March 14, 2019--Admissions-Gate

There may be nothing so pervasively hypocritical than the way elite colleges admit students.

We are reminded of that just now. Two days ago the federal court in Boston indicted 50 people from admissions officers to coaches to college-advisor hucksters and to nearly three dozen wealthy parents who cheated in various ways to secure places for their children in the freshman classes of some of the nation's most selective undergraduate schools. 

For many decades these and other comparable colleges have found inventive ways to shape the profile of those they sought to enroll and, more than equally, to deflect and reject others whom they did not want to welcome to their campuses.

I used to participated by knowing about scams of these kinds many years ago when I was an administrator at a unit of the City University of New York and then later, at other institutions. In no instances, in spite of what I knew, did I speak out about the corruption I witnessed.

And, earlier, I experienced the tawdry rules of the admissions game when I applied to and was accepted to a number of Ivy League colleges, and, after that, two medical schools.

Anyone following how college admissions works knows about how so-called "legacies," children of alums, are given preferential treatment, as are gifted athletes, geographically-diverse students (it is easier to be admitted to the Ivy League if you're from North Dakota), and members of certain demographic groups who are admitted via affirmative action programs.

We also know that there are soft quotas systems at work. If admission was determined by the cold calculus of just numbers--high school averages, SAT test scores, and grades on AP courses--many elite campuses, including all in California, would have students bodies where Asian students would constitute more than half the campus population. For this reason, Asian-American students, to those in the admissions business, are often referred to as "the new Jews."

Speaking of Jews, until the 1960s all highly selective colleges had and enforced Jewish quotas. As with today's Asians there was concern that places such as Harvard and Yale and my Columbia, if they admitted students only by the numbers, would become "Jew colleges." And so they all set low limits on how many would be admitted. At Harvard, for example, just five (5) Jews per year were admitted. This was also true for the other Ivy League colleges. 

Even somewhat less selective institutions had severe limits on the number of "Hebrews" that they would admit. At NYU, for example, about 10 percent of the entering class, following quota guidelines, were Jewish. 

This was true as well for professional schools. I was a pre-med and when it came time to apply to medical school my WASPY advisor subtly steered me away from applying to P&S (Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia's medical school). Though I did not in truth have the grades to be admitted there, being pushy (admittedly a stereotype) I pressed him to tell me why he was guiding me in a different direction. Hemming and hawing, he finally revealed that there was a quota and I should be realistic and apply to places such as the Jew-friendly University of Chicago.

When I told my Uncle Jac about my plans he encouraged me to apply to Chicago and generously offered to pay my tuition, revealing in the process that he was a major donor and that would help lubricate the process as it does today in many colleges--a $2.5 million dollar naming gift can go a long way when it comes to Jews being acceptable. Just ask Jared Kushner how he got into Harvard. Like his father-in-law he had mediocre prep school grades and wasn't much of a basketball player. His Daddy, like the parents of those just indicted, wrote checks.

(I, by the way, though accepted to two medical schools, not including Chicago to which I did not apply, decided not to attend, preferring to work on graduate degrees in English and comparative literature.)

So what we are seeing is nothing new.

Finally, what do I have to confess? 

Among a number of things retrospectively I do not feel good about discussing, at "Big City University," where I was a dean, one of the programs for which I was responsible was for traditional-age undergraduates. That program was directed by an enterprising administrator who reported to me. 

Among other things, I noticed that slowly the program was filling up with varsity athletes, especially baseball players. When I asked "Jim" about this he told me the coach's daughter worked for him and that he was just trying to be collegial. If I had probed he might have told me the true story--that this program for which I was ultimately responsible was a back door into the university for student-athletes who didn't have the grades or SAT scores to be admitted to the "regular" college. He also told me that our program was a financial beneficiary of enrolling athletes. The university's policy was, on paper, to credit us the equivalent of full tuition for each athlete we admitted. This amounted to a number of million dollars a year.

So, there you have it. Ivy towers aside, the admissions game has traditionally been tainted and though there are periodic exposes of the sort we are currently hearing about things quickly revert to "normal." 

April 5, 2018--My Martin Luther King Story

Fifty yeas ago last night I was a junior faculty member at Queens College in New York City and one of my classes scheduled for that evening was an interdisciplinary seminar in literature and the arts for a carefully selected group of community leaders, mainly adults from the black ghetto of Jamaica, Queens. This meant that all 25 of the students in the class were African American.

We were well into a discussion about Jonathan Swift when a late-arriving student, Alan Jenkins, burst into the classroom.

Struggling to catch his breath, he finally gasped, "He's been shot," as if we knew who the "he" was. Sensing this, he added, "Martin. Martin Luther King. In Memphis."

"Is he . . . ?"

"I don't know. I was driving here and on the radio heard the report about the shooting. But not about his condition."

By then many of the students were quietly sobbing.  From their experience they knew the news would turn out to be devastating. It would not be that he was "just" shot. They had lived too long with violence in their lives to not immediately sense the truth.

A number of the students held hands and, kneeling, prayed. Others, clinging to each other, softly began to sing, including psalms and the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome."

Grieving, supporting myself on the lectern, feeling estranged, denying what was occurring, I tried to convince myself that if I behaved "normally," got us back to Swift, reality itself would revert to where it had been only minutes before when we had talked together, dispassionately, about Gulliver.  

Then slowly it occurred to me I was the only white person in the room. I am not sure from where that feeling originated. It was not quite from feeling danger, but something close to that. Some primal recidivism close to tribalism, some self-protective reflex wired in my DNA. 

"Do you think you might drive me home?" Whispering was the most academically promising of my students, Nellie McKay.

By then Alan had come back from listening to the radio in his car. He trembled as he told us that it was over. King was dead. Shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The news, he said, was now turning to reports from inner cities across the country. Dozens were already in flames, stores and houses were set on fire by rampaging street gangs crazed with rage and fear.

"I'm afraid," Nellie said, "And about you . . . I don't think it's safe for you . . . to be driving home alone . . . the only . . . person in the area."

She meant white person. She asked me to drive her home not so much because of her fear but because she was concerned about me. White people out and about, well after dark, on the evening Martin Luther King was assassinated, would, she felt, not be safe. Being in the car with me would give me a margin of safety. She knew from inner-city uprisings during the previous few years that some white car and truck drivers had been ripped from their vehicles, beaten and even killed, as the riots spiraled out of control.

Opting to think less about myself I tried to concentrate on how I might provide safety for her--she commuted to the college by local buses. 

By then all the other students in ones and twos had departed. Nellie and I were the only ones remaining and we walked to the parking lot, clinging to each other.

In my car, a conspicuously yellow Opal, we headed south, needing to drive through segregated Jamaica, out toward where she lived in an integrated neighborhood near the bay.

Buildings were on fire all along the way. As I slowed to stop for a red light Nellie told me to ignore it, to keep moving, as it would be unsafe if we stopped.

To distract me from the news crackling on the radio she told me about her dreams--for her teenage son, it meat helping him get though his adolescence intact. By that she meant alive, out of the clutches and demands of violent street gangs. He was very bright, she said, but was already showing signs of succumbing to the allure of street life.

"I'm thinking of sending him to live with my mother, in Mississippi. Believe it or not, it's safer there. Even with Jim Crow."

"And what about you? You're a terrific student. Especially of literature. Are you thinking . . . ? We heard gunshots and saw a car a block ahead of us burst into flames and explode when the fire reached the gas tank.

"Turn that way," Nellie instructed me. "Quickly. Down there," she pointed to a one-way street where we would have to drive into oncoming traffic. "I know it's a one-way against us but it takes us to what I'm sure will be a safer route."

I followed her directions and at the end of one block we came to a cross street of abandoned houses and undeveloped lots where there were no signs of life or disorder. I began to breath more normally. 

"I am thinking about graduate school," Nellie said, resuming her story as if nothing unusual was happening, "Perhaps even working on a PhD. I know I'm a little old for that, but it's my dream. To be like you. A college professor." She smiled.

"We're getting close," she continued. "You are welcome to stay with me. But I know you live in Brooklyn and are married. Your wife will be worried about you."

I almost told her our marriage was on the rocks and that I would prefer to stay with her. But those emotions, if we survived, were perhaps for another day. 

At her house I got out to open her car door and, on the sidewalk, sobbing, we embraced for what felt like not enough time. As if we would not see each other again. That we were saying goodbye forever.

"We'll be all right," she said. "America will recover and be all right. You will be all right. And so will I."

With that she ran to the steps that led to her house and disappeared behind her aluminum front door.

I got home safely and the following week classes resumed. We all knew we were living in a changed America. Two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Swift and Jane Austen lost some of their importance.

Nellie's son did well, eventually becoming a social worker, and after Queens College, Nellie pursued her dream. She was admitted to graduate school at Harvard where she eventually earned her doctorate. After Harvard, Nellie began a distinguished career as a professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

I reencountered her when she approached the Ford Foundation, seeking a grant to support her work. I was happy to be able to assist. 

Nellie McKay, at only 76, died in 2006.

June 9, 2017--Freedom Summer

It's graduation season but though it's 2017 some of the official celebrations feel a bit like back to the future.

For example, at Harvard, Harvard, African American graduate students had their first separate ceremony with their own speaker.

Reading about this took me back to the past--my early years as an English instructor at Queens College, a selective unit of the City University University of New York. Thus, because of rampant inequalities and lingering segregation in New York's K-12 system, when I arrived in the early 60s, the student body was overwhelmingly white.

Two years later, I became deputy director of the SEEK Program, which was a pre-open admissions effort to foster the enrollment of minority students. It worked quite well. After a few years we had 500 or so mainly Black and Hispanic students and almost all of them excelled academically when, if needed, after some remedial work, we mainstreamed them into the "regular" course work and programs of the college.

Was everyone happy about this? Far from it. Some on the faculty were upset about what they perceived to be pressure to lower standards. In fact, in too many cases, mean-spirited faculty raised their expectations to help assure that SEEK students would fail. To contribute to a racially-motivated self-fulfilling prophesy. But, for the most part, rising to the occasion, many SEEK students did not feel at home on campus, sensing that they were not fully welcomed there or in the surrounding all-white neighborhood.

So, in the student cafeteria minority students arranged to sit at self-segregated tables. There were Black tables and Hispanic tables. I hated it, but understood.

In addition to understanding, there was an irony--Queens College was where civil rights worker Andrew Goodman was enrolled. With companions James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, a few years earlier, during the 1964 Freedom Summer, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, he and they were brutally murdered and buried in a shallow ditch.

During one English Department faculty meeting a memorial service for Andrew Goodman was underway right outside the building where we were gathered. They were remembering him while we argued about the way in which a new Medieval Literature course was to be described in the college catalog.

So, again, I understood the reasons for those separate tables.

But a separate graduation at Harvard? In 2017? Though I understand this as well it is not quite for the same reasons.

SEEK students at Queens College were not made to feel comfortable. Often quite the opposite. There was widespread resistance to their admission and attendance. Any number of faculty confronted me about how thanks to us the academic currency of the college was being debased. There were all-college faculty meetings at which some professors did not feel reluctant to speak out against the change in complexion of the Queens student body.

That was one reason there was a SEEK Program.

But at Harvard and other elite colleges where various forms of self-separation are being reintroduced, in a campus climate that includes an infusion of Black Lives Matter's agenda, minority students are saying, as one did recently to a New York Times reporter, "We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity, and yet we are here."

Here and yet not fully here. And not during their separate graduation ceremony.

Also not at Emory and Henry College where this spring they held their first "Inclusion and Diversity Year-End Ceremony." The University of Delaware held a "lavender" separate graduation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students; and at my old college, Columbia, where they held a "First-Generation Graduation" for students who were the first in their families to graduate from college.

I wonder if I would have been happy to attend. I suspect not. I was trying to "pass."

Passing no longer needs to be on too many agenda--and that's a good thing. But isn't that the point?

That with colleges and universities for at least four decades getting comfortable, seeing it advantageous to have a diverse student body, what we used to call campus "climate" has changed and there should thus be less not more need for separate tables much less graduations.

Harvard Black-Student Graduation Ceremony

August 17, 2105--Longfellow

"Forty thousand books. Can you believe it."

I knew John has a lot of books, but 40,000? "Not mine," he said, knowing what I was thinking. "I've got a barn full of 'em but . . ."

"So whose are you talking about?" Rona asked.

"Longfellow's, in his house in Cambridge. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poet."

"I know who he is," I said.

Ignoring me, John said, "He spoke six languages and had thousands of books in those languages as well as in English."

"Wasn't he also a professor?" I asked, seeming to remember he taught at Bowdoin, in his native Maine, and then later at Harvard, in Cambridge.

"That's the house we visited," John said, "The one in Massachusetts. It was Washington's headquarters at the start of the Revolutionary War. There's also in Portland the house where Longfellow was born. We've been there too. Not as interesting. Not that many books." He winked, knowing I too am into books--buying them, reading them, just having them. "Among other things," John added, "he translated Dante's Divine Comedy. Amazing. Really."

"'Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands,'" Dave laughed as he pounded out the rhythmics.

"That's where the tree is. In Cambridge. Right in the middle in the village. Just as the poem says."

"The tree's still there?" Rona asked, "Almost 200 years later?"

"I mean it would be there if it was still there."

"You're losing me," I said.

"Why don't you take a drive and visit it. See for yourself," John suggested, beginning to sound exasperated, "While you're there you can count the books."  And with that turned his attention back to the paper.

Dave resumed--

The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

"Pretty bad, no?" Dave said, "Writing stuff like this it's amazing he was so popular."

"Maybe that's why he was so popular," cynically, I said.

"Popular doesn't even begin to describe it," John said, rejoining the conversation, "I mean at the height of his fame he got $3,000 a poem and of course royalties from his books of poems. The docent in Cambridge told us when we visited that on the first day The Courtship of Miles Standish went on sale in London, 10,000 copies were sold."

Dave again picked up on that--

Just in the gray of the dawn, as the mists uprose from the
meadows,
There was a stir and a sound in the slumbering village of
Plymouth.

"Uprose, slumbering village," Dave quoted again, "This sounds so high-schooly."

"Give the guy a break, will you Dave. He wrote this in the middle of the 19th century when 'uprose' and 'slumbering villages' were good poetic form."

"Speaking of high school," Rona said, "Is that where you memorized your Longfellow?"

"He's not my Longfellow," Dave said, "But, yes, we were forced to learn shit like that. The Gettysburg Address too. You know, he said, showing off, 'Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth--'"

"You can spare us," I said, cutting him off, "Though I am impressed that you still remember so much. Though I assume you hate the 'four-score' business. Too archaic for your taste."

"I can handle it," Dave said. "The speech is a work of genius. The Longfellow poems are garbage by comparison."

"I wonder if school kids are asked to memorize anything these days," Rona said.

"Probably a bunch of politically correct stuff," John said, "But don't ask me to suggest what that might be. I don't want to get myself in trouble."

Later, back at home, still thinking about Longfellow and all the stuff of his still in my head from my elementary school years--from Hiawatha to Evangeline to The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, how could I forget that one--

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere . . .

Borderline doggerel but still, there's something stirring about it and the others. Perhaps because the poems resonate about sweeter, more innocent times and childhood memories with their ring of patriotism and American exceptionalism. Or maybe, the poetry on its merits isn't as bad as literary snobs, me very much included, sneer.

How does this sound to the modern ear--from Hiawatha:

By the shores of Gitchie Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest, rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them; bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water, beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

Not half bad. "Black and gloomy pine trees," the sunlight "bright before it beat the water." Sounds like primeval forest to me. And the "Big-Sea-Water," modern day's Lake Superior, which the Ojibwe named Gichi-Gami, "Great Sea," which Longfellow then transliterated into the more melliferous Gitchie Gumee.

Speaking of the primeval forest, how about this from Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie--

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

This I actually like. And I don't think it's just because Mrs. Borrel in 6th grade forced us to memorize it.

January 8, 2015--Poor You

According to a recent story in the New York Times, many of the very same Harvard professors who were in such demand as advisors to the Obama administration as it fashioned the legislation that launched the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) are now whining that because of it they have to pay a little more for the health care coverage that Harvard provides faculty and staff.

Outraged by this turn of events, the Faculty of Arts and Science voted overwhelmingly to oppose those changes in Harvard policy that would have them, for example, pay an annual deductible of $250 for individuals and $750 for families. This for what everyone acknowledges is platium-level or Cadillac coverage.

Some say this is punishing the sick since for many members of the faculty and they dependents, as for the rest of us, costs really begin to accrue when one is in fact sick or in need of extensive testing and even hospitalization.

In the Times piece there is scant recognition, whatever the professors feel about having to dip a bit deeper into their wallets, of how unbelievable privileged they still are in contrast to almost every other American affected by the health care system they helped devise.

What insensitivity. What obliviousness. What hypocrisy.

To see what kind of a financial burden the new guidelines represent for Harvard faculty, I checked to see what average annual salaries are for professors.

According to the Harvard Crimson, in 2012, on average assistant professors earned $109,800 a year; associate professors $124,900; and full professors $198,400. Not noted is the fact that most faculty at places such as Harvard typically earn at least the equivalent of an additional one-quarter of their annual salaries as consultants.

And, the new Harvard health care guidelines indicate that anyone--faculty or staff--earning $90,000 or less per year (almost everyone else) will be assisted to pay their copays and deductibles.

As an NYU full professor friend, who acknowledges he is doing very well, used to say about similar circumstances, "Poor you."

December 16, 2014--Ready for Elizabeth Warren?

Elizabeth Warren has the perfect job for her. Senior senator from Massachusetts.

But like another senator, this one from Illinois, though she has served in the Senate for just two years, already there is a groundswell of interest in her running for President in 2016.

We know how the former junior senator from Illinois who in 2008 did manage to be elected President worked out.

So this is just what we don't need--another Harvard Law School professor as a potential President.

But support for her is growing exponentially since she took the lead in opposing the recent appropriation bill to fund the federal government. As an academic specialist in bankruptcy law and a progressive she was the ideal person to take the lead. Her objection to the bill was because buried in it was a provision to gut that part of Dodd-Frank that is designed to rein in big banks' ability to invest in risky derivatives, the loses from which would be covered again by the taxpayers, just as they were six years ago when these very sort of practices nearly bankrupted the country and cost us many billions to bail them out.

But President Warren?

She is adamantly denying that she is running or has any interest in running. And as long as Hillary Clinton is healthy enough to run, Warren undoubtedly will be true to her word. But if Hillary is seen to falter or falls down again and hits her head on the bathtub, Elizabeth Warren will be first in line to announce her candidacy.

In my work I have known hundreds of professors and the one thing they love more than anything is professing. Professing before as large an audience as possible.

Considering that whoever runs and ultimately gets elected will face so much resistance from Congress to any legislative agenda that nothing but the minimum will have any change of becoming law. There is that much rancorous partisanship on both sides plus a powerful antigovernment movement within the Republican congressional caucus. Thus, what we should be looking for in a potential president is someone who knows how to lead and, especially, run things.

Run things such as the Pentagon, the veterans administration, the IRS, the C.I.A., the federal health care system, federal involvement in education policy, whatever environmental protection programs that will manage to survive, border security and immigration policy, and of course our various global diplomatic and military involvements.

Is Elizabeth Warren ready for all this and more? Has she demonstrated any capacity to take on any of this? I think not.

But among progressives who want an ideologue in the race there is a growing ReadyForWarren movement that parallels ReadyForHillary. And money is flowing in, mainly from the West and East Coasts. Again, just what we don't need.

Above all, if we want an effective president, not just one who makes us feel warm and fuzzy and affirms our pieties, we should be looking for someone who has a demonstrated track record of actually having run something big, run it effectively, and one  who, like Warren to her considerable credit, knows that this time around, "It's the middle class, stupid."

September 30, 2013--The 99th Percentilers

As the Occupy Wall Street protesters reminded us last year, there is the one percent and then the rest of us who make up the 99 percent.

Also in New York--in Manhattan--there is another 99 percent. Actually, 99 percentilers: those 4-and 5-year-olds who score in the 99th percentile on the exam that determines whether or not (mainly not) one's toddler is admitted to the city's most competitive and prestigious private schools. Places such as Dalton, Trinity, and Horace Mann. Schools that from this early age significantly determine if junior 12 years later will be admitted to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. And after that, who knows, the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and even the White House.

New York is the town that Lake Wobegon envied--where every kid is not just above average but way, way above average. Some are even 99 percentile scorers on the Early Childhood Admission Assessment exam that up to now has been the filter that separates the anointed from the just OK.

And if your child is among the anointed, that of course means you are as well. Nothing is more affirming than that--it means you passed along your superior DNA and all the tutoring and chauffeuring from chess lessons to French lessons, from peewee soccer to peewee field hockey paid off. One's foundational work is done and all that remains is resume-building for college applications.

And bragging.

According to a report in the New York Times, here's how it feels among the wealthy in Manhattan if your child does not score in the 99th percentile--

Justine Oddo is just such a mother whose twins got into "only" the 95s. She opined, "It seemed like everyone got 99s. It was demoralizing. It made me think my kids are not as smart as the rest of the kids."

Maybe yes; maybe no. It could be that Ms. Oddo did not shell out the $200 an hour it costs to have one's child tutored for the private school admissions test.

Well aware of all the coaching and prepping, the Independent Schools Admissions Association recommended to its 140 members that they no longer use these exam scores. What to do with applicants is another story--using numbers and percentiles makes life easier than having to rely on interviews and letters of recommendation.

Yes, they do require these letters, though what a recommender would write about a youngster just out of diapers is hard to fathom.

"He's a good eater."

"She knows how to use a smart phone."

"He knows his alphabet and can count to 100."

"She can take off and put on her own snowsuit."

In the meantime, the parental celebrating continues. One couple whose daughter is a 99 percentiler threw a big catered bash for her and her dozens of best friends at their Hamptons cottage.

One guest wondered what they will do for an encore when she gets into "their school of choice."

Maybe a long weekend in Paris?

July 22, 2013--"No Jews. No Dogs"

When I applied to Columbia University, I had no idea. When I became a faulty member at the City University of New York, I had no idea. And years later when I became a dean at New York University, I had no idea.

I did know that by some NYU was called New York Jew, but I naively had no idea what that fully meant. Just that during the 1970s it felt as if there was a disproportionate percentage of Jewish students enrolled. But NYU, after all, is in New York City and at the time there were more Jews living in New York than in all of Israel.

But later I began to understand why NYU was very Jewish at its downtown location but more gentile at its University Heights campus and why Columbia College on its application required a passport-style photograph. When I asked my parents about this they said it was probably to see if I was a Negro. Having lived through the Holocaust and having seen No Jews. No Dogs signs at hotels in upstate New York, they knew discrimination when they saw it.

Once I arrived on campus on Morningside Heights I saw that by requiring a headshot Columbia was doing a pretty good job of screening some of us in and keeping others out--in my undergraduate class of about 600 there was only one Negro. And he was the star of our otherwise pathetic football team.

I was beginning to figure things out. But I thought these practices were all about people of color, not that Columbia's screening policy also very much pertained to me.

Then some years later, reading Thomas Bender's University and the City, I began to see the extent of the quota system colleges and universities were implementing to keep the number of Jewish students down to as bare a minimum as they could get away with.

And just this week, reading Leonard Dinnerstein's definitive Antisemitism In America many more details of this virulent system became even clearer.

As with so much in regard to higher education, in this too Harvard took the lead.

In the 1920s, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell (a Lawrence and a Lowell), declared that his college had a "Jewish problem." He noted that Jewish enrollments had more than tripled from 6 percent in 1908 to 22 percent in 1922. To assure that students developed into "true Christians" (to Lowell, this was at the heart of Harvard's mission) one had to limit the number of Jewish students for fear that the institution would lose its "character."

The Board of Overseers agreed. One member, Jack Morgan (of J.P. Morgan) wrote to his colleagues--

I think I ought to say that I believe there is a strong feeling that [a potential new member of the Board] . . . should by no means be a Jew or a Roman Catholic, although, naturally, the feeling in regard to the latter is less than in regard to the former. I'm afraid you will think we are a narrow-minded lot, but I would base my personal objection to each of these two . . . on the fact that in both cases there is acknowledgement of interests of political control beyond, and in the minds of these people, superior to the Government of this country--a Jew is always a Jew first and an American second . . .

Other colleges seeking elite status rushed to follow Harvard's lead. In addition to establishing strict admission quotas for those Jewish students they felt compelled to admit, they established rules to socially restrict and even segregate "Hebrew" undergraduates.

At Syracuse University, where a Ku Klux Klan chapter existed, Jews were excluded from almost all campus organizations, including fraternities. Their Jewish students were also housed separately from Christians. At the Universities of Michigan and Nebraska, gentile students were advised against associating with Jewish males. And Harvard cleverly came up with the idea of geographic diversity in order not to have to handle too many Jewish applicants since most lived in a few big cities and states.

Ernest Hopkins, president of Dartmouth, summed up the reasons for these application procedures and quotas--

Any college which is going to base its admissions wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.

Beside the illiteracy of President Hopkins' statement (if he were a high school senior and had included it in his application to Dartmouth, if he had been accepted, he would have been placed in remedial English), in his statement he was unfortunately telling it like it was.