JEWS IN AMERICA FROM1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II-----Episode 14

CHARLES W. ELIOT WAS PRESIDENT OF HARVARD FROM 1869 UNTIL 1909 [ 40 years ]

    During the era of Eliot's liberal --- and much criticized --- elective system [ students could choose their courses and were not bound to a particular curriculum that matched up with a major] , many students gravitated to the "snap" and "cinch" courses then abundantly available. So common was this practice that the students joked about "teh Faculty of Larks and Cinches." Henry Yeomans, a government professor who was himself an alumnus [1900] , aptly described the atmosphere of the time  :"Few among either students or instructors, who knew the college about 1900, and who respected intellectual achievement, could be satisfied with conditions. A man who worked hard at his studies was too often called a 'grind.' As if the term were not sufficiently opprobrious, it was not uncommon to strengthen it to 'greasy grind'." The problem, hr believed, was made worse by "the social cleavage between the men who studied and the men who played, or more commonly and worse, who loafed." In Yeomans's view, there could be little question about who set "the undergraduate standard of idleness : it was the rich and socially ambitious." 
   The low academic standards at the Big Three were in no small part a product of just how easy it was to gain admission. A candidate had only to pass subject-based entrance examinations devised by the colleges. Like many American universities, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia administered their own exams. But the tests were not especially demanding, and a young man with modest intelligence from a feeder school like Groton could usually pass them with ease. If he did not, however, he could take them over and over again to obtain the requisite number of passes.
   Even the unfortunate dumbass applicant who failed to pass exams in enough subjects could still be admitted with "conditions." In practice, this meant that he gained entrance by special action of the faculty. At each of the Big Three, admission with conditions became a common pathway to the freshman class. In 1907, 55 percent of those admitted at Harvard had failed to fulfill the entrance requirements. Similarly, at Yale in 1909, the proportion of freshmen admitted with conditions was 57 percent. Of these, 22 percent had one condition , 14 percent two, and 21 percent three. Even Princeton a smaller institution that was making a vigorous effort to raise its standards under Woodrow Wilson, admitted a clear majority of its students with one or more conditions.  Between 1906 and 1909, the proportion of students so admitted ranged from a low of 56 percent in 1909 to a high of 65 percent in 1907. 
    Why would these eminent universities admit so many students who did not even meet their modest entrance requirements ? Part of the answer is their eagerness to enroll what later came to be called "paying customers," for tuition provided the bulk of their income [over 60 percent at Harvard in 1903-1904]. But there was also a powerful sense of pride in sheer bigness, especially at Harvard and Yale. In the 1890s, Harvard Graduates' Magazine [HGM] bragged about how its enrollment had grown spectacularly and in the process outstripped Yale. In 1900, it boasted that Harvard had the largest undergraduate enrollment of over 4,000 placed it "among the great universities of the world, surpassed in population only by Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and Paris." Harvard, HGM noted proudly, had passed England's two ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which enrolled just 3,500 students respectively. 
   Although Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were willing to allow the size of the freshman class to fluctuate from year to year to accommodate the growing number of students who could pass some or all of the required exams, there were powerful forces limiting expansion. In addition to escalating competition from smaller colleges, such as Dartmouth, Williams, and Amherst, there was an increasingly visible disconnect between the Big Three's traditional entrance requirements and the curricula offered by the nation's rapidly expanding public high schools. Both Yale and Princeton required that candidates pass examinations in both Greek and Latin, thereby effectively excluding most high school graduates, for only a handful of public schools offered both languages. Even Harvard, which under Eliot had abolished its Greek requirement in 1898, still required latin ---not a problem at well-established secondary schools such as Boston Latin and Philadelphia's CentralHigh School, but still an insurmountable obstacle at most public schools. The Big Three therefore found it hard to tap into the expanding pool of high school graduates --- a point frankly admitted in 1909 in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which noted that it did not recognize many of the subjects taught in public high schools while its own requirements, especially in classical languages, could not be fulfilled in most of them. Even the public schools in nearby New York City, the nation's largest urban center, did not offer the courses required by Princeton.