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National News See other National News Articles Title: Affirmative Action and the Jewish in the Room The top American news story at the end of last week was the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, striking down the use of race in college admissions and thereby overturning nearly a half-century of its own past rulings. The print editions of our leading national newspapers carried virtually identical front-page banner headlines, with the New York Times announcing “Justices Gut College Affirmative Action” and the Wall Street Journal declaring “Court Guts College Affirmative Action.” The banner headline in my own local Palo Alto Daily Post, a small distribution newspaper that closely tracks the media consensus, was even more emphatic: “Court Ends Affirmative Action.” Although the ultimate consequences of any major legal decision may take years to be fully understood, the potentially sweeping implications of this dramatic ruling were suggested by the lead story on the Saturday website edition of the Times: “Affirmative Action Ruling May Upend Hiring Policies, Too.” The editors of our national newspaper of record had apparently prepared themselves for this verdict. The ruling was announced Thursday morning and by that evening the Times website had already published a lengthy opinion piece on the long political conflict over racial preferences by Jerome Karabel, an eminent Berkeley sociologist. Karabel’s essay was allocated a full page in the next day’s prestigious print edition, thereby establishing him as the primary voice selected by the Times to respond to the controversial court decision. The Decades-Long Fight to Dismantle Affirmative Action Jerome Karabel • The New York Times • June 29, 2023 • 2,400 Words Although the history presented by Karabel seemed reasonably even-handed and accurate, I noticed a striking omission. As a scholar, he is best known for his award-winning 2005 study The Chosen, a magisterial narrative history of the last hundred years of Jewish enrollment at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. His research had heavily focused on the secret use of discriminatory practices to sharply restrict Jewish admissions, yet despite its obvious relevance to the current court case no mention of that topic appeared anywhere in his lengthy essay. Karabel’s seminal research on Jews in the Ivy League served as the foundation for my own 2012 Meritocracy analysis, and although he carefully avoided that subject in his Times piece, I had explained in my article why I regarded it as central to understanding the long struggle over elite admissions: Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes— establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare. During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition.[10] Therefore, the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level, and thereafter hold it almost constant during the decades which followed.[11] For example, the Jewish portion of Harvard’s entering class dropped from nearly 30 percent in 1925 to 15 percent the following year and remained roughly static until the period of the Second World War.[12] As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America’s national population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.[13] Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.[14] At times, external judicial or political forces would be summoned to override university admissions policy, often succeeding in this aim. Karabel’s own ideological leanings are hardly invisible, as he hails efforts by state legislatures to force Ivy League schools to lift their de facto Jewish quotas, but seems to regard later legislative attacks on “affirmative action” as unreasonable assaults on academic freedom.[15] The massively footnoted text of The Chosen might lead one to paraphrase Clausewitz and conclude that our elite college admissions policy often consists of ethnic warfare waged by other means, or even that it could be summarized as a simple Leninesque question of “Who, Whom?” Although nearly all of Karabel’s study is focused on the earlier history of admissions policy at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with the developments of the last three decades being covered in just a few dozen pages, he finds complete continuity down to the present day, with the notorious opacity of the admissions process still allowing most private universities to admit whomever they want for whatever reasons they want, even if the reasons and the admissions decisions may eventually change over the years. Despite these plain facts, Harvard and the other top Ivy League schools today publicly deny any hint of discrimination along racial or ethnic lines, except insofar as they acknowledge providing an admissions boost to under-represented racial minorities, such as blacks or Hispanics. But given the enormous control these institutions exert on our larger society, we should test these claims against the evidence of the actual enrollment statistics. For more than one hundred years and especially in recent decades, our elite colleges have served as a direct channel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, finance, and media, so dominating those institutions and determining their enrollment provides a considerable measure of control over our entire society. And as Karabel demonstrated in his fascinating volume, throughout the twentieth century those colleges therefore became the battleground of a silent struggle for power between white Gentiles and Jews. The former initially held the upper hand, but the latter ultimately proved victorious, and towards the end of his book the author celebrated their supposedly meritocratic triumph: Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by…noting the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America’s elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict. Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular example emphasized by Karabel. Indeed, I think our nation’s fifty year struggle over Affirmative Action can best be understood as an element of that hidden ethnic struggle. As I explained in the closing paragraphs of my 2018 article: Many years ago as a young and naive undergraduate, I would usually spend my dinners discussing all sorts of political and policy issues with my fellow classmates in our Harvard dining hall. Affirmative Action was a regular topic of our conversations, and I would occasionally note how odd America was in that regard. No other example came to mind in which an ethnic group had established a legalized system of racial discrimination against its own members, while similar sorts of systems aimed at excluding or disadvantaging rival ethnic groups were all too common in world history. As the decades went by, I gradually noticed that the huge and continuing increase in the enrollment of non-white and foreign students at our most elite universities had caused a complete collapse in the enrollment of white American Gentiles, but oddly enough, no similar reduction in Jewish numbers. It was well-known that Jewish activists had been the primary force behind the establishment of Affirmative Action and related policies in college admissions, and I began to wonder about their true motivation, whether conscious or unconscious. Had the goal been the stated one, of providing educational opportunities to previously excluded groups? Or had that merely been the excuse used to advance a policy that eliminated the majority of white Gentiles, their primary ethnic competitors? With the Jewish population numbering merely 2%, there was an obvious limit as to how many elite college slots they themselves could possibly fill, but if enough other groups were also brought in, then Gentile numbers could easily be reduced to low levels, despite the fact that they constituted the bulk of the national population. Asians represented an interesting test-case. As their numbers rapidly grew, white Gentiles were consequently pushed out, and this process was celebrated across the academic community. But by the late 1980s, Asian numbers had increased to such an extent that they inevitably began to impinge upon elite Jewish enrollment as well and future increases would surely worsen the situation. And at that point, the process suddenly halted, with Asian numbers being sharply reduced and thereafter permanently capped. The implications of this situation were already in the back of my mind when I published my 1998 Wall Street Journal column describing some of these striking racial facts. The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals. The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well- known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved. Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society. Most American journalists and academics quietly recognize that matters touching upon Jewish sensitivities constitute the deadly “third rail” of their professions and the quantitative analysis that I had presented in my 2012 Meritocracy analysis was probably one of the most explosive published anywhere in many decades. In that study I demonstrated that the distribution of students at our elite colleges sharply diverged from that of our society as a whole or its highest performing segment, but instead showed a strikingly different ethnic skew: The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America’s other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America’s most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent. Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non- Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores. When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity. However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under- represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students. Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews. Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination. The Myth of American Meritocracy Ron Unz • The American Conservative • November 28, 2012 • 26,200 Words Several charts and graphs effectively presented these remarkable findings: Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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