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." 

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.