The friendly university: Jews in academia since World War II

Judaism, Summer, 1997 by Edward S. Shapiro

In the movie Pete and Tillie, the character played by Walter Matthau was asked why, since he was three-quarters Lutheran and only one-quarter Jewish, he insisted on calling himself Jewish. "I'm a social climber," he replied. The rapid economic and social mobility of Jews since World War II has presented a challenge to both scholars and laymen alike in understanding recent American Jewish history, wedded as many of them have been to interpretations of Jewish history emphasizing anti-Semitism and victimhood. What Salo Baron termed the "lachrymose" paradigm of Jewish history still resonates in certain sectors of American Jewry, although such an interpretation is unable to explain the major social patterns of post-World War II American Jewry. The great theme of American Jewish history, and this is particularly true of the post-war decades, has not been anti-Semitism, but the manner in which Jews have defined Jewish identity and responded to the unprecedented economic and social opportunities of this "goldenah medinah."

Nowhere in American culture has this rise in the status of Jews been more evident than in academia. According to Arthur Hertzberg, the universities were "the first established American institutional arena in which Jews entered and even joined the elite." This change initially manifested itself in 1968 with the naming of Edward H. Levi, a grandson of Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, as president of the University of Chicago. This was the first time a Jew had been chosen head of one of America's prime universities, previously the preserve of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The selection of Levi was followed by the appointment of other Jews to important positions within academia so that by the 1980s Jews had served as presidents of the two most prestigious of America's scientific universities (California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology), leading state institutions such as the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, Indiana University, and the University of California, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

It was in the Ivy League that the ascent of Jews up the academic ladder was most noticeable and remarkable. "Dartmouth," its president Ernest M. Hopkins had declared in 1945, "is a Christian college founded for the Christianization of its students." In the 1970s and 1980s, Dartmouth entrusted "the Christianization of its students" to two Jewish presidents. Jews also served as the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Princeton University, and Jews were deans of the law schools at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. In the 1990s, Harvard and Yale also selected presidents with Jewish backgrounds. By 1993, Jews headed five of the eight Ivy League institutions.(1)

An important step in transformation of the Ivy League into what one wit called the "oi vey" league occurred on November 29, 1990. On that day the dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences met with the executive vice president of the Mellon Foundation in New York to see whether he would be interested in succeeding Harvard's current president, Derek Bok, who had announced his retirement the previous May. This meeting was part of a grueling selection process in which over seven hundred and sixty applicants had been considered, including Indiana University president Thomas Ehrlich and Dartmouth College president James O. Freedman. Harvard eventually narrowed the search to four candidates: a Harvard economist, a Harvard Medical School geneticist, the provost of the University of Chicago, and the Mellon vice president. On March 24, 1991, the Harvard Corporation formally selected as its new president the Mellon Foundation official. According to reports in the New York Times and Time, the most unusual and noteworthy characteristic of Harvard's new president was that he had not attended Harvard College. (He had earned his B.A. at Princeton.) This, however, was not a fatal flaw since he had a Ph.D. from Harvard in English literature. Also of interest was the fact that his father had been a guard at Sing Sing prison.

For those fascinated with the history and sociology of American ethnic succession, however, the most notable fact about the selection was its Jewish aspect. Two of the final four candidates - the economist Martin Feldstein and the geneticist Philip Leder - were Jews, and the parents of the successful candidate, Neil L. Rudenstine, were a Jewish immigrant from Russia and a second-generation Italian. Moreover, the Harvard dean who had broached the idea to Rudenstine was Henry Rosovsky, who himself had been a serious candidate for the presidency until he withdrew his name from consideration. Rosovsky, the first Jew to sit on the Harvard Corporation, had been born in Danzig (now Gdansk), Poland and was married to an Israeli. Neither the Times nor Time mentioned Rudenstine's ethnic background, evidently believing it to be unimportant. If so, then the most important aspect of the Times and Time coverage was the topic they considered to be unworthy of mention.(2)