# Did there used to be anti-Jewish quotas at Ivy League universities?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [May 17, 2015, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262 "2015-05-17T21:16:24Z")
**Posts on this page:** 14
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/1 "2015-05-17T21:16:24Z")
Until today, I would have thought that anyone claiming that there were no quotas designed to limit the number of Jews admitted to Ivy League universities starting in the early 20th Century and not ending until roughly the 1960s was about as likely as someone claiming the US didn’t drop the bomb on Hiroshima or that Elvis was still alive.
However in the thread on Asian-American groups suing Harvard, we have at least one poster rather vociferously arguing that and going to the point of insisting that there can be no debate about such quotas because they never existed.
[http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=757088](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=757088)
The poster even admits that “geographic diversity” quotas were clearly imposed due to the President of Harvard, Lawrence Lowell, along with other measures that were clearly designed to lower the number Jews entering Harvard, but that those couldn’t be considered “quotas”.
Now, I suppose I can understand understand how absurdly pedantic people might agree to this, but personally, I’m reminded of the phrase “a distinction without a difference”.
To me that would be like arguing that the poll taxes of the Jim Crow South weren’t racist because they didn’t explicitly only apply to blacks and didn’t explicitly exclude whites and that in order for them to be considered “racist” they’d have to explicitly refer to blacks and whites.
So, who is correct, the academics and scholars who regularly refer to the Jewish quotas at Ivy League schools, or the posters who insist there were no such quotas?
For anyone completely unfamiliar with this controversy, though I am reluctant to use wikipedia as a source.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott\_Lawrence\_Lowell#Admissions\_and\_Jewish\_quota\_controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_Lawrence_Lowell#Admissions_and_Jewish_quota_controversy)
> [@](#):
>
> Following Lowell’s earlier reform of Harvard’s admissions process to increase the admission of public school students, the Jewish proportion of the student body rose from 6% in 1908 to 22% in 1922, at a time when Jews constituted about 3% of the U.S. population. Lowell, continuing to focus on the cohesiveness of the student body, described a campus where antisemitism was growing and Jewish students were ever more likely to be isolated from the majority. He feared—and recent developments at Columbia University supported him—that the social elite would cease sending its sons to Harvard as Jewish enrollment increased. He cited what he saw as the parallel experience of hotels and clubs that lost their old membership when the proportion of Jewish members increased. He proposed limiting Jewish admissions to 15% of the entering class. His attempts to persuade members of the Harvard Board of Overseers to adopt his views were already failing when the plan was leaked to the Boston Post in May 1922. The idea was immediately denounced by Irish and black groups and by the American Federation of Labor.[48]
>
> Lowell continued to argue both in private correspondence and in public speeches that his rationale was the welfare of the Jewish students. “It is the duty of Harvard,” he said, “to receive just as many boys who have come, or whose parents have come, to his country without our background as it can effectively educate.” If higher Jewish enrollment provoked greater prejudice against them, he asked, “How can we cause the Jews to feel and be regarded as an integral part of the student body?” He also suggested that Harvard would not be facing this issue if other universities and colleges would admit Jews in similar numbers: “If every college in the country would take a limited proportion of Jews, I suspect we should go a long way toward eliminating race feeling among the students.”[49]
>
> The question was turned over to a faculty committee: the Committee on Methods of Sifting Candidates for Admission. In the course of the internal campaign to influence that group’s work, Lowell sought to exploit divisions within the Jewish community. Despite the basic divide between the older Jewish immigrants, usually of German origin, and the lower class of more recently arrived Eastern European Jews, Lowell found no ally there who would articulate his view of “desirable” and “undesirable” Jews. The faculty committee eventually rejected Lowell’s proposed quota. Instead, Harvard’s new guiding principle in admissions would be the top seventh rule. Harvard would reach out to youths in smaller cities and towns, even to rural communities, with the guideline that the student place in the top seventh of his class. It would seek “to pick out the best pupils from good schools, here, there, and everywhere.” Though some suspected this was nothing but a covert way to decrease Jewish enrollment, the policy had the opposite effect. The numbers of non-Jewish students attracted from the South and West could not match the larger numbers of Jews admitted from the Middle Atlantic and New England states. By 1925, Jews made up 27% of the entering class.[50]
>
> Lowell then found another way to accomplish his goal, this time less publicly. He first won approval from the Harvard Board of Overseers for a new policy that would, in addition to traditional academic criteria, use letters from teachers and interviews to assess an applicant’s “aptitude and character,” thus introducing discretion in the place of the strict top seventh rule. He even persuaded one doubtful Overseer that this would not support discrimination against Jews as a group, but merely “careful discernment of differences among individuals.” When Lowell gained final approval of these modifications in 1926 and appointed a compliant Admissions Committee, he had won his way.[51] When Lowell left his position in 1933, Jews made up 10% of the undergraduate population.[52]
---
### Author:  [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/2 "2015-05-17T21:35:13Z")
Yes there were. I don’t understand the point of the counter-arguments. There were clear policies that were instituted to keep Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite Northeastern universities in check. It sounds like some people are taking the question to mean something like ‘Did Harvard ever have a strict limit on the number of Jews it enrolled at any given time (in other words, 1200 is fine but #1201 has to go somewhere else because we are full for their type)?’ The answer to the latter is not really but that is only one unusually strict definition of a quota. A combination of less explicit policies can limit enrollment equally well.
If you want further evidence, look to the more prestigious schools in the South. My own alma mater, Tulane, was among several of the more prestigious Southern universities that did not ever establish any sort of Jewish quotas. They were welcomed with open arms as long as they could contribute intellectually and financially. The result was a massive influx of Jewish students from the Northeast who had the credentials and the money to make it through any university but could not be admitted to a good one closer to home. Even today, Tulane is still 1/3 or more Jewish despite Louisiana having an insignificant Jewish population because Jewish alumni send their kids and grandkids back to where they were originally welcomed. The same is true for Vanderbilt, Emory, Duke and others of the more prestigious Southern schools.
It wasn’t just Harvard that had such policies. It was widespread practice in the Northeast among schools that weren’t set up as Jewish universities.
---
### Author:  [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/3 "2015-05-17T21:37:10Z")
[This story is pretty comprehensive](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in), no matter what you may think of Malcolm Gladwell.
Short version: Yes, they just used indirect means.
> [@](#):
>
> As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”
> …
>
> The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph.
> …
>
> The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.
>
> If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t abandon the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it.
---
### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/4 "2015-05-17T21:48:12Z")
Wasn’t that one of the reason that Brandeis University was founded? It’s not mentioned in the wikipedia article, but it’s what I had always heard growing up in the area.
---
### Author:  [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/5 "2015-05-17T21:51:42Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#):
>
> [This story is pretty comprehensive](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in), no matter what you may think of Malcolm Gladwell.
>
> Short version: Yes, they just used indirect means.
I agree with both you and Shagnasty. To me arguing that there were no anti-Jewish quotas at Harvard and similar universities is to be aggressively in denial of reality or being pointless pedantic.
Sadly, Gladwell’s evidence was brought up in the Asians suing Harvard thread and dismissed by those insisting there were no anti-Jewish quotas, merely policies that were “discriminatory” but that “all admissions policies are discriminatory”.
---
### Author:  [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/6 "2015-05-17T22:43:48Z")
It was just the Northeast. USC in California also had Jewish quotas. They even had them in the universities in Canada.
---
### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/7 "2015-05-17T23:28:03Z")
I doubt you’d find any official document from a college saying something like “This college has a policy that it will not admit more than fifty Jewish students.” But there would be a definite unwritten understanding that a limit like that existed and it would be followed.
---
### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2015, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/8 "2015-05-18T01:05:30Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#):
>
> [This story is pretty comprehensive](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in), no matter what you may think of Malcolm Gladwell.
>
> Short version: Yes, they just used indirect means.
It’s fascinating that you link the same New Yorker article\*\* in support of the OP\*\* that [I linked and summarized late last night](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18371465&postcount=57) (well, the wee hours of this morning, actually). And which I later used to argue **against the OP** in the other thread! How can the same article be used to argue both sides? 😃
Well, it shows the importance of context and how the goalposts have been moving. The link that I posted was a pretty neutral attempt to shed to some informative light on the admissions practices in the Ivy League, with Harvard as a notable case in point. I had no particular interest in the matter of anti-Semitism at Harvard but mentioned it in my summary as the origin of what turned into long-standing so-called “holistic” admissions policies that looked at every aspect of a candidate’s personal and family background, including personal interviews, as part of the admissions process.
The culture has evolved over time into a continuing holistic evaluation of candidates in which those from established successful families, especially children of alumni, are judged more likely to have stellar careers and therefore to be an asset to the institution from which they graduate. I thought it was a fascinating insight into the Ivy League culture. If there’s any point I’m making here at all, on an issue on which I don’t particularly have strong views, it’s that in the modern era admissions criteria are driven not so much by racism or bigotry, and certainly not by explicit quotas, as by the norms of the establishment and the power structure of society. I reject the notion that there’s any explicit anti-Asian bigotry which I think is just silly, but yes, they are no doubt disadvantaged, along with members of dozens of other ethnicities and socioeconomic strata, as a side effect of these old-boy country-club policies. How much should be done about this is the subject of the other thread.
But somehow this mutated into some bizarre side issue over anti-Semitism and whether or not there were quotas on Jews and the difference between real quotas and a _de facto_ ones. And the whole inflamed mutation was then lifted by the OP out of the original thread, losing all the original context, into this completely separate pointless discussion to vilify some imagined villain that doesn’t exist. A discussion, now devoid of context, about how some idiot, namely me, is delusional about whether or not there were admissions quotas for Jews, a subject which is frankly absolutely the last thing I ever had any interest in, and about which I was the first to point out that Jews were indeed discriminated against at the time, at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League. I’m kind of sorry that I ever bothered to write and post a summary to an informative article in the New Yorker about the topic of the original thread – Harvard admissions policies – that I thought others might find interesting. I should have just gone to bed instead. Lesson learned, I suppose. 😛
---
### Author:  [@Ranger\_Jeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranger_Jeff)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2015, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/9 "2015-05-18T01:10:54Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#):
>
> I doubt you’d find any official document from a college saying something like “This college has a policy that it will not admit more than fifty Jewish students.” But there would be a definite unwritten understanding that a limit like that existed and it would be followed.
They were called “Gentlemen’s Agreements”. Well, “called” in a very quiet whisper.
---
### Author:  [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2015, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/10 "2015-05-18T01:23:36Z")
> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> It’s fascinating that you link the same New Yorker article\*\* in support of the OP\*\* that [I linked and summarized late last night](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18371465&postcount=57) (well, the wee hours of this morning, actually). And which I later used to argue **against the OP** in the other thread! How can the same article be used to argue both sides? 😃
Depends on if you’re arguing history or the present day. The OP question is about history, and the answer is Yes. Things do change over time, though.
---
### Author:  [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2015, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/11 "2015-05-18T09:14:27Z")
> [@Ranger\_Jeff](#):
>
> They were called “Gentlemen’s Agreements”. Well, “called” in a very quiet whisper.
Great movie, by the way.
---
### Author:  [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2015, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/12 "2015-05-18T17:00:03Z")
Anecdotally, my (Jewish) father graduated from Princeton in the 1960s. Our last name is one that is either Americanized from the Yiddish, in which case it’s Jewish, or not, in which case most people with my last name hail from the British Isles. He was admitted to Princeton with no issues, because his name wouldn’t have drawn attention (his first name is not particularly ethnic). But once he got to campus, and people saw him (he certainly looks much more Jewish than he looks Anglo-Saxon: olive skin, schnoz, and black hair until it went gray) he was simply not admitted to any of the eating clubs.
ETA: Dad’s family is early 20th century arrived Ashkenazim; his father was born in Riga, and his mother was born in Canada, but her parents hailed from now-Belarus and now-Ukraine, respectively.
---
### Author:  [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2015, 7:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/13 "2015-05-22T07:32:31Z")
This appears to be an argument about definitions. There was no Jewish quota in Harvard, as “Quota” implies a fixed number. There was a change in Harvard admission policies with the goal of drastically lowering the share of Jews admitted. The practice was known colloquially as, “The Jewish quota”. Interestingly, it was widely acknowledged at the time.
It was not at all unique to Harvard.
---
### Author:  [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2015, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-there-used-to-be-anti-jewish-quotas-at-ivy-league-universities/720262/14 "2015-05-24T00:56:20Z")
> [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#):
>
> This appears to be an argument about definitions. There was no Jewish quota in Harvard, as “Quota” implies a fixed number. There was a change in Harvard admission policies with the goal of drastically lowering the share of Jews admitted. The practice was known colloquially as, “The Jewish quota”.
I believe that the meaning of the word quota, in reference to university admissions, subtly changed. In the 1950’s, having a goal to reduce the percentage of Jews was synonymous with quota, as can be seen in this 1952 article:
> **[Penn Frats Want New Jewish Quota | News | The Harvard Crimson](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1952/4/10/penn-frats-want-new-jewish-quota/)**
>
> A quota limiting the number of Jewish students at the University of Pennsylvania was asked of the Office of Admissions
In the context of Affirmative Action, [a numerical goal is not a quota, as it may not be reached within the time frame.](http://www.archives.gov/eeo/terminology.html) But in the context of American antisemitism, there was, historically, no such distinction.
Some people think that the distinction between a quota and goal, in the AA context, is hypocrisy, and others are all for it. I’m not trying to rule on that here. I’m just saying that, as a matter of usage, the word quota applied regardless of how tight or loose would be the control over the number of Jews.