JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 21

           THE "JEWISH PROBLEM" AT THE  
           ELITIST UNIVERSITIES IN AMERICA 

     By 1914, the "Jewish problem" was so great at Columbia that its dean, Frederick Keppel, openly acknowledged the widespread perception that the large number of immigrants had made it "socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement." While publicly insisting that "Columbia is not 'overrun' with Jews any more than it is with Roman Catholics or Episcopalians," Keppel privately admitted that "boys whose families are in New York society" had a strong tendency to go out of town for college and that no conceivable plans that Columbia could devise would attract them. In truth, New York's upper class had begun to abandon Columbia as early as the 1890s. But the arrival of large numbers of Jews in the years after 1910 seems to have decisively accelerated the process. Still attracting 16 percent of the sons of New York's elite between 1900 and 1909, the proportion dropped precipitously the following decade to 6 percent.
   By the time Columbia finally moved vigorously to repel the "Jewish Invasion," it was far too late. Though the proportion of Jews, which had reached perhaps 40 percent, was reduced to 22 percent by 1921, the sons of the Protestant Elite had abandoned Morningside Heights, never to return. In the 1920s, just 4 percent enrolled at Columbia. Meanwhile, 84 percent matriculated at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, THE BIG THREE. As the case of Columbia had demonstrated, the possibility of "WASP FLIGHT" was a "danger" for any institution with a substantial Jewish presence. 
   The specter of Columbia was very much on the mind of Harvard President Lowell as he confronted Harvard's "Jewish Problem." With Columbia and NYU taking active measures to limit Jewish enrollment, Lowell moved in February 1920 to inquire about the number of Jews at Harvard College. Although the dean's office did not provide a precise estimate, Lowell had ample reason to worry. A study of higher education enrollment patterns in 1918-1919 among the leading private colleges revealed that only Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania ---- the very institutions that many members of the eastern upper class believed had already been "ruined" by the Jews --- had a higher percentage of Jewish students than Harvard. 
 Though the proportion of Jews in Harvard's freshman class had ranged from 13 to 20 percent between 1912 and 1919, Harvard retained its close connection to Boston's upper class throughout the 1910s. Indeed, the link between Harvard and Brahmin Boston was far tighter than the historical ties between the upper classes of New York and Philadelphia with Columbia and Penn respectively. By the 1910s, Harvard enrolled 85 percent of the sons of the Boston upper class, whereas just 52 and 6 percent of their counterparts in Philadelphia and New York matriculated at Penn and Columbia. Harvard, moreover, enjoyed a close relationship with the upper class of New York City, which in recent decades had come to dwarf Boston in economic importance. In the 1910s, nearly a third of the sons of New York's elite enrolled at Harvard. To President Lowell, Harvard's rising Jewish enrollment posed a threat to these crucial relationships, making it imperative to bring the "Jewish Invasion" under control. 
   In a letter to the Harvard philosophy professor William Earnest Hocking, who had proposed enlisting the Jewish alumni to assist in eliminating the "undesirable Jews" [ as he claimed had already occurred at Williams ] , Lowell explained that his main concern was that the sheer number of Jews would cause the flight of the Protestant elite and thereby "ruin the college" : 

     The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also. This happened to a friend of mine with a school in New York, who thought, on principle, that he ought to admit Jews, but who discovered in a few years that he had no school at all. A similar thing has happened in the case of Columbia College ; and in all these cases it is not because Jews of bad character have come ; but the result follows from the coming in large numbers of Jews of any kind, save those few who mingle readily with the rest of the undergraduate body. Therefore any tests of character in the ordinary sense of the word afford no remedy. 

Lowell's personal preference was "to state frankly that we thought we could do the most good by not admitting more than a certain proportion of men in a group that did not intermingle with the rest, and give our reasons for it to the public." But he also anticipated quite presciently that "the Faculty, and probably the Governing Boards, would prefer to make a rule whose motive was less obvious on its face , by giving to the Committee on Admission authority to refuse admittance to persons who possessed qualities described with more or less distinctness and believed to be characteristic of the Jews." For Lowell, however, it was crucial that "the Faculty should understand perfectly well what they are doing, and that any vote passed with the intent of limiting the number of Jews should not be supposed by anyone to be passed as a measurement of character really applicable to Jews and Gentiles alike." 
   In frankly endorsing a double standard, Lowell was rejecting the argument that applying ostensibly neutral criteria such as "character" would be sufficient to reduce the number of Jews. On this issue, as on many others, Lowell was utterly forthright : his goal was restriction itself. In a letter to Julian Mack, a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers and a federal judge, Lowell made explicit some of the cultural assumptions behind his commitment to a Jewish quota : "It is the duty of Harvard to receive just as many boys who have come, or whose parents have come, to this country without our background as it can effectively educate ; including in education the imparting, not only of book knowledge, but of the ideas and traditions of our people. EXPERIENCE SEEMS TO PLACE THAT PROPORTION AT ABOUT 15%. "