| Popis: |
When Conant became president, Harvard College students were male, almost all white, primarily Unitarian, Congregationalist, or Episcopalian in religion, predominantly from New England. Brahmin Harvard sought to restrict the number of Jewish students and faculty; indeed, that issue often was the outlet for opposition to the effort to make Harvard a more meritocratic university. Even more pervasive was the desire to shield Harvard men and Radcliffe women from the perils of coeducation. Catholics were scant, but for different reasons: hostility to godless Harvard in Catholic churches and schools kept their numbers small during the 1920s and 1930s. As for African Americans, there were so few that it was safe to accept (if not to welcome) them—if they met academic standards for admission and had the money to pay for their education. Under Eliot’s benign lead, turn-of-the-century Harvard was more receptive to Jewish students than were other Eastern universities. Undergraduates from well-off German-Jewish families combined with a growing number of commuters from the Boston area to become a substantial presence. By the early 1920s, an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the undergraduate student body was Jewish. This was cause for concern by alumni, faculty, and not least President Lowell. In 1922 he proposed a formal Jewish quota of 12 percent. This was the limiting device traditionally used in European universities, now much in the American public mind because of the movement for quota-based immigration restriction laws. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, looking back on the controversy fifty years later, ascribed the emotional strength of the Jewish reaction to the fact that Lowell’s 12 percent quota was the same as the numerus clausus of the Russian imperial universities. Lowell’s biography, published in 1948, rather laboriously tried to exonerate him: “the poor, hard-working student, native-born or immigrant, Gentile or Jew, white or black, never had a warmer friend, although many excellent persons criticized at times his way of showing friendship.” But it is clear that Lowell shared in full measure the prejudices of his caste. Jews, he thought, lowered the moral tone of the College. |
