Published: March 26th, 2014
from the Jewish Press by Jerold Auerbach
NOTE: Read this and weep. Most of us go about our lives, busy with work, kids, family and when time allows, we catch up with the news, magazines, etc. And we have a fairly good handle on current events. But every so often we're whacked on the side of the head and realize how utterly ignorant we are of reality. Wellesley? In our lives? NOW? And if this is happening at Wellesley, where else is it this bad? Vassar? Michigan? Loyola? Brooklyn? NYU? Just how endemic is anti semitism? What is the message our college aged children hear? Where are the defenders of truth? Are we once again letting the blood libel to spread unchecked? Christ Killers? Money grubbers? When will we come together and really say, "ENOUGH!" And how can we do that?
In the good old days of what passes for higher education, before the state of Israel was relentlessly pilloried by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movements and professional academic associations,there was only garden variety anti-Semitism.
During much of the 20th century, elite American colleges and universities carefully policed their admission gates to restrict the entry of Jews. Like its Big Brothers – Harvard, Yale and Princeton – Wellesley College, where I taught history between 1971 and 2010, designed admission policy to perpetuate a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite.
This challenge became imperative after World War I, when hordes of socially undesirable candidates with academically superior credentials – in a word, Jews – threatened to inundate the academic citadels of privilege. With Harvard in danger of becoming “Hebrewized,” Yale fearful of being “overrun” by Jews, and Princeton anxious lest Jews “ruin [it] as they have Columbia and Pennsylvania,” the solution was obvious.
Just as Congress enacted immigration restriction laws to curtail the entry of undesirables from Southern and Eastern Europe, so colleges imposed quotas to exclude Jews. Questions about religious affiliation were embedded in the selection process.
So, too, were geographical distribution preferences, personal interviews, and photographs, all designed to filter out Jews. More than sixty years after her graduation, a Wellesley Jewish alumna still remembered an oblivious classmate who had complained: “Isn’t it awful how Jews turn up everyplace and how they have horns.”
Several years before my arrival, two faculty members circulated a petition among their colleagues asking Wellesley trustees to drop the provision in college bylaws restricting the faculty to those who professed Christianity. Half the faculty signed but the trustees, reaffirming their commitment to religious freedom, declined to change the bylaws. KEEP READING CLICK HERE
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