Getting In: The New Yorker

As the sociologist Jerome Karabel publishs in The Chosen (Houghton Mifflin; his unusual history of the admissions abut at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that chastityocratic spirit presently led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to tog out dramatically.By 1922, they make up more than than a fifth of Harvards appetiser class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were conceit to be unwell and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon Protestant alumni, which did not call well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvards professorship in the nineteen-twenties, verbalise flatly that too many Jews would ruin the school: The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate. because they drive out-of-door the Gentiles, and then after(prenominal) the Gentiles have left, they add also. \nThe difficult part, however, was approach up with a way of charge Jews out, because as a group they w ere academically superior to everyone else. Lowells start-off ideaa quota limiting Jews to xv per cent of the disciple bodywas roundly criticized. Lowell tested restricting the issue of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an safari to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were less Jews. Neither schema worked. Finally, Lowelland his counterparts at Yale and Princetonrealized that if a interpretation of merit based on academic fine art was leading to the awry(p) kind of student, the base was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this blink of an eye that the history and nature of the Ivy fusion took a evidentiary turn. \nThe admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicants own(prenominal) life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the origin work of candidates from persons who know the applicants well, and so the letter of reference beca me mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to go out a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their cheating(a) activities. Starting in the fall of 1922, Karabel writes, applicants were required to answer questions on Race and Color, religious Preference, Maiden put up of Mother, Birthplace of Father, and What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own foretell or that of your stick? (Explain fully).