1922: Harvard keeps purely academic admissions

From a recent issue of the _New Yorker_:

"In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high--school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.

"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 difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell's first idea--a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body--was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell--and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton--realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.

"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. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. 'Starting in the fall of 1922,' Karabel writes, 'applicants were required to answer questions on "Race and Color,'' "Religious Preference,' "Maiden Name of Mother,' "Birthplace of Father,' and "What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).' "

"At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was "very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view" and 4 was "undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be." 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."

-- The 15% figure, BTW, was what Lowell had originally proposed. The whole "character" business began as a way to slip it in by the back door. The number of Jews in Harvard's freshman class would remain between 12% and 15% for the next 40 years, until standards were revised again in the 1960s. (Interestingly, modern admissions -- which consider academics and SAT scores as just one element of the "whole candidate" -- are directly descended from the system Lowell adopted in the 1920s, although they're no longer intended to keep out the Wrong Sort.)

Okay, so. Reading that, two things occurred to me.

1) There was probably a window of a decade, maybe fifteen years, where this sort of thing could take root. Before the end of WWI the numbers of Jews still aren't high enough to be disturbing. By the early Depression years, attitudes will be shifting, and also you're going to see large numbers of wealthy Jewish alumni acting as a counterweight.

2) There were schools that didn't adopt this policy. Among the Ivies, Penn never did; outside, the University of Chicago kept a high reputation for excellence (academically, at least) while keeping to a strict academic standard.

I find it hard to imagine a POD that eliminates de facto quotas among the Ivies altogether. Still, we could perhaps give a twist to the brain of President Lowell.

OTL he was very much a man of his times, a strong supporter of immigration restrictions who worried that admitting too many "undesirables" would destroy Harvard's reputation. TTL, let's say he's a rigid, unbending meritocrat who refuses to budge on pure merit-based admissions. Now, this is going to lead him into problems with the alumni and the Board. But it's very hard to get rid of a Harvard President, and it was even harder back in the day. And if Lowell hangs on until the early 1930s, I think it will be much harder to establish a quota system.

In this TL, Jewish numbers at Harvard rise and rise. How high? I'd guess to around a third -- which is probably enough to seriously change the school's image and reputation. TTL, Harvard is more of a "brain" school -- more like the University of Chicago than Yale. There are a lot more Jewish Harvard grads. The school itself has a more, hum, ethnic flavor to it, more like Columbia.

A different mix of Harvard grads in this TL. Some folks who went to Columbia or Brandeis are Crimson now. Effects on the greater world... hm.

Thoughts?


Doug M.
 
Would this have very large knock-off effects for national admissions standards? The biggest issue is really a butterfly one. If I went to a different university my life might be very different then it is, and my particular decision was contingent. This raises similar issues.
 
O, Boston, O Boston,
Land of the bean and the cod
Where the Cabots speak only to Lowells
And the Lowells speak only to God.


Positing that Lowell was more anti-semitic than the board in OTL, but quite liberal in this TL may be a self-healing POD. The Boston Brahmins on the board would have simply not named him to the post, removed him when he moved too far to the left, force him to limit Jewish enrollment or expand to school to make room for legacies.

I am not sure I agree that the board was all that conservative at the time, though. The Unitarians had held the Divinity School for years. An African-American graduated in 1870. Lewis Brandeis graduated in 1877. Harvard had a distinct reputation as the most liberal of the big three (Harvard, Yale and Princeton).

Basically, Lowell was noteworthy beacause he was less liberal than the board, not moreso. Being more liberal in this TL I suppose leads to his having a quieter, more harmonious tenure. Admitting legacies alongside merit students (like today) leads to a larger number of graduates, and a larger endowment. Harvard would have become even more of a great engine that turned people with names like Schwartzburg and Maironi into Americanised and WASPised lawyers and businessmen who shop at LL Bean, nickname their daughters Cuffy, and summer on the Cape. The melting pot just gets ever so slightly more melt-ey.

Sorry, no butterflies here.
 
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