[lbo-talk] "The Chosen"

[Bitch]

I've left Jim's comments for a flavor of the article:

-----------------------------------------------------

Fascinating recent article in the New Yorker on Ivy League admissions
policy. I've copied the most interesting part of the article below.
In short, the admissions essay was introduced by Harvard as a
mechanism to control the number of Jews attending Harvard.

There are also some interesting tidbits on the correlation between
LSAT scores and future performance as a lawyer (but you'll have to
read the entire article for those :-)

- Jim

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/051010crat_atlarge

As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in "The Chosen" (Houghton
Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a
crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922,
they made up more than a fifth of Harvard's freshman class. The
administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be
sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the
sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund- raising.
A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's president in the nineteen- twenties,
stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school:
"The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its
fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the
Gentiles have left, they leave also."

The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews
out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone
else. Lowell's first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent
of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting
the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an
effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where
there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and
his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition
of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of
student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel
argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the
Ivy League took a significant turn.

The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the
details of an applicant's personal life. Lowell told his admissions
officers to elicit information about the "character" of candidates
from "persons who know the applicants well," and so the letter of
reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to
provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays,
demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their
extracurricular activities. "Starting in the fall of 1922," Karabel
writes, "applicants were required to answer questions on 'Race and
Color,' 'Religious Preference,' 'Maiden Name of Mother,' 'Birthplace
of Father,' and 'What change, if any, has been made since birth in
your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).' "

At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools,
with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4,
where 1 was "very desirable and apparently exceptional material from
every point of view" and 4 was "undesirable from the point of view of
character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results
of the entrance examinations might be." The personal interview became
a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, "to ensure
that 'undesirables' were identified and to assess important but
subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress,
deportment and physical appearance." By 1933, the end of Lowell's
term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per
cent.

If this new admissions system seems familiar, that's because it is
essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day.
According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn't abandon the
elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They
institutionalized it._______________________________________________
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