it is elsewhere.
Just my parental opinion……By the time parents realize what their children haven’t been taught it is too late. When the kids reach HS and they don’t have the basic knowledge (scaffolding) from previous classes, they struggle with the higher level content. Kids taking higher level maths in HS struggle because they never mastered fractions or learned the Order of Operations. Kids taking AP History or Gov’t never learned the basics and struggle by having to cram in so much back learning just to make sense of the AP content. And yet school systems want to extend the day….for what!!??….more test prep for stupid standardized tests.
You’re exactly right. I us d to assume some basic background knowledge of students when they entered my class. I can’t assume that anymore. I DO NOT blame the elementary schools and teachers. They don’t have choice. It’s only tested subjects and some tech thrown in. Kids are taught how to code as young as Kindergarten, but don’t know who won the American Revolution or that My. Everest is not the mountain with Presidents (both questions I have asked multiple times).;
What moron first decided to teach the first half of American history in 7th grade and the second half in 11th grade? I often look at the standard curriculum and think that someone must have formed a committee to come up with the dumbest, most counterproductive way to teach. Let’s start foreign languages in middle school or high school, after the innate grammar-learning device in the young brain starts shutting down. Let’s start trying to teach extremely abstract mathematical concepts YEARS BEFORE kids have developed the ability to think overtly in abstract terms. Let’s teach abstract skills to concretely thinking little kids. Insanity. But habits of the tribe.
Peopole are fooled into doing extremely abstract stuff with little kids by two phenomena. One is the Clever Hans phenomenon. They signal to kids without being aware that they are doing so and falsely attribute abstract reasoning to them. A second is confusion of automatic, unconscious processing with overt, conscious processing. Yes, little kids form an unconscious model of the grammar of a language, and on the basis of this, they made decisions about grammaticality. But this is NOT because they learned, applied, we taught or can articulate the abstract rules involved. Overtly, kids are extremely concrete thinkers. They don’t develop the ability to think in abstract, conceptual terms until their mid-teens to mid-twenties.
That we have not addressed developmental readiness for instruction should be a national scandal.
People have claimed for decades that it’s not important to teach facts, that one should concentrate instead on “skills.” Often they do this based on a mind-blowingly stupid, spurious argument that facts change. But, ofc, the speed of light will still be 299,792,458 meters per second tomorrow, and Kant will still be the guy who formulated the categorical imperative and Trump will still be a Russian asset who took national security documents to his beach club. So, for much of what we are interested in kids and adults knowing, this facts change stuff just is not true. Unfortunately, we have lots and lots of teachers who serve up lesson after lesson after lesson in which kids supposedly “practice their skills” from which kids walk away having learning nothing, zip, nada, niente.
Oh, we were practicing our inferencing skills.
Give me a break. You might as well be having them drink soda while calling it culinary school. The soda? We’re practicing our gustatory and digestion skills. Here are the standards we’re covering.
Nonsense.
People have claimed for decades that it’s not important to teach facts, that one should concentrate instead on “skills.” Often they do this based on a spurious argument that facts change. But, ofc, the speed of light will still be 299,792,458 meters per second tomorrow, and Kant will still be the guy who formulated the categorical imperative, and 1 and 1 will be 2, and Trump will still be a Russian asset who took national security documents to his beach club. So, for much of what we are interested in kids and adults knowing, this “facts change” stuff just is not true. Unfortunately, we have lots and lots of teachers who serve up lesson after lesson after lesson in which kids supposedly “practice their skills” from which kids walk away having learning nothing, zip, nada, niente.
Oh, we were practicing our inferencing skills.
Give me a break. You might as well be having them drink soda while calling it culinary school. The soda? We’re practicing our gustatory and digestion skills. Here are the standards we’re covering.
Nonsense.
Oh how I hate WordPress moderation.
“the first half of American history in 7th grade and the second half in 11th grade? ”
The third half is key and they never even get to that.
We must throw over the testing and the skills-based instruction and return to exciting, knowledge-based curricula.
You are correct.
Bob, I dunno what “knowledge” is. What is it in math, for example?
Ah. But first you will have to explain to me what math is.
Many people seem to think geography is useless.
But Rebekah Jones , the brilliant woman who developed a COVID tracker for Florida has a PhD in geography.
Obviously, she learned something about scientific thinking and problem solving in her geography classes.
time for the nation to sit up and take notice that much of what kids do not get taught is due to our nation’s long decades of test-fanaticism as much as for the recent push about anti-CRT
and don’t forget the people who have claimed for decades that it’s not important to teach facts, that one should concentrate instead on “skills”–folks who serve up lesson after lesson after lesson from which kids walk away having learning nothing, zip, nada, niente.
Oh, we were practicing our inferencing skills.
Give me a freaking break. You might as well have been drinking soda and calling it culinary school.
Shortly after I entered Northwestern in 1963 (only yesterday!) the Daily Northwestern had an expose on admissions: there were four categories of applications and quotas for each. Category 1 White Anglo Saxon Protestant. 2 Catholic, 3 Jewish, 4 other which at that time was primarily Black. You could almost be assured that any Black person at that time was an athlete. And this heavily Greek school had sororities and fraternities for each “minority” population. It was a pretty devastating expose. I left the next year – proud graduate of the U of Michigan, home of the first sit-in and where I marched in my first anti-war “parade.”
!!!!
Any idea what the numbers were for legacy students?
It’s growing more and more. Check out the article and please look at the 2 minute video: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/us/fbi-newark-threat-to-synagogues
Thank you RM for link
“I’ve had students who thought that President John F. Kennedy had email”
Maybe they are confusing email with female.
John F. Kennedy had female — many of them.
At least the student didn’t think the Revolutionary army stormed the airports like a certain former President that graduated from U. Penn.
Exactly
Trump might have a degree, but there is no way he earned the grades. There was undoubtedly a lot of pocket lining with $100 bills going on.
And I suspect he is not alone in that regard. (George Dumbya Bush)
As Tevya says in Fiddler on the Roof, “When you’re rich, you really don’t have to know”
Here’s the thing I never really got: why are people outraged now? This has been going on since–at least, if not earlier- the early 20th century in the US and most of Western industrialized world. Against any students, like Jews, who are “the others.”
Eight years ago, Neil Steinberg wrote at his blog about his son’s college visit
to Notre Dame. Steinberg cited US News and World Report- “Among the nation’s top 25 universities, Notre Dame has the fewest percentage of Jewish students.”
PR that burnishes the image of the Catholic Church is evident to me in recent media articles and reporting. IMO, the American historians in the future who review the lead up to Christian theocracy and government preference for the two major religions and their adherents, won’t ignore the USCCB’s religious liberty arguments and their success in enacting legislation favorable to the Catholic Church.
For the Church and its universities to develop plans that show outreach to people of Jewish faith is easy. In contrast, a religionist’s task in gaining GOP judges and politicians who advance male, patriarchal religion is more difficult. Future scholars will be able to document the result of the politicized, conservative Christians’ efforts.
A couple of articles worth reading, “Catholic bishops’ religious liberty fight enables anti-Jewish discrimination,” Religion Dispatches, 11-2-2018.
And, for anti-Semitic canards like blood libel, 4-6-2021, Notes from Poland,
“Jewish Museum condemns Catholic University for not disciplining professor over ritual murder claims.” The university referenced is the foremost Catholic University in Poland.