The friendly university: Jews in academia since World War II

Judaism, Summer, 1997 by Edward S. Shapiro

After 1945, however, these universities, along with Oxford and Cambridge in England, became almost totally secular institutions little interested in their charges' "character" or moral and religious development. Christianity, the historian George M. Marsden wrote, became not merely peripheral to higher education "but also often came to be considered absolutely alien to whatever is important to the enterprise." The universities saw their task as fostering the intellectual distinction defined by scientific and professional criteria. The exclusion of Jewish "brains plants" from this intellectual meritocracy ran counter to academic ideals. In addition, the country's leading universities aspired to be national institutions, and this required reducing parochial religious, ethnic, and regional attachments. One indication of the spirit of secularism pervading the academy (and the country) was Harvey Cox's 1965 best-seller, The Secular City, which celebrated the secularization of the university. The effort to retain a Christian presence in the academy, Cox wrote, was a "cumulative catastrophe."(20)

The friendlier attitude of America's elite universities toward Jews was also due to changes in the values and behavior of Jews themselves. As a result of their acculturation, their movement up the social and economic ladder, and their migration from Jewish neighborhoods in the inner cities to suburbia, Jews no longer stood out from other students. The goal of American German Jews to inculcate Eastern European Jews with "more polish and less Polish" had come to pass in the postwar decades. Indeed, the unofficial arbiters of American manners were now two sisters of Eastern European Jewish background named Dear Abby and Ann Landers.

The emphasis on merit that enabled Jews to advance in academia both as students and faculty did not go unchallenged. In the 1970s and 1980s the major objection to the principle of merit came not from old-line Americans wishing to restore their pre-war position, but from blacks, Hispanics, feminists, and other aggrieved minorities. They sought through affirmative action - what the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer called "affirmative discrimination" - to increase the number of students and faculty from among those who were otherwise unqualified on the basis of impersonal tests, publications, and degrees. Those concerned with maintaining academic integrity predicted, correctly as it turned out, that affirmative action would lower academic standards, devalue academic degrees, create an academic spoils system, and balkanize education into competing ethnic, racial, gender, religious, and political factions. For Jews, affirmative action was reminiscent of the anti-Jewish quotas of European and American universities prior to World War II, and they feared it would close an important avenue of social ascent. Ironically, affirmative action was encouraged, or at least tacitly accepted, by some Jewish academicians and administrators whose own advancement had been due to the spread of the merit principle.(21)