Before a general policy can be formulated on this great question it must engage the attention of the Governing Board and the Faculties and it is likely to be discussed by alumni and undergraduates. A professor of social ethics asked his class to discuss whether religious restrictions were ethically justified. Even the Nation, in commenting on the genteel tradition at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, conceded that the infiltration of a mass of pushing young men with a foreign accent accustomed to overcome discrimination by self-assertiveness would obviously change the character of any of these institutions and lessen its social prestige. However, the Nations editorial did not defend quotas. His construction of compulsory freshman dormitories won him a reputation as a champion of democracy. . It was resigned to the inevitability that some of the beauty of the aristocratic tradition would be lost, but argued that America should not imitate the methods of the most backward in Europe. As might be expected, Jewish opinion challenged the legitimacy of judging applicants in terms of character as well as intelligence. Acting on this assumption, at least two universities have singled out areas of high Jewish concentration as deserving lowest priority in the recruitment of students. The Eastern collegeselitist, tradition-bound, repositories of Puritan values and upper-class standardscould not remain untouched by these trends, especially when their enrollments contained increasing numbers of Jewish students. The basic truth is that racial and religious prejudice was one of the underpinnings of upper-class society. For one thing Jews tended to avoid campuses like Yale and Princeton that had a reputation for bigotry, and to seek out othersCity College, New York University, and Columbiathat offered a less hostile atmosphere as well as proximity to New Yorks Lower East Side.
Ironically, Lowells correspondent was himself a Harvard graduate and his son had received his previous schooling at fashionable Exeter Academy. As a small minority, Jews are obviously threatened by the concept of proportional representation. Indeed, the very idea of quotas is anathema to Jews. Public spirit and interest in fellows were Christian virtues; Jews were outsiders who cared only for themselves. When the Board dramatically met in emergency session and announced that no changes in the colleges entrance requirements would be made until after the committee had reported, the opponents of quotas probably assumed that the administration was on the retreat. Lost your password? The subtle thing which we call manners, among them differs from the manners of Americans generally. Prior to the East European immigration, American Jews had been a small, inconspicuous, and highly assimilated group. American Jews have an important stake in the nation's system of higher education.
A number of other Eastern colleges showed rapid increases in their Jewish enrollment.
. Other factors were also at work. Rather it was argued that the college stood for other things, and that social standards were as important and valid as intellectual ones. By 1924, the year that immigration quotas were imposed, the nations Jewish population had increased to approximately four million. [each] with qualities which can enrich our common heritage.. More recent trends, however, threaten to alter the structure of educational opportunity for Jews. As he wrote on one occasion: This question is with us. Thanks to the presence of a New York Times reporter, the event was reported in the press. I am sorry to have to tell you that in the Freshman Halls, where residence is compulsory, we have felt from the beginning the necessity of not including colored men. The report continued: The other part of the problem, namely, the building up of a new group of men from the West and South and, in general, from good high schools in towns and small cities, is more difficult. The difficulty was that students from these regions did not receive a high-school education that, in quality or substance, prepared them for Harvard College. Why did Harvard not proceed more discreetly and simply adopt the subterfuges employed elsewhere? If not for the history of virulent anti-Semitism and the various stigmas attached to Jews, their cultural characteristics would have received less notice. Nothing more need be said about the class of students who took faculty, textbooks, and debating seriously; they were not very different from the contemporary college student with serious aspirations, a competitive spirit, and a respect for scholarship. One writer in 1910 observed that in colleges there were two classes, the one, favored according to undergraduate thinking, holding its position by financial ability to have a good time with leisure for carrying off athletic and other showy prizes; the other class in sheer desperation taking the faculty, textbooks, and debating more seriously. By 1880 the attitude that all knowledge must begin with the classics gave way to demands for practical education. As one historian, John Higham, writes: . For the first time the conflict between the status claims of the elite colleges and their educational functions became apparent. In one instance a quota was specifically aimed at students from the New York City metropolitan area. The Boston City Council passed its own resolution condemning the Harvard administration. . A writer in a 1923 edition of the Nation put it bluntly: the upwardly mobile Jew sends his children to college a generation or two sooner than other stocks, and as a result there are in fact more dirty Jews and tactless Jews in college than dirty and tactless Italians, Armenians, or Slovaks.. At least some administrators of Eastern colleges shared the anti-Jewish sentiments of their students, hardly surprising since both groups had similar social origins. Thanks to their penchant for education and their determination to succeed, Jews availed themselves of the newly created opportunities more than did other groups. By 1920 Harvards Jewish enrollment reached 20 per cent; no restrictions were yet in effect. The second has been the lowering of discriminatory barriers that once limited Jewish access to many private colleges, including some of the most prestigious colleges in the nation. This trend could severely restrict Jewish access to some of the largest universities in the nation. Nevertheless, many Jews are alarmed by the introduction of unofficial quotas favorable to black applicants. In addition, Jews were strategically located within the power structure of the university. . In addition, Jews are heavily represented among faculty in institutions of higher learning. With determination, average intellect, and modest financial resources, a student could make his way through the academic system. According to the prevailing image, Jews did not use fair play but employed unfair methods to get ahead. In the final analysis, the class origins and ethnic peculiarities of Jews were only of secondary importance. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which honor societies, Greek-letter fraternities, eating clubs, and sports dominated undergraduate life. Under President Eliots administration, Harvard earned a reputation as the most liberal and democratic of the Big Three and therefore Jews did not feel that the avenue to a prestigious college was altogether closed. Jewish college students during the 1920s carried the mark of their immigrant culture. The Jewish population of New York, the port of arrival for most immigrants, grew from 80,000 in 1880 to 1,225,000 in 1910. In contrast, the quotas adopted in recent years are designed to increase the representation of disprivileged blacks. The new immigration, as it was called, made Jews visible as a group for the first time. We cannot solve it by forgetting or ignoring it. In his commencement address a week later he added a touch of eloquence: To shut the eyes to an actual problem of this kind and ignore its existence, or to refuse to grapple with it courageously, would be unworthy of a university. The problem was that Jewish enrollment at Harvard had increased from 6 per cent in 1908 to 20 per cent in 1922. But the effort to maintain standards against untrained minds and spirits is not oppression or prejudice. According to Laurence Vessey: The undergraduate temperament was marked by a strong resistance to abstract thinking and to the work of the classroom in general, by traits of practicality, romanticism, and high-spiritedness, and by passive acceptance of moral, political, and religious values taken from the non-academic society at large. One might assume that the President of Harvard was motivated by a sincere desire to preserve Harvards historic identity, rather than by anti-Semitism. They did so, first of all, because they were lower class, and frequently exhibited ethnic characteristics that violated what Veblen called the canons of genteel intercourse. Secondly, the seriousness and diligence with which they pursued their academic careers not only represented unwelcome competition, but implicitly called into question the propriety of a gentlemens college. Finally, Jews were unwanted simply because they were Jews, and it was feared that their presence might diminish the social standing of the college and its students. One comments begrudgingly: History is full of examples where one race has displaced another by underliving and overworking. Indeed, Jewish academic success, and the willingness of Jews to violate the taboo on scholarship (as one Yale professor called it), was a source of considerable resentment, and constituted no small part of the Jewish problem.. The tendency was to think of all Jews in terms of the immigrant, and to think of all non-Jews in terms of the highest standards of gentility and Christian virtue. America now had a Jewish problem, and American nativism a new target. They destroy the unity of the college. They are governed by selfishness. Jews are an unassimilable race, as dangerous to a college as indigestible food to a man. Other responses were not explicitly anti-Jewish. The latter argument did not accuse Jews of any objectionable behavior, but assumed the absence of qualities necessary for the preservation of the institutions special character. Before the 1920s only criteria of scholastic performance were used in the admissions process; now admissions boards began to scrutinize the outside interests of students. Most Jews are socially untrained, and their bodily habits are not good. Racial and religious oppression and prejudice have no place in America, and least of all in academic environments.
Just as important as the physical expansion of the university were the related qualitative changes. . indeed, their exclusion from societies stimulates their education on the intellectual side; and a final judgement on the whole matter would depend in part on the relative importance we give to college work and college life. His prediction that Jews would pioneer a new and higher conception of the purpose of university education may have proved correct in some respects.
The fact that the Jewish entry into institutions of higher learning began with second- rather than third- or fourth-generation Jews was of utmost significance. The committees assigned task was not simply to study religious quotas, but to review all of Harvards admissions procedures. But in fact quotas were instituted, though concealed behind a number of subterfuges. It is natural that with a widespread discussion of this sort going on there should be talk about the proportion of Jews at the college. Still others, under the pretext of seeking a regional balance, gave preference to students outside the East and thereby limited the number of Jews, almost all of whom lived in the East. . It is evident that a tide of bigotry swept college campuses during the 1920s, just as it did the nation as a whole. . Moreover, Jews were heavily concentrated in the urban centers of the Northeast, where they did in fact constitute a significant portion of the population. Lowell, however, was determined to avoid the indirect methods employed elsewhere. The following from a Harvard professor was typical: Many Jews have personal and social qualities and habits that are unpleasant. Other changes will affect Jews selectively. As a consequence there were a number of Jewish districts that elected Jewish candidates to the State Legislature. As Russell says: It was a fierce and gruelling competition. To the other dormitories and dining rooms they are admitted freely, but in the Freshman Halls I am sure you will understand why . Other Eastern colleges had already employed this as a strategy for excluding Jews (between 1920 and 1922 Columbia instituted regional quotas, with the result that the Jewish proportion at the college was cut in half, from 40 to 22 per cent) and although no comparable figures are available for Harvard, there is no reason to think that its motives were different. . [Emphasis added.]. Significantly, the figure for Harvard was lower47 per cent. Secondly, Harvards governing body, the Board of Overseers, had one Jewish member, Judge Julian W. Mack of Chicago, who was a leader in the American Jewish Congress. These reforms, the report asserted, would solve one part of our problem.. As the Forwards editorial observed: You dont find many German, Irish, or Italian children in City College. .
Within each institution was a wealthy class who dominated social life and set patterns imitated throughout the system of higher education. He is to be the transmitter to others of ideals of mind, spirit, and conduct. This problem is really a group of problems, all difficult, and most of them needing for their settlement more facts than we now have. For largely independent reasons, the mood inside the colleges was also undergoing change. In recent years many state universities have adopted percentage restrictions against out-of-state students. On the surface upper-class Protestants may have been protecting their status prerogatives and their cultural symbols. It shows our capacity to make sacrifices for our children . . That Harvard could be the goal of anyones ambitions never occurred to me.
Columbias run by Jews. . At the top of the hierarchy stood Harvard, Yale, Princeton, with Columbia struggling to retain its elite position. Each class runs in the same rut all its life. Second-generation Jews obviously did not have the economic resources or the social standing to participate in the collegiate leisure class. For them a college education was less a mark of status than a vehicle out of the lower class, and this inevitably gave Jews a sense of purpose lacking elsewhere. A policy of recruiting nationally can be, and often is, defended on legitimate grounds. Start your risk free trial with unlimited access. In the seventeen ranking universities, the proportion of Jews is 17 per cent, and among faculty in such fields of traditional Jewish concentration as medicine, law, and social science, the proportion of Jews runs as high as one-third. .
As one writer in a 1922 journal put it: Each student in an American college is there, for some other purpose than acquiring knowledge. As Lowell said in a letter to the father of one of Harvards black freshmen: . The Speaker obliged Lowell with a public statement that dismissed the press report as idle rumor, adding that Harvard would remain, as in the past, a great university for all the people. Although exceptions were sometimes made, Jews were generally excluded from the honor societies and eating clubs at Yale and Princeton. First, there were the Jewish alumni, like the one quoted above, who were outspoken in their opposition to quotas. Finally, the Governor appointed a committee to investigate possible discrimination at Harvard. . But it would be equally naive to assume that class and ethnic differences alone explain the unfavorable attitudes toward Jews that prevailed in educated circles. In addition, school principals were asked to rank students on such characteristics as fair play, public spirit, interest in fellows, and leadership, These traits were exactly the opposite of those generally ascribed to Jews. It is said to increase the quality of the student body, to diversify and enrich student culture, and to extend the influence of the college at the same time opportunities are extended to deserving students outside the East.
Practically all the political agitation over quotas was confined to a five-day period that began with the Harvard announcement raising the possibility that they might be instituted and ended with a decision by the colleges Board of Overseers to refer the issue to a special faculty committee. The spectacle of over one million Jews clustered in New York City aroused the predictable xenophobic reaction. In 1885, a group of leading Reform rabbis adopted a statement of principles that rejected whatever in Mosaic law was not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization., A small Jewish population, its integration into the class system, the absence of sharp cultural differences between Jews and non-Jews, the mood of accommodation in the Jewish communitythese factors contributed to a low level of religious conflict during most of the 19th century. . Most were either descendants of early settlers or recent German immigrants. The leading institutions were measured more in terms of these status characteristics than by standards of scholarship or academic achievement. Impoverished, refugees from persecution, natives of an alien and sometimes backward culture, adherents of pre-modern religious beliefs and customs, the East European Jews were a new factor in American life. Ironically, this only reinforced the prevalent notion that Jewish students were clannish and unassimilable. The man who, in his commencement address six months earlier, had extolled the contributions each immigrant group could make to the evolving American, now in private conversation asserted that a Jew could not be both a Jew and an American.
It was largely in response to this development that, as Oscar and Mary Handlin put it, after 1880 the longings for exclusive, quasi-aristocratic status increasingly found satisfaction in associations with an hereditary basis. Yankee ancestry became a condition for respectability, and the old class sought refuge in exclusive societies and resorts. The Jewish takeover of City College, whose student body was by then over 80 per cent Jewish, served as a warning. They had the bitter experience of being treated as outcasts, and some had to settle for a less prestigious education. Scholarship is perhaps the most strongly emphasized of these ideals, but it is not the only one, or even the one most generally prized. The fact of the matter is that Jews did not face intense competition from non-Jews, at least not on the scale that is characteristic today. . It was not until the influx of Jewish students that Eastern colleges began to worry about achieving a regional balance and it was not until the crisis over Harvards proposed quotas that a students geographical background was deemed relevant to his admission to the college. While campus anti-Semitism probably left Jews with a feeling of social inferiority, it was a small price to pay for education and economic advancement. Thanks to the basic structural changes in society that transformed American higher education, the opportunities existed in the first place. From a historical perspective it makes little sense to explain Jewish academic success in terms of a special aptitude or brilliance on the part of Jews. Leadership was seen as a prerogative of non-Jews; Jews exhibiting this quality would be regarded as pushy. School principals, who were invariably Protestant and middle class, could be expected to reflect these stereotypes in evaluating their Jewish students. . Lowells letter began with the disclaimer that there is perhaps no body of men in the United States . Without its pejorative implications the notion of a Jewish invasion would not be inappropriate for describing the trends in these institutions prior to World War I. A third political resource was the presence of Jews among the faculty at Harvard. As one Jewish writer put it: We think that a university which keeps a man out because it doesnt like his character is almost as benighted as the one which would sift him out because he is a Jew.. However unpleasant, social discrimination was not a serious disability. In the class of eighty-three, forty-one defended religious quotas. Lowell believed that he was acting courageously. .
If anyone reciting made a mistake that the master overlooked, twenty hands shot into the air to bring it to his attention. This the committee did with apparent good conscience. About 90 per cent of the boys there are Jews, and most of them children of Jewish workers. What the Forward neglected to mention was that, according to one early report, as the percentage of Russian-Jewish boys in attendance increased, the families of Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, and Huguenot descent, who had been accustomed to register their boys in the College in the old days, sent them elsewhere for a college education.. The full text was as follows: The great increase which has recently taken place in the number of students at Harvard College, as at the other colleges, has brought up forcibly the problem of the limitation of enrollment. A ceiling on the number of Jews at Harvard was therefore in the interest of both groups. The editorial in the Jewish Daily Forward could take pride in Jewish students marching off to City College with clothes that were mostly poor and old. But they were greeted with indignation and hostility by their upper-class schoolmates, especially in the elite Eastern colleges. before 1880 or 1890 there were too few American Jews for them to constitute a question., More than small numbers was involved.
Lowell never denied the encounter on the train, though a statement issued by his office claimed that the newspaper report grossly misrepresents his views. The statement continued sanctimoniously: His earnest desire is to see anti-Semitic prejudice and Semitic segregation abolished in this country, and he believes that Jews and Gentiles should work together to this end. No one suggested that Jewish students threatened academic standards. Discrimination became commonplace in neighborhoods, clubs, resorts, and private boarding schools, and was making headway wherever else Jews turned in large numbers. By 1920 a pattern of anti-Jewish discrimination had become established, and was being sustained by an upsurge of anti-Jewish propaganda, especially in the Northeast where the Jewish settlements were located. . But prejudice was a factor in the very definition of status, just as it was a factor in the choice of cultural symbols. Negro civil-rights groups agitated against it, and 149 Harvard alumni signed a protest petition. The New York Times reported that Harvard officials were surprised since they had assumed that any plan for a State investigation would die a natural death.. This was an impressive response from the official sector, unusual for the 1920s. Advocates of quotas did not question the right of Jews to a college education. In all they numbered roughly a quarter of a million in a population of sixty-three million, or just six-tenths of one per cent. as well as our love for education, for intellectual effort. While the Jewish passion for education is easily romanticized, the fact is that Jewish immigrants did place high value on education and sent their children to college in disproportionate numbers. [Emphasis added.]. The criticism that was marshaled against President Lowell and Harvard owes itself in large measure to the political influence that Jews enjoyed both within and outside the university. . In 1890 the editor of the American Hebrew mailed a questionnaire to a number of prominent Christians, including several college presidents and professors. Explore the scintillating July/August 2022 issue of Commentary. . When on the other hand, the number of Jews was small, the race antagonism was small also. To the public, and possibly to themselves, they maintained the fiction of non-discriminatory admissions. Another proposal called for a review of the tax exemptions that Harvard enjoyed on its property. Like the proposed religious quotas, the color ban became a cause clbre. Several weeks later, at a synagogue forum on discrimination against Negroes, Kramer described his encounter with Lowell. . As a consequence they were unable to pass Harvards entrance examination. These come in large measure from the social isolation to which they have been subjected for centuries, by the prejudice and ignorance of Christian communities. In 1922 admission to Harvard was guaranteed to anyone with the appropriate high-school training who passed an entrance examination. Veblen bluntly called them gentlemens colleges where scholarship is . . We have not at present sufficient classrooms or dormitories, to take care of any further large increase. A climate of intolerance prevailed in many Eastern colleges long before discriminatory quotas were contemplated by college officials. From a practically invisible minority of 3 per cent, by 1920 Jews constituted 30 per cent of the citys population. They have the memory of the numerus clausus that restricted Jewish access to universities in Russia. New York University was also reported to have sharply reduced the number of Jewish students. There was none of the Roxbury solidarity of pupils versus the master.
Numerous writers during the early 1900s commented on the outstanding academic record of Jewish students. It was no doubt as a reflection of class formation elsewhere in society that higher education assumed the features of a caste system. It removed the issue of quotas from the public arena and insulated Harvards officialdom from public scrutiny and political pressure. World War I fanned the flames of nationalism, and a combination of political demagoguery and nativist propaganda heightened anti-Jewish feeling. First of all, cutbacks in government funding of higher education have brought an abrupt end to a quarter-century of steady growth, and this will inevitably influence the educational chances of Jews and non-Jews alike.
Ironically, Lowells correspondent was himself a Harvard graduate and his son had received his previous schooling at fashionable Exeter Academy. As a small minority, Jews are obviously threatened by the concept of proportional representation. Indeed, the very idea of quotas is anathema to Jews. Public spirit and interest in fellows were Christian virtues; Jews were outsiders who cared only for themselves. When the Board dramatically met in emergency session and announced that no changes in the colleges entrance requirements would be made until after the committee had reported, the opponents of quotas probably assumed that the administration was on the retreat. Lost your password? The subtle thing which we call manners, among them differs from the manners of Americans generally. Prior to the East European immigration, American Jews had been a small, inconspicuous, and highly assimilated group. American Jews have an important stake in the nation's system of higher education.
A number of other Eastern colleges showed rapid increases in their Jewish enrollment.
. Other factors were also at work. Rather it was argued that the college stood for other things, and that social standards were as important and valid as intellectual ones. By 1924, the year that immigration quotas were imposed, the nations Jewish population had increased to approximately four million. [each] with qualities which can enrich our common heritage.. More recent trends, however, threaten to alter the structure of educational opportunity for Jews. As he wrote on one occasion: This question is with us. Thanks to the presence of a New York Times reporter, the event was reported in the press. I am sorry to have to tell you that in the Freshman Halls, where residence is compulsory, we have felt from the beginning the necessity of not including colored men. The report continued: The other part of the problem, namely, the building up of a new group of men from the West and South and, in general, from good high schools in towns and small cities, is more difficult. The difficulty was that students from these regions did not receive a high-school education that, in quality or substance, prepared them for Harvard College. Why did Harvard not proceed more discreetly and simply adopt the subterfuges employed elsewhere? If not for the history of virulent anti-Semitism and the various stigmas attached to Jews, their cultural characteristics would have received less notice. Nothing more need be said about the class of students who took faculty, textbooks, and debating seriously; they were not very different from the contemporary college student with serious aspirations, a competitive spirit, and a respect for scholarship. One writer in 1910 observed that in colleges there were two classes, the one, favored according to undergraduate thinking, holding its position by financial ability to have a good time with leisure for carrying off athletic and other showy prizes; the other class in sheer desperation taking the faculty, textbooks, and debating more seriously. By 1880 the attitude that all knowledge must begin with the classics gave way to demands for practical education. As one historian, John Higham, writes: . For the first time the conflict between the status claims of the elite colleges and their educational functions became apparent. In one instance a quota was specifically aimed at students from the New York City metropolitan area. The Boston City Council passed its own resolution condemning the Harvard administration. . A writer in a 1923 edition of the Nation put it bluntly: the upwardly mobile Jew sends his children to college a generation or two sooner than other stocks, and as a result there are in fact more dirty Jews and tactless Jews in college than dirty and tactless Italians, Armenians, or Slovaks.. At least some administrators of Eastern colleges shared the anti-Jewish sentiments of their students, hardly surprising since both groups had similar social origins. Thanks to their penchant for education and their determination to succeed, Jews availed themselves of the newly created opportunities more than did other groups. By 1920 Harvards Jewish enrollment reached 20 per cent; no restrictions were yet in effect. The second has been the lowering of discriminatory barriers that once limited Jewish access to many private colleges, including some of the most prestigious colleges in the nation. This trend could severely restrict Jewish access to some of the largest universities in the nation. Nevertheless, many Jews are alarmed by the introduction of unofficial quotas favorable to black applicants. In addition, Jews were strategically located within the power structure of the university. . In addition, Jews are heavily represented among faculty in institutions of higher learning. With determination, average intellect, and modest financial resources, a student could make his way through the academic system. According to the prevailing image, Jews did not use fair play but employed unfair methods to get ahead. In the final analysis, the class origins and ethnic peculiarities of Jews were only of secondary importance. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which honor societies, Greek-letter fraternities, eating clubs, and sports dominated undergraduate life. Under President Eliots administration, Harvard earned a reputation as the most liberal and democratic of the Big Three and therefore Jews did not feel that the avenue to a prestigious college was altogether closed. Jewish college students during the 1920s carried the mark of their immigrant culture. The Jewish population of New York, the port of arrival for most immigrants, grew from 80,000 in 1880 to 1,225,000 in 1910. In contrast, the quotas adopted in recent years are designed to increase the representation of disprivileged blacks. The new immigration, as it was called, made Jews visible as a group for the first time. We cannot solve it by forgetting or ignoring it. In his commencement address a week later he added a touch of eloquence: To shut the eyes to an actual problem of this kind and ignore its existence, or to refuse to grapple with it courageously, would be unworthy of a university. The problem was that Jewish enrollment at Harvard had increased from 6 per cent in 1908 to 20 per cent in 1922. But the effort to maintain standards against untrained minds and spirits is not oppression or prejudice. According to Laurence Vessey: The undergraduate temperament was marked by a strong resistance to abstract thinking and to the work of the classroom in general, by traits of practicality, romanticism, and high-spiritedness, and by passive acceptance of moral, political, and religious values taken from the non-academic society at large. One might assume that the President of Harvard was motivated by a sincere desire to preserve Harvards historic identity, rather than by anti-Semitism. They did so, first of all, because they were lower class, and frequently exhibited ethnic characteristics that violated what Veblen called the canons of genteel intercourse. Secondly, the seriousness and diligence with which they pursued their academic careers not only represented unwelcome competition, but implicitly called into question the propriety of a gentlemens college. Finally, Jews were unwanted simply because they were Jews, and it was feared that their presence might diminish the social standing of the college and its students. One comments begrudgingly: History is full of examples where one race has displaced another by underliving and overworking. Indeed, Jewish academic success, and the willingness of Jews to violate the taboo on scholarship (as one Yale professor called it), was a source of considerable resentment, and constituted no small part of the Jewish problem.. The tendency was to think of all Jews in terms of the immigrant, and to think of all non-Jews in terms of the highest standards of gentility and Christian virtue. America now had a Jewish problem, and American nativism a new target. They destroy the unity of the college. They are governed by selfishness. Jews are an unassimilable race, as dangerous to a college as indigestible food to a man. Other responses were not explicitly anti-Jewish. The latter argument did not accuse Jews of any objectionable behavior, but assumed the absence of qualities necessary for the preservation of the institutions special character. Before the 1920s only criteria of scholastic performance were used in the admissions process; now admissions boards began to scrutinize the outside interests of students. Most Jews are socially untrained, and their bodily habits are not good. Racial and religious oppression and prejudice have no place in America, and least of all in academic environments.
Just as important as the physical expansion of the university were the related qualitative changes. . indeed, their exclusion from societies stimulates their education on the intellectual side; and a final judgement on the whole matter would depend in part on the relative importance we give to college work and college life. His prediction that Jews would pioneer a new and higher conception of the purpose of university education may have proved correct in some respects.
The fact that the Jewish entry into institutions of higher learning began with second- rather than third- or fourth-generation Jews was of utmost significance. The committees assigned task was not simply to study religious quotas, but to review all of Harvards admissions procedures. But in fact quotas were instituted, though concealed behind a number of subterfuges. It is natural that with a widespread discussion of this sort going on there should be talk about the proportion of Jews at the college. Still others, under the pretext of seeking a regional balance, gave preference to students outside the East and thereby limited the number of Jews, almost all of whom lived in the East. . It is evident that a tide of bigotry swept college campuses during the 1920s, just as it did the nation as a whole. . Moreover, Jews were heavily concentrated in the urban centers of the Northeast, where they did in fact constitute a significant portion of the population. Lowell, however, was determined to avoid the indirect methods employed elsewhere. The following from a Harvard professor was typical: Many Jews have personal and social qualities and habits that are unpleasant. Other changes will affect Jews selectively. As a consequence there were a number of Jewish districts that elected Jewish candidates to the State Legislature. As Russell says: It was a fierce and gruelling competition. To the other dormitories and dining rooms they are admitted freely, but in the Freshman Halls I am sure you will understand why . Other Eastern colleges had already employed this as a strategy for excluding Jews (between 1920 and 1922 Columbia instituted regional quotas, with the result that the Jewish proportion at the college was cut in half, from 40 to 22 per cent) and although no comparable figures are available for Harvard, there is no reason to think that its motives were different. . [Emphasis added.]. Significantly, the figure for Harvard was lower47 per cent. Secondly, Harvards governing body, the Board of Overseers, had one Jewish member, Judge Julian W. Mack of Chicago, who was a leader in the American Jewish Congress. These reforms, the report asserted, would solve one part of our problem.. As the Forwards editorial observed: You dont find many German, Irish, or Italian children in City College. .
Within each institution was a wealthy class who dominated social life and set patterns imitated throughout the system of higher education. He is to be the transmitter to others of ideals of mind, spirit, and conduct. This problem is really a group of problems, all difficult, and most of them needing for their settlement more facts than we now have. For largely independent reasons, the mood inside the colleges was also undergoing change. In recent years many state universities have adopted percentage restrictions against out-of-state students. On the surface upper-class Protestants may have been protecting their status prerogatives and their cultural symbols. It shows our capacity to make sacrifices for our children . . That Harvard could be the goal of anyones ambitions never occurred to me.
Columbias run by Jews. . At the top of the hierarchy stood Harvard, Yale, Princeton, with Columbia struggling to retain its elite position. Each class runs in the same rut all its life. Second-generation Jews obviously did not have the economic resources or the social standing to participate in the collegiate leisure class. For them a college education was less a mark of status than a vehicle out of the lower class, and this inevitably gave Jews a sense of purpose lacking elsewhere. A policy of recruiting nationally can be, and often is, defended on legitimate grounds. Start your risk free trial with unlimited access. In the seventeen ranking universities, the proportion of Jews is 17 per cent, and among faculty in such fields of traditional Jewish concentration as medicine, law, and social science, the proportion of Jews runs as high as one-third. .
As one writer in a 1922 journal put it: Each student in an American college is there, for some other purpose than acquiring knowledge. As Lowell said in a letter to the father of one of Harvards black freshmen: . The Speaker obliged Lowell with a public statement that dismissed the press report as idle rumor, adding that Harvard would remain, as in the past, a great university for all the people. Although exceptions were sometimes made, Jews were generally excluded from the honor societies and eating clubs at Yale and Princeton. First, there were the Jewish alumni, like the one quoted above, who were outspoken in their opposition to quotas. Finally, the Governor appointed a committee to investigate possible discrimination at Harvard. . But it would be equally naive to assume that class and ethnic differences alone explain the unfavorable attitudes toward Jews that prevailed in educated circles. In addition, school principals were asked to rank students on such characteristics as fair play, public spirit, interest in fellows, and leadership, These traits were exactly the opposite of those generally ascribed to Jews. It is said to increase the quality of the student body, to diversify and enrich student culture, and to extend the influence of the college at the same time opportunities are extended to deserving students outside the East.
Practically all the political agitation over quotas was confined to a five-day period that began with the Harvard announcement raising the possibility that they might be instituted and ended with a decision by the colleges Board of Overseers to refer the issue to a special faculty committee. The spectacle of over one million Jews clustered in New York City aroused the predictable xenophobic reaction. In 1885, a group of leading Reform rabbis adopted a statement of principles that rejected whatever in Mosaic law was not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization., A small Jewish population, its integration into the class system, the absence of sharp cultural differences between Jews and non-Jews, the mood of accommodation in the Jewish communitythese factors contributed to a low level of religious conflict during most of the 19th century. . Most were either descendants of early settlers or recent German immigrants. The leading institutions were measured more in terms of these status characteristics than by standards of scholarship or academic achievement. Impoverished, refugees from persecution, natives of an alien and sometimes backward culture, adherents of pre-modern religious beliefs and customs, the East European Jews were a new factor in American life. Ironically, this only reinforced the prevalent notion that Jewish students were clannish and unassimilable. The man who, in his commencement address six months earlier, had extolled the contributions each immigrant group could make to the evolving American, now in private conversation asserted that a Jew could not be both a Jew and an American.
It was largely in response to this development that, as Oscar and Mary Handlin put it, after 1880 the longings for exclusive, quasi-aristocratic status increasingly found satisfaction in associations with an hereditary basis. Yankee ancestry became a condition for respectability, and the old class sought refuge in exclusive societies and resorts. The Jewish takeover of City College, whose student body was by then over 80 per cent Jewish, served as a warning. They had the bitter experience of being treated as outcasts, and some had to settle for a less prestigious education. Scholarship is perhaps the most strongly emphasized of these ideals, but it is not the only one, or even the one most generally prized. The fact of the matter is that Jews did not face intense competition from non-Jews, at least not on the scale that is characteristic today. . It was not until the influx of Jewish students that Eastern colleges began to worry about achieving a regional balance and it was not until the crisis over Harvards proposed quotas that a students geographical background was deemed relevant to his admission to the college. While campus anti-Semitism probably left Jews with a feeling of social inferiority, it was a small price to pay for education and economic advancement. Thanks to the basic structural changes in society that transformed American higher education, the opportunities existed in the first place. From a historical perspective it makes little sense to explain Jewish academic success in terms of a special aptitude or brilliance on the part of Jews. Leadership was seen as a prerogative of non-Jews; Jews exhibiting this quality would be regarded as pushy. School principals, who were invariably Protestant and middle class, could be expected to reflect these stereotypes in evaluating their Jewish students. . Lowells letter began with the disclaimer that there is perhaps no body of men in the United States . Without its pejorative implications the notion of a Jewish invasion would not be inappropriate for describing the trends in these institutions prior to World War I. A third political resource was the presence of Jews among the faculty at Harvard. As one Jewish writer put it: We think that a university which keeps a man out because it doesnt like his character is almost as benighted as the one which would sift him out because he is a Jew.. However unpleasant, social discrimination was not a serious disability. In the class of eighty-three, forty-one defended religious quotas. Lowell believed that he was acting courageously. .
If anyone reciting made a mistake that the master overlooked, twenty hands shot into the air to bring it to his attention. This the committee did with apparent good conscience. About 90 per cent of the boys there are Jews, and most of them children of Jewish workers. What the Forward neglected to mention was that, according to one early report, as the percentage of Russian-Jewish boys in attendance increased, the families of Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, and Huguenot descent, who had been accustomed to register their boys in the College in the old days, sent them elsewhere for a college education.. The full text was as follows: The great increase which has recently taken place in the number of students at Harvard College, as at the other colleges, has brought up forcibly the problem of the limitation of enrollment. A ceiling on the number of Jews at Harvard was therefore in the interest of both groups. The editorial in the Jewish Daily Forward could take pride in Jewish students marching off to City College with clothes that were mostly poor and old. But they were greeted with indignation and hostility by their upper-class schoolmates, especially in the elite Eastern colleges. before 1880 or 1890 there were too few American Jews for them to constitute a question., More than small numbers was involved.
Lowell never denied the encounter on the train, though a statement issued by his office claimed that the newspaper report grossly misrepresents his views. The statement continued sanctimoniously: His earnest desire is to see anti-Semitic prejudice and Semitic segregation abolished in this country, and he believes that Jews and Gentiles should work together to this end. No one suggested that Jewish students threatened academic standards. Discrimination became commonplace in neighborhoods, clubs, resorts, and private boarding schools, and was making headway wherever else Jews turned in large numbers. By 1920 a pattern of anti-Jewish discrimination had become established, and was being sustained by an upsurge of anti-Jewish propaganda, especially in the Northeast where the Jewish settlements were located. . But prejudice was a factor in the very definition of status, just as it was a factor in the choice of cultural symbols. Negro civil-rights groups agitated against it, and 149 Harvard alumni signed a protest petition. The New York Times reported that Harvard officials were surprised since they had assumed that any plan for a State investigation would die a natural death.. This was an impressive response from the official sector, unusual for the 1920s. Advocates of quotas did not question the right of Jews to a college education. In all they numbered roughly a quarter of a million in a population of sixty-three million, or just six-tenths of one per cent. as well as our love for education, for intellectual effort. While the Jewish passion for education is easily romanticized, the fact is that Jewish immigrants did place high value on education and sent their children to college in disproportionate numbers. [Emphasis added.]. The criticism that was marshaled against President Lowell and Harvard owes itself in large measure to the political influence that Jews enjoyed both within and outside the university. . In 1890 the editor of the American Hebrew mailed a questionnaire to a number of prominent Christians, including several college presidents and professors. Explore the scintillating July/August 2022 issue of Commentary. . When on the other hand, the number of Jews was small, the race antagonism was small also. To the public, and possibly to themselves, they maintained the fiction of non-discriminatory admissions. Another proposal called for a review of the tax exemptions that Harvard enjoyed on its property. Like the proposed religious quotas, the color ban became a cause clbre. Several weeks later, at a synagogue forum on discrimination against Negroes, Kramer described his encounter with Lowell. . As a consequence they were unable to pass Harvards entrance examination. These come in large measure from the social isolation to which they have been subjected for centuries, by the prejudice and ignorance of Christian communities. In 1922 admission to Harvard was guaranteed to anyone with the appropriate high-school training who passed an entrance examination. Veblen bluntly called them gentlemens colleges where scholarship is . . We have not at present sufficient classrooms or dormitories, to take care of any further large increase. A climate of intolerance prevailed in many Eastern colleges long before discriminatory quotas were contemplated by college officials. From a practically invisible minority of 3 per cent, by 1920 Jews constituted 30 per cent of the citys population. They have the memory of the numerus clausus that restricted Jewish access to universities in Russia. New York University was also reported to have sharply reduced the number of Jewish students. There was none of the Roxbury solidarity of pupils versus the master.
Numerous writers during the early 1900s commented on the outstanding academic record of Jewish students. It was no doubt as a reflection of class formation elsewhere in society that higher education assumed the features of a caste system. It removed the issue of quotas from the public arena and insulated Harvards officialdom from public scrutiny and political pressure. World War I fanned the flames of nationalism, and a combination of political demagoguery and nativist propaganda heightened anti-Jewish feeling. First of all, cutbacks in government funding of higher education have brought an abrupt end to a quarter-century of steady growth, and this will inevitably influence the educational chances of Jews and non-Jews alike.