However reluctant many college presidents may be to mount the public stage, however sensitive they may be to the political and social limitations of their office, moments do arise when candor or conscience requires that they speak out, especially to vindicate an important principle or teach a relevant moral. It is at such moments that presidents often attain heightened stature in their institutions.
In November 1997, at the start of my 11th year as president of Dartmouth College, I confronted a moment when I felt compelled to discard conventional constraints and speak out. The subject was anti-Semitism at Dartmouth almost half a century earlier. The occasion was the dedication of a handsome new campus facility, the Roth Center for Jewish Life.
At the time, The Chronicle asked me if I would be willing to discuss the incident in print, but it took me several years to get to that point. I was ready to put the incident behind me. More recently, however, I have come to reconsider. I have been working on a book on the role of college presidents, and I have increasingly realized just how important it is for presidents -- and former presidents -- to use the bully pulpit their position gives them. It is a rare privilege to have a public platform to address moral issues. We need to make use of it.
Until I became president of Dartmouth in 1987, concerns about anti-Semitism had never been a significant part of my life. Although I now believe that my undergraduate class of 1957 at Harvard was chosen at a time when a quota limiting Jewish enrollment still existed, I did not realize that until many years later. My subsequent experience as a student at Yale Law School, from 1959 to 1962, was buoyant. The law school was an authentic meritocracy; Jews were a significant proportion of the student body, even though, as I later learned, quotas were still enforced at the undergraduate college. In short, to my knowledge, I had never been adversely affected as a student by anti-Semitism.
My interest in the subject of anti-Semitism in academe was first piqued in 1994, when I wrote an essay in The New York Times at the request of the American Jewish Committee. In the essay, “What Being Jewish Means to Me,” I noted that the faculty at Harvard College during my undergraduate years provided but a handful of Jewish academic role models. One of the first responses came from McGeorge Bundy, who had been dean of the faculty of arts and sciences during my undergraduate years. He found himself astonished by my remarks, and rattled off nearly a dozen names of notable Jewish scholars who had been on the Harvard faculty.
Dean Bundy’s list, at first reading, was formidable. After some investigation, I replied: “Although I recognize that the faculty list you set forth was intended to be illustrative and not inclusive, a number of professors on that list had not yet been appointed to the Harvard faculty while I was an undergraduate. That to the side, I do believe that even a list perhaps twice as long would still properly be characterized as a ‘handful’ among a faculty of approximately 450 persons.”
By that time, I was more than a little curious to learn about the historical record of college admissions and appointment practices. I chose to look at educational leaders like Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale and found several books recounting the history of anti-Semitism at such institutions. That only made me ask myself why I, a Jewish college president, had never before delved into such sources and why so few people seemed to want to look hard at what those books detailed.
I knew, of course, that anti-Semitism and the numerus clausus had been facts of life in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, when my father graduated from the Lynn (Mass.) English High School in 1916, he applied to Harvard. The admissions examination was scheduled on Rosh Hashanah. Leaders of the local Jewish community asked A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president, to reschedule the test a day earlier or later, so that Jewish students might take it without compromising their religious convictions. The president refused. (I later discovered that an official at Columbia rejected a similar request in 1909, arguing that if Jews wished to attend a Christian college, they should follow its requirements or stay away.)
As a result of Lowell’s decision, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of young men like my father declined to take the examination and, therefore, did not qualify for admission to Harvard. I dearly wish that my father, who later encountered anti-Semitism while looking for his first high-school teaching positions, had lived long enough to see the installation of Jewish presidents at several Ivy League universities.
As I began to look into the history of anti-Semitism in academe, I learned that, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, it was sometimes expressed quietly, sometimes accompanied by an air of public condescension. When Percy Bridgman, a Nobel laureate in physics, wrote to Ernest Rutherford in 1925 on behalf of his Harvard student J. Robert Oppenheimer, he described him as “a Jew, but entirely without the usual qualifications of his race. He is a tall, well set-up young man, with a rather engaging diffidence of manner, and I think you need have no hesitation whatever for any reason of this sort in considering his application.” In expressing such views, Bridgman was echoing prejudices held by many Americans. Charles A. Lindbergh confided to his journal in 1939, for example, “A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos.”
But I found that excluding Jews had not always been the rule. Anti-Semitism only began to flourish at Ivy League institutions in the 1920’s. That was especially true at Harvard, where Lowell, president from 1909 to 1933, was an outspoken public figure. Having been trained as a lawyer, he opposed President Wilson’s appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court in 1916, ostensibly because he believed that Brandeis did not enjoy the confidence of the bar. Many observers thought that he objected to the appointment because he rejected Brandeis’s progressive political and social views -- and because Brandeis was a Jew. Lowell also became immersed, in 1922, in an ugly public controversy when he attempted to institute quotas for Jewish students at Harvard. At the time, Jews constituted 21 percent of the student body, up from 7 percent in 1900. The waves of immigration during the prior three decades, especially from Eastern Europe, had increased the size and shaped the character of the Jewish applicant pool.
Lowell, a former vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, linked Jewish immigrants to African-Americans, Asian-Americans, French Canadians, and others whom he feared would not assimilate on campus. As his biographer Henry Aaron Yeomans has written, Lowell believed that the presence of too many Jewish students would erode what he called Harvard’s “character as a democratic, national university, drawing from all classes of the community and promoting a sympathetic understanding among them.” The presence of too many Jews (especially if they were not fluent in English), Lowell argued, would “not only be bad for the Gentiles ... but disastrous for the Jews themselves.” Lowell favored quotas on Jewish students, noting that 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.” He believed, in short, that a limitation upon the number of Jews would serve to reduce anti-Semitism.
When Lowell’s proposals were reported on the front page of The New York Times, an outcry ensued, and he was forced to retract his plan. Several years later, however, Lowell informally directed the admissions committee to require a photograph of applicants and to place greater emphasis upon geographic distribution and personal fitness. “To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way which is, at the same time, straight forward and effective, and that is selection by a personal estimate of character,” he wrote the committee. He did not want any Jews, he said, who were unwilling to modify their “peculiar practices.” In due course, Jewish enrollment was cut to 10 percent.
A dissenting voice came from one of Harvard’s most distinguished graduates, Judge Learned Hand, in a letter to one of the university’s professors: “If the Jew does not mix well with the Christian, it is no answer to segregate him. Most of these qualities which the Christian dislikes in him are, I believe, the direct result of that very policy in the past. ... it seems to me that students can only be chosen by tests of scholarship, unsatisfactory as those no doubt are. ...
“A college may gather together men of a common tradition, or it may put its faith in learning. If so, it will I suppose take its chance that in learning lies the best hope, and that a company of scholars will prove better than any other company.”
The policy implications of adopting religious quotas for admission to the nation’s most respected university radiated well beyond Harvard; the decision had momentous implications for other universities and for the nature of a democratic society.
The books I read revealed that events similar to those at Harvard also occurred at Yale, where the proportion of Jewish students had risen from 2 percent in 1901 to 13 percent in 1925. When a member of the Yale Corporation saw a list of the university’s entering class in 1929, he commented, “The list as published reads like some of the ‘begat’ portions of the Old Testament and might easily be mistaken for a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall.” One dean reported that Yale became alarmed that “every single scholarship of any value is won by a Jew.” The dean noted that although Jewish students often led the class in terms of scholarship and intelligence, “their personal characteristics make them markedly inferior.”
By 1924, Yale had instituted an admissions policy that placed enhanced emphasis upon “character” and detailed personal information about each applicant. That policy remained in place for the next four decades. In his book The Big Test (1999), Nicholas Lemann recounts that Yale’s Catholic chaplain told William F. Buckley Jr., when he was an undergraduate in the late 1940’s, that “Yale maintained a [combined] ceiling of 13 percent on Catholics and on Jews.”
The consequence of Yale’s anti-Semitic actions reverberated for decades. When Henry Rosovsky, who had been dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard for 13 years, was offered the presidency of Yale in 1977, he had serious doubts. As Dan A. Oren quoted him in the book Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (1985), he believed that “I represented bitter medicine to them. They made the choice, but felt I didn’t fit their image. I wasn’t a graduate. I was a Jew. In style and appearance I wasn’t their kind of guy.” Rosovsky declined Yale’s offer. (The amber glow of nostalgia may cause many to forget that, until recently, Yale and most other universities would not have considered a Jew for their presidencies.)
Finally, my modest foray into history indicated that Columbia was every bit as anti-Semitic as Harvard and Yale. Concerned that the presence of Jews was causing the loss of students from what a dean called “homes of refinement,” Columbia adopted admissions quotas in 1914. By emphasizing such nonacademic factors as geographic balance and personal character, and by asking for a photograph of the applicant, for the maiden name of the applicant’s mother, and for the parents’ place of birth, Columbia reduced the proportion of Jewish students enrolled from about 40 percent in 1914 to 21 percent in 1918, and eventually to 15 percent during the 1920’s, despite the size of the Jewish population in the city around the college.
Like Harvard and Yale, Columbia also discriminated in the appointment of Jews to its faculty. The most celebrated incident involved Lionel Trilling, who was to become one of the nation’s most distinguished literary critics. Trilling was appointed as an instructor in the English department in 1932. The appointment was “pretty openly regarded as an experiment,” as Trilling later wrote, “and for some time my career in the college was complicated by my being Jewish.” The department apparently believed that a Jew could not properly appreciate Anglo-Saxon literature.
When Trilling’s appointment came up for renewal in 1936, he was told his department believed that, as a Freudian and Marxist scholar and a Jew, he would be more comfortable elsewhere. Only the intervention of Nicholas Murray Butler, the university’s formidable president, who had been deeply impressed by Trilling’s book on Matthew Arnold, preserved his place at Columbia. (Prejudices die hard, however. Trilling’s widow recounted in her memoirs that a senior member of the department then told him that “now that Lionel was a member of the department, he hoped he would not use it as a wedge to open the English department to more Jews.”) Having made inquiry into the admissions practices at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, I could hardly fail to do so at Dartmouth. In that endeavor, I was greatly assisted by an honors thesis written by Alexandra Shepard of the class of 1992. Entitled “Seeking a Sense of Place: Jewish Students in the Dartmouth Community, 1920-1940,” the thesis collected a wealth of material confirming that Dartmouth’s practices were as noxious as those at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. The actions at all four institutions illustrated the lesson that Karl Shapiro drew in his poem “University": “To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew/Is the curriculum.”
The foremost defender of the religious quotas that defaced Dartmouth’s admissions policy was Ernest Martin Hopkins, who served as president from 1916 to 1945. In 1933, the dean of admissions reported that Dartmouth faced a shortage of students as a result of the Depression and recommended raising Jewish enrollment by 1 percent rather than lowering academic standards by admitting poorly qualified non-Jews. President Hopkins replied, “Life is so much pleasanter in Hanover, the physical appearance of the place is so greatly benefited, and friends of the college visiting us are so much happier with the decreased quota of the Hebraic element, that I am not enthusiastic at all about your suggestion.” Hopkins spoke of Jewish students as if they were poison ivy or unsightly weeds.
By requiring applicants to provide photographs of themselves, Dartmouth was able to eliminate those who, in the words of an admissions officer, “strongly demonstrated Hebrew physiognomy.” By the end of the 1930’s, Dartmouth had cut back on Jewish students and was accepting only one out of 10 Jewish applicants, compared with three out of four non-Jewish applicants.
In June 1934, a Dartmouth alumnus wrote to the dean of admissions that the “campus seems more Jewish each time I arrive in Hanover. And unfortunately many of them (on quick judgment) seem to be the ‘kike’ type.” The dean assured him that the proportion of Jews in the class would not increase. The archives are filled with similar correspondence.
Much of it indicates that a significant concern was that Jewish students dominated campus life, occupying leading positions in student organizations, from class president to editor in chief of the newspaper. They also dominated the award of academic honors; one dean complained that the Phi Beta Kappa society was getting “too swarthy.”
Among the most poignant folders of correspondence in the Dartmouth archives is a plea, in 1935, from a Jewish father to Hopkins. The father wrote that his son, graduating that year from Dartmouth, had been denied admission to every medical school to which he applied, including Dartmouth’s, despite being an excellent student, an athlete, and “a fine honest upright boy who has won the respect of all who have known him.” The father expressed the hope that “your experience will place you in a position to advise me.”
The president first sought an explanation from an official at his own medical school, who reported lamely that the applicant was unacceptable “on the basis of those intangible qualities, which I will not attempt to define.” President Hopkins then replied to the father that “there is no medical school in the country of which I know ... that does not labor under the difficulty that the overwhelming majority of applications are from the racial group of Jewish blood.” In responding so candidly and in such odious language, Hopkins confirmed the existence of a Jewish quota. In fact, for more than two decades, the quota at Dartmouth Medical School was exactly two Jews per class.
There was not a year as president of Dartmouth that I did not receive a letter from an alumnus of that era, recalling his own experience as a Jewish undergraduate. Many quoted the well-known interview with Hopkins that appeared, in 1945, in the New York Post and was reported in Time and Newsweek magazines, as World War II was coming to a conclusion. In that interview, the president publicly acknowledged the existence of quotas and said, “I think if you were to let Dartmouth become predominantly Jewish, it would lose its attraction for Jews.” By pressing for the removal of quotas, he said, “those with Jewish blood are their own worst enemies.” And then he added, “Dartmouth is a Christian college founded for the Christianization of its students.”
Thus, as the date for the ceremony dedicating the Roth Center at Dartmouth approached, I considered what a significant milestone its opening was for the realization of the promise of American life at the college -- an institution that, in common with other institutions like it, had erased every vestige of official anti-Semitism. I also considered what a decade’s experiences at Dartmouth had done to challenge my sense of Jewish identity. The question I faced was this: What ought a college to do, what ought I, as a Jew, to do, on such a triumphant occasion when the institution had such a morally troubling past?
I concluded that it was important for any institution to acknowledge what I called “the ghosts of the past,” to undertake a process of moral reckoning and accountability. That is why, after all, the United States continues to press Russia for information about the mysterious disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps in the final months of World War II. That is why Switzerland, however reluctantly, is investigating the role of its banks in concealing Nazi loot during the Holocaust. That is why South Africa conducted lengthy hearings, through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to fix personal responsibility for the horrors of apart-heid.
In 1997, the government of France decided to face up to the collaboration of the Vichy regime with the Nazis more than 50 years earlier. It charged Maurice Papon, an 87-year-old former high-ranking civil servant, with crimes against humanity; specifically, with helping organize the arrest and deportation of Jewish men, women, and children from Bordeaux to Auschwitz from 1942 to 1944.
After the longest and most expensive trial in modern French history, Papon was convicted and, despite his advanced age, sentenced in 1998 to 10 years of criminal detention. The trial forced the French people to confront a part of their past that many had tried to forget. It taught the French to ask how the atrocities of the Vichy government could be fitted into their idealized vision of the grandeur of French history. The instinct that animated the French government to confront its past was a sound one for France, it seemed to me, and a sound one for Dartmouth as well.
On a personal level, I recalled a whole series of troubling incidents: my frequent embarrassment when Jewish parents of prospective college students told me they would not consider sending a son or daughter to Dartmouth; my chagrin when friends told me how surprised they were to learn that a Jew would choose to be president of Dartmouth; my anger when a fund-raising consultant warned me that a Jewish president should expect to face difficulty in raising money from Dartmouth alumni; my exasperation when the tirades of The Dartmouth Review, an independent conservative newspaper, were characterized by the national press as anti-Semitic and attributed to the college; and my impatience when the press found it relevant to continually refer to me, alone among Jewish college presidents, as Jewish. Those humiliating suggestions of persisting anti-Semitism at Dartmouth hurt me to the quick.
Because I had already announced that I would step down as president at the end of the academic year, I knew that the ceremony dedicating the Roth Center might be my last chance to address the question publicly. What was the value of having a public platform if I was not prepared to mount it? Having come to believe that acknowledging the past would work a redemption both institutionally and personally, I resolved to take the occasion to recite the ignoble history of discrimination against Jewish students by Dartmouth and other Ivy League institutions. Contrary to my usual practice, I alerted no one to what I planned to say; I wanted my remarks to have the maximum possible impact.
I emphasized in my speech that the dedication of the Roth Center was a joyous and important event, symbolic of a gratifying stride forward. Jewish students at Dartmouth now had a place in which to come together -- to conduct Friday evening and Saturday morning services, to maintain a kosher kitchen, to hold Sabbath dinners, to invite speakers, to organize social events, to make their presence known. The ugly days of official anti-Semitism, in which colleges caused so much sadness and pain, were many decades in the past. Dartmouth now embraced religious tolerance in the fullest sense and enabled Jewish students to feel a complete and significant part of its community.
One of the lessons of this history, I concluded, was that colleges and society must exercise a continuing vigilance about discrimination against those who are different -- whether they be Jews, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, or anyone else. So long as we do so, our educational institutions will be meritocracies in which the primary criteria for admission are talent, idealism, ambition, and the promise of making a contribution to American life. The applause from the startled audience, almost all of whom were significant donors to the Roth Center, was immensely reassuring. I felt cleansed and unburdened, as if a psychological boil had been lanced. I felt, too, that I had honored my father’s thwarted ambition.
Several days later, The New York Times covered my speech in an article that spread across the top of the page. If anyone believes that the public discussion of anti-Semitism in higher education was not startling, they should read the article. It began, “The president of Dartmouth College has confronted the anti-Semitism in its past, giving one of the most vivid illustrations ever of an attitude that was prevalent for years at elite private colleges and universities.” The article reproduced several of the anti-Semitic letters from which I had read, and noted that many members of the audience “were stunned by the language in some of the documents read by Mr. Freedman.” It also quoted such leading figures as Elie Wiesel and Deborah Lipstadt, who praised my courage.
In addition, the Times included a photograph of my wife and me, with two rabbis, reading from the Torah in the Roth Center’s sanctuary -- the first time, I suspect, that a college president appeared in the pages of that newspaper wearing a yarmulke and a tallis! Friends sent me clippings from the Jewish press nationally -- including papers from San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Denver, and Minneapolis -- which carried accounts of my speech.
More than two dozen Jewish alumni wrote to share their experiences as undergraduates. One said, “The embarrassment I felt for my alma mater when reading of your speech at the Roth Center was eclipsed by my pride in a school whose president has the courage and sensibility to make these matters public.” Another wrote, “Just as we long have had some among our landsman who would not ‘rock the boat’ and sought only what was allowed of them, so today I speculate that you may have made some Jews uncomfortable. So be it.” Still another expressed the hope that “your example will inspire the presidents of other leading schools, including all of the Ivy League schools, to do the same.”
A few alumni were critical of my remarks. One wrote, “It is the duty of a college president to point out the positive aspects of his school, not tarnish it. What good did it do?” Several suggested that Dartmouth’s actions in the past had been the result of ignorance rather than anti-Semitism. Many described President Hopkins as an “honest conservative” and expressed admiration for his many good works. Some Jewish alumni granted that racial quotas existed at the time they had been admitted, but insisted that their experiences as Jewish undergraduates had been positive, almost entirely free of anti-Semitism.
Predictably, William F. Buckley Jr. devoted an op-ed-page piece in the Times, “God and Man at Dartmouth,” to the subject. (Buckley sometimes seems mildly obsessed with Dartmouth. He invariably wrote at least one column a year about events at the college; his book In Search of Anti-Semitism [1992] includes an entire chapter on a confrontation over anti-Semitism that I had with The Dartmouth Review in 1990-91.) Usually the provocateur, Buckley praised the abolition of religious discrimination. “But is it meant, in welcoming students of other creeds, that a college must forswear its own traditional creed?” he asked. Doing away with quotas should not require Dartmouth to abandon “the ideal of Christianizing those students susceptible to Christian mores.”
Religious quotas are now a thing of the past. Jews have long since succeeded in making their mark on American life, primarily by means of education. As two distinguished social scientists, Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, noted in their book, Jews and the New American Scene (1995), while Jews constitute less than 3 percent of the American population, they make up “50 percent of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington. ...” Jews now attend Ivy League colleges at 12 times their presence in the general population. They constitute approximately one-third of the students at those eight institutions. Although the percentage of Jewish students at Dartmouth remains to this day considerably lower than that at the other Ivy League institutions (about 10 to 12 percent at the college), the explanations for this circumstance do not include anti-Semitism, but rather factors like Dartmouth’s rural location.
Jews are now among the leaders of the mainstream rather than its victims. No longer the “fragile remnant” that Benjamin Disraeli pointed to in the 19th century, no longer the “despised minority” that Justice Brandeis described in the 20th century, they have made good on what Herbert Croly, the first editor of The New Republic, called “the promise of American life.”
But none of that means that we can afford to forget the past. Nor does it mean that those of us who have a public platform to remember the past should shirk from doing so. In a world addicted to sound bites, instant analyses, and fast-paced rhetorical responses, the disciplined insights and deliberative approaches that college presidents can bring to public discussion are hardly democratic luxuries. College presidents can and must use their professional stature to promote the unhurried consideration of large questions. Their willingness to speak out on moral issues can remind us all of the essential nature of idealism.
James O. Freedman is president emeritus of Dartmouth College and of the University of Iowa.
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