The legacy of exclusion
NOVEMBER is upon us, and high schoolers across the nation are toiling away on college applications, collecting letters of recommendation from guidance counselors and teachers, collating transcripts and records of standardized test scores and doing their damnedest to pigeonhole their lives into that most anxiety-provoking of adolescent genres: the personal essay. Unbeknownst to them, they are doing this all on account of the Jews.
As Jerome Karabel explains in “The Chosen,” his magisterial history of admissions politics at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, the baroque college application procedure that we now take for granted was developed in the 1920s by anxious Ivy League admissions offices expressly to limit the numbers of Jews on campus. Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe had been increasing exponentially since the late 1800s, and Harvard found itself awash in smart Jews, who matriculated at the college after excelling on an in-house entry exam. The Boston Brahmins worried that the Jews would vitiate the sturdy WASP culture of Cambridge with their shtetl ways and their genuine love of books, not to mention the fact that first-generation Jewish Americans were not exactly a sure source of great sums of money for Harvard’s endowment.
So Harvard overhauled the application process, making “character” the centerpiece of its new admissions policy, for, as Karabel wryly remarks, character was “a quality thought to be in short supply among Jews but present in abundance among high-status Protestants.” Rather than focus on academic achievement and intellectual potential, the new policy emphasized personal interviews, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities and family legacies. The modern American college application, as it turns out, is the anomalous spawn of pure anti-Semitism combined with dollar politics.
Karabel makes it clear that throughout the first half of the 20th century, this triad of higher-learning institutions was far less concerned with shaping great minds than with training corporate and political leaders. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how thoroughly anti-intellectual the cultures of these institutions and their feeder schools were. Harvard distinguished between undesirable “top brains,” who would go on to become scholars, scientists and teachers, and “desirable students,” who would go on to run those corporations and wield that political power. Top brains were to constitute no more than 10% of the incoming class, as they were thought to be a drag on the college’s lively social life and a blot on its sprightly appearance. Wilbur Bender, head of Harvard’s admissions office in the 1950s, worried that the school was developing a reputation for harboring “pansies and poets and serious la-de-da types,” as opposed to “virile, masculine, red-blooded he-men,” the gentleman’s C scholars of yore who did little to develop their minds and lots to develop their social cachet and who would later in life fork over big bucks to the university.
Of course, many of these gentlemen were none too gentle, as one clearly sees in “The Great Gatsby’s” acid portrait of the bigoted Yale grad Tom Buchanan. It is no accident that the abusive Buchanan should cherish his halcyon days as a football player, for it was pigskin pyrotechnics, not scholarship, that held sway at Yale a century ago. If anything, the intellectual ambience was even more slack in the eating clubs of Princeton, where scions of the WASP aristocracy held court in a country club ambience far away from Jews, blacks and other undesirables.
It is well-known that Harvard, Princeton, Yale and their fellow institutions had quotas for Jewish students during the first half of the 20th century and that the universities have done much since to remedy that. Indeed, when I went for an interview at the Princeton admissions office in 1977, I was dismayed to see a “welcoming” pamphlet entitled “Jews at Princeton,” the awkward pandering of which was enough to make this Jew withdraw his application. Still, it is astonishing to peruse Karabel’s meticulous presentation of anti-Jewish discourse as it publicly flourished in high WASP precincts in the era before Hitler. Even during World War II, with its student population seriously depleted, Yale turned away qualified Jews with service exemptions to maintain itself as a bastion of Protestant ascendancy.
James Bryant Conant, Harvard’s president from 1933 to 1953, was one of the first to understand that the college had to transform itself into an institution that would serve as a greenhouse for the country’s most talented students. He pushed hard for need-blind admissions and greater reliance on the SAT, which, in the days before the tutoring industry, sought to level the playing field so kids from public schools in the heartland could compete with those from Andover. Nonetheless, as Karabel shows, despite Conant’s public promise to wield “the axe against the root of inherited privilege,” Harvard’s admissions office continued to favor the Protestant elite, as it provided paying customers and the promise of big gifts down the road.
More than any other single factor, it was the Cold War that changed the schools’ cultures, as the nation confronted the scientific and technological challenges posed by the Soviet Union. After the Soviets launched the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government began pouring money into universities by way of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 and the National Defense Education Act of 1958. As professors brought in grant money, faculty power increased. With this came a strenuous call for the great universities to enroll the most brilliant young minds, the top brains that caused Bender to shudder as they reminded him of the bookworms at the University of Chicago.
Change came very rapidly in the more egalitarian 1960s as the discourse of civil rights and the politics of enfranchisement came to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Their student bodies already changed as a result of Cold War intellectual pressures, the schools further modified their politics, admitting greater numbers of Jews, blacks and, eventually, women. Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr., scion of and class traitor to an old Boston Brahmin family, is one of the heroes of Karabel’s narrative, because he purged the university’s old-boy admissions office in 1965, allowed for greater faculty participation on the admissions committee, reduced the number of legacy admissions and increased ethnic and religious diversity on campus. Karabel shows how Brewster’s decision to open the doors of Old Blue to blacks was in large part the practical decision of an administration terrified by the prospect of riots in racially tense New Haven, Conn. Between 1965 and 1969, Yale’s African American enrollment went up by a factor of four, greatly altering the composition of the school, as did the decision to admit women in 1968.
Karabel argues convincingly that there is no value-neutral definition of merit and shows how legacy preferences have always been a form of affirmative action for the privileged. As such, affirmative action in the conventional sense comes off here as a reasonable institutional antidote to decades of elite privilege.
Perhaps most subversively, Karabel cites statistics at the end of the book on the current paucity of working-class students at these elite schools and calls for admissions departments to attend to that most ignored of American identity categories, that of class itself. With endowments in the many billions, it would seem that Harvard, Princeton and Yale could be doing more to ferret out and nurture minds from blue-collar families. Then again, as Karabel’s history shows, when it comes to pursuing interests, these institutions are every bit as materialistic as the American culture in which they grew to become internationally recognized brand names. *
