JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 22

   HARVARD PRESIDENT LOWELL IS TRYING TO FIX 
   THE "JEWISH PROBLEM" AT HIS ELITE UNIVERSITY

   By the spring of 1922, when Lowell moved decisively, the proportion of Jews had already reached 21.5 percent. Unless immediate measures were taken, Lowell wrote in a letter on May 20, it would suffer the fate of Columbia. At Harvard, he warned, "the danger would seem to be imminent." 
   Compared to rural and small-town institutions such as Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, and Amherst ----which had already taken measures to limit the size of the freshman class and overhaul their admissions policies --- Harvard was particularly vulnerable. An urban institution with a long tradition of openness to graduates of public as well as private secondary schools, Harvard was not insulated from the growing numbers of public school graduates who met its entrance requirements. Between 1900 and 1920, the number of male graduates from the nation's high schools had risen from 95,000 to 310,000---an increase of over 300 percent.  The democratization of the opportunity to graduate from high school was a mixed blessing for institutions such as Harvard. While their numbers meant a larger pool of academically qualified students, it also meant a surge in the number of applicants who lacked the social graces of an earlier generation. Many of these students were from urban areas, and a disproportionate number of them --- especially in the college preparatory track --- were naturally the children of Russian and Polish Jews. 
   Left to his own devices, the authoritarian Lowell would have been more than willing to impose his own solution to the "Jewish problem." Indeed, that is precisely what he tried to do when he asked the Committee on Admissions to admit as transfers only those "Hebrews . . . possessed of extraordinary intellectual capacity together with character above criticism" and to impose a higher standard for admission to the freshman class on members of the "Hebrew race." This was a covert attempt to impose a quota, but it was rejected by Chairman Henry Pennypacker, a graduate of Harvard [1888] who had served as headmaster of Boston Latin School from 1910 to 1920. Though Lowell's subordinate, Pennypacker told him that the group's members "felt that the Committee should not practice discrimination without the knowledge and assent of the Faculty," of which it was "merely the administrative servant." The stage was thus set for a conflict between the autocratic Lowell and a faculty that, while hardly free of anti-Semitism, was reluctant to publicly endorse a policy of discrimination. 
   By this time, the faculty ws actively involved in the debate about the "Jewish problem" that Lowell had initiated. At a meeting on May 23, Lowell's brother-in-law and personal friend, James Hardy Ropes, the Hollis Professor of Divinity, introduced a three-part motion : its most controversial elements instructed the Committee on Admissions "to take into account the proportionate size of racial and national groups in the membership of Harvard College" and declared that "it is not desirable that the number of students in any group which is not easily assimilated into the common life of the College should exceed fifteen percent of the whole college." These proposals, which clearly had Lowell's support, generated a complex and at times bewildering array of amendments and countermotions, some of them supporting the basic thrust of Ropes's proposals and others opposed.  Though the motion proposing a 15 percent quota on "any group which is not easily assimilated" [ an unsubtle euphemism for Jews ] was not approved the meeting was a partial triumph for Lowell, for a slightly revised version of the other controversial element was passed by a vote of 56--44. It called upon the Committee on Admission, "pending further action by this Faculty . . . to take into account the . . . proportionate size of racial and national groups in the membership of Harvard College." This was a dramatic departure from Harvard's historic commitment to nondiscrimination and, for that very reason, was warmly welcomed by Lowell. 
   Yet even before the faculty meeting, opposition to Lowell's efforts to limit Jewish enrollment had been growing. In addition to Federal Judge Julian Mack, a member of the Board of Overseers, who had exchanged a series of increasingly tense etters with Lowell, further opposition was expressed by Jerome D. Greene, who had served as secretary to President Eliot [1901---1905] and then secretary to the Corporation [1905--1911]. Reportedly Eliot's top choice as his successor, Greene left Harvard to become an important banker in New York two years after Lowell took office. On the Board of Overseers, he was generally thought to represent the views of Eliot, who remained a towering figure at Harvard [and a troublesome presence for Lowell] even though he had retired thirteen years earlier and was nearing the age of ninety.