The Yeshiva Shel Ma’ala and the Ivy League

November 21, 1925 ought to have been a wonderful weekend for Harvard alumnus W. F. Williams, who had traveled from his home in Greenwich Connecticut to watch his alma mater play in the 44th Harvard-Yale football game. Yale was favored to win, but Harvard’s defensive line kept the score to 0-0, or what the Harvard Crimson called “a scoreless victory.” But when he arrived at the campus, he found with dismay that his beloved school had changed since he had attended Harvard in 1900. Where, he wondered, had all these Jews come from? He headed home in disgust, and wrote a letter of complaint to Harvard’s president: “Being uncertain what stadium entrance to use,” he recounted in this correspondence, “I stopped a boy, evidently a student, to ask directions – he was a Jew. I was ushered to my seat at the game by a Jew, and another of the same “breed” followed me to my seat and required me to sign my ticket.”

“Naturally,” he wrote elsewhere in his letter, “after 25 years, one expects to find many changes, but to find that one’s University had become so Hebrewized was a fearful shock. There were Jews to the right of me, Jews to the left of me, in fact they were obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust of the present and grave doubts about the future of my Alma Mater.”

Leaving aside his abrasive anti-Semitism, Williams was on to something; Harvard of the 1920’s did have a significantly higher Jewish population than any time earlier; in fact Jewish undergraduate enrollment was fully 28 percent of the student body. Williams’ letter and the history of Jewish enrollment in the Ivies, is discussed in a recent book that I have begun reading by historian Jerome Karabel, entitled The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, to which I was first referred by an excellent review by Jonathan Kay in Commentary. Karabel depicts an early twentieth-century Ivy League in which intellectual achievement was less celebrated than were extracurricular activities and social class. In fact, in 1904 the Yale yearbook boasted that their university had “more gentlemen and fewer scholars than any other class in the memory of man.” Because it was assumed that only the “right people” would apply, describes Karabel, no quotas were needed. And this system worked, Karabel writes, until the arrival of Eastern European Jews in America. “In those days,” writes David Brooks in an article on the book, “people who applied to schools like Harvard were admitted because people who weren’t from the right social class didn’t bother applying. But Jews, for reasons that are not clear, never got the message. They applied to Harvard, Yale and Princeton even though they weren’t really wanted. And because many were so academically qualified, they increasingly got in.” It was in response to this increased Jewish attendance that a form of quotas were subsequently instituted, drastically limiting Jewish enrollment.