The friendly university: Jews in academia since World War II

Judaism, Summer, 1997 by Edward S. Shapiro

One wonders what A. Lawrence Lowell would have thought of this development. A vice president of the Immigration Restriction League and Harvard's president during the 1920s, Lowell was not enamored of Jews, Italians, and other undesirable immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. "I long ago came to the conclusion that no democracy could be successful unless it was tolerably homogeneous," he said in 1918. Robert Morss Lovett noted that in dealing with immigrants, Lowell was "no longer straight-forward and scrupulous, but indirect and tortuous, his behavior a mixture of insolence and cunning." The most famous example of this "cunning," besides Lowell's role in encouraging the execution of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, was his 1922 proposal to solve Harvard's "Jew problem" by limiting the Jewish enrollment in Harvard College. Lowell claimed his suggestion had only the Jews' best interests at heart, since it would diminish the anti-Semitism caused by the Hebrew invasion of Cambridge. Actually Lowell disliked Jews, believed they could not be both Americans and Jews, and asserted that they would have to give up their "peculiar practices" before they could expect to be treated equally. Lowell and other Harvard administrators claimed that Jews lacked the proper "character" for Harvard. Character denoted personality, manners, morals, and other vague qualities which were to be used to restrict Jewish enrollment. Thus Henry Pennypacker, chairman of Harvard's admissions committee, warned in 1926 of applicants with "extreme racial characteristics" who did not have the requisite "character, personality, and promise."(3)

Some Harvard students vigorously supported Lowell's goal of restricting Jewish enrollment at Harvard. They argued that the proper Bostonians, "the men who have made Harvard what it is today," would not continue sending their sons and bequests to Harvard if the university continued its transformation into a yeshiva. "Were it only a matter of scholarship," one group of undergraduates declared, "there could be no objection to Jews at all. But they do not mix. They destroy the unity of the college." Such attitudes led Professor Harry A. Wolfson, the distinguished Harvard historian of philosophy, to suggest during the 1920s that Jews should "submit to fate" rather than "foolishly struggle" against prejudice. To be "isolated, to be deprived of many social goods and advantages," Wolfson wrote, "is our common lot as Jews."(4)

Prior to World War II, Jews had found it nearly impossible to break into the academic big leagues. Selig Perlman, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin, warned Jewish graduate students in history to switch to economics or sociology. "History belongs to the Anglo-Saxons," he told them in his deep Yiddish accent. Jews specializing in American history had a particularly hard time getting jobs. Universities were reluctant to entrust the teaching of the nation's sanctified history to outsiders, particularly to East European Jews who were believed to lack gentility and to be too politically radical.