#Negative Tactics

[xtruss]

Yale University students celebrate graduation in 1914—despite what the date scribbled on the image says. In the early 20th century, U.S. elite colleges were panicked about an influx of Jewish applicants. They devised a system to screen them out that remains mainly in place today. Photograph By George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress

Why Do Colleges Have Legacy Admissions? It Started as a Way to Keep Out Jews.

Standardized tests. Interviews. Extracurricular Activities. In the early 20th Century, Universities used these Tactics to Ensure their Students were Predominantly Protestant.

— By Erin Blakemore | July 28, 2023

Should college students gain admission based on academic merit—or who their parents are? That question has become more pertinent than ever with the U.S. Supreme Court’s invalidation of affirmative action and the Department of Education’s announcement of a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s preferential treatment of “legacy” students with family connections.

Although it may seem like a modern problem, it’s only been about a century since U.S. colleges and universities began factoring family relationships and other criteria like extracurricular activities, interviews, and standardized test scores into their admissions decisions. These policies, it turns out, are rooted in anti-Semitic attitudes that aimed to keep Jewish students out of elite schools.

Here’s how anti-Jewish discrimination fueled modern college admissions—long before affirmative action ever existed.

Training Grounds For Society’s Elite

Before the late 19th century, a college education was largely out of reach for anyone but wealthy Protestants, who founded universities and colleges to prepare their sons for cultural and community leadership. Though these institutions extended preferential treatment to the sons of previous graduates, their entrance requirements were relatively lax. In a time before widespread public education, few who could afford to pay were turned away.

But beginning in the 1840s, the makeup of American society changed with waves of immigration that brought Catholics and Jews into the country in large numbers. As these emigrants flooded into the nation, write sociologists Deborah L. Coe and James D. Davidson, their presence threatened white Protestant groups who had previously dominated mainstream culture.

“As a result,” Coe and Davidson write, “anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiments found their way into a variety of mechanisms that were created in response to the undesirable demographic changes.” This soon filtered into college admissions too.

Catholics quickly founded their own universities and encouraged members of their religion to attend them. So it was Jewish college enrollment that generated special concern at predominantly Protestant institutions.

Panic Over 'Undesirable' College Applicants

Institutions historically tolerated some Jewish students, but only those whom officials felt had the proper class standing and had appropriately “assimilated” into mainstream American culture.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, newer arrivals from majority Jewish enclaves didn’t fit that mold, so elite Protestants attempted to close ranks. University officials who bought into longstanding stereotypes of Jews as clannish, conniving, and socially undesirable worried that admitting Jews would taint the reputation of the schools. Plus, they disliked the idea of their sons being educated alongside them.

No longer was mere money sufficient for acceptance into elite social circles. As historian John Higham writes, Protestant elites of the era “grasped at social distinctions that were more than pecuniary,” including “the cult of genealogy.” Suddenly, institutions including social clubs, sports organizations, prep schools, and even neighborhoods emphasized family connections as part of the price of entry—shutting Jews out by default.

It was no different in higher education, where leaders were alarmed by rising Jewish enrollment. In response, they began to brainstorm how to limit Jewish applicants without endangering public funding or damaging their reputations.

Elite Universities’ Anti-Semitic Legacy

Yale University was one of those institutions. “There seems to be no question that the University as a whole has about all of this race that it can well handle,” wrote Robert Nelson Corwin, Yale’s admissions chairman, in 1922. Though Jewish students showed the same academic achievement as their counterparts, Corwin wrote, “members of this race…graduate from college as alien in morals and manners as they were upon admission.”

He recommended that Yale implement “non-intellectual requirements,” including letters of recommendation, in-person interviews, and psychological testing, to limit its number of Jews.

Corwin was far from alone. From Harvard to Rutgers, Columbia to Tufts, elite colleges and universities began trying anything and everything to control the makeup of their student bodies. Some implemented quotas to limit the number of Jews in new classes. Others focused recruiting in areas they knew had lower populations of Jews, and began looking more closely at extracurricular activities that indicated the social class and religion of applicants. More admissions requirements meant more reasons to turn down students—and a way to mask anti-Semitic school policies.

When Jews won more academic scholarships, schools like Harvard and Yale discontinued them in favor of financial aid. They also embraced the new field of psychological testing, offering tests that measured aptitude and not achievement, such as the Thorndike Tests for Mental Alertness.

“The primitive and biased tests effectively reduced Jewish enrollment [at Columbia] by half,” write education historians Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, noting that many such tests were developed by eugenicists in search of “a purportedly objective way to quantify the structural racism of the day and to have it accepted as scientific.”

Another new requirement was so common it became almost ubiquitous during the period: the photograph. Historian Marianne R. Sanua writes that at Columbia, one fraternity publication satirically recommended that to get around newly tightened admissions requirements, applicants should dye their hair blonde, pretend they were taller, and have photos taken that downplayed stereotypically “Jewish” facial features.

Finally, higher education institutions also implemented internal legacy admissions policies, actively recruiting relatives of alumni and offering them a leg up on other applicants.

“All properly qualified sons of Dartmouth alumni and Dartmouth College officers will be accepted,” wrote Dartmouth College in its alumni magazine in 1922. The school also required applicants to submit multiple letters from Dartmouth alumni, promising that it would prioritize “men who plainly possess the qualities of leadership or qualities of outstanding promise” over those “qualified by high scholarship ranks but with no evidence of positive qualities otherwise.”

The Persistence of Legacy Admissions

As anti-Jewish sentiment became less mainstream in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust and with the rise of the civil rights movement, many universities phased out their more overtly anti-Semitic policies. But many of the restrictions put in place to limit Jewish applicants stuck. Standardized testing and interviews are still common requirements for college admissions, and today’s institutions of higher learning still admit more wealthy students.

One recent analysis found that children from the top 0.1 percent income bracket are more than twice as likely to gain admission to Ivy League schools compared to poorer students with the same test scores—and that 46 percent of their advantage can be attributed to admissions policies that extend preferential treatment to “legacy” students.

Despite some institutions like Amherst, Johns Hopkins, and Wesleyan announcing that they’ve abandoning the practice, the system is still common today. In a 2018 survey by Inside Higher Education, 42 percent of admissions directors at private colleges and universities said legacy status is a factor in their admissions process, compared to 6 percent at public institutions.

Among those institutions is Harvard, whose legacy admissions policy is now facing scrutiny by federal civil rights investigators. The Harvard Crimson reports that among its 2022 freshman class, more than 14 percent surveyed said they were legacy students, and self-reported legacies were likelier to be white. Over a third with one or more parents who attended Harvard reported a combined family income of $500,000 a year or more.

Will legacy admissions go the way of affirmative action? Until the results of the Department of Education’s reported investigation become clear, there’s no way of knowing. But many of the policies once implemented to keep Jews out of higher education in the U.S. are likely to persist.

[moeblob]

I am really tired of a situation rn.

[buffyspeak]

none of the tbosas x thg are 1:1 parallels because that would take away their nuance and dimensionality. that being said the character most like sejanus was gale but some of y’all aren’t ready that conversation because you blindly hate gale without consideration for his complexity. anyway

[deservedgrace]

i listened to a sermon from my old church and transcribed it so i can go through and point out cult tactics for my own benefit, and i'm realizing how much like... i don't know if it can be considered doublespeak but there are a bunch of statements that probably sound way different to "outsiders" than it does to "insiders".

like the statement "we're not conformed to the way the world works, we're conformed to god's purposes in heaven", an "outsider" making a good faith interpretation might go "oh, okay, they're probably talking about having faith about heaven and how they feel they should act in accordance with that." but those of us that are/have been involved know, the words "conformed" and "world" have a lot of implications around them within christianity.

"conformed" doesn't just mean "behave according to socially acceptable conventions or standards" or "agree with". it has implications in idolatry, since conforming to worldly things is equivalent to worshiping worldly things (and everybody is worshiping something, if they're not worshiping god they're worshiping satan/idols). "conformed" has implications in giving into the temptations of the sin of the "world".

and "world" doesn't mean "the earth" or "people/societies that exist on earth". it is equivalent to sinfulness, to wickedness, to immorality, to depravity. worldly people are incapable of morality, of goodness, of "real" love, of "real" happiness, of "real" fulfillment.

and i'm realizing now that when i brought up concerns about things being taught in the church, and i would get dismissed and made to feel like i was the issue... a lot of that was that i was criticizing "insider" doctrine, and the solution the church members were trained in is using "outsider doctrine" (nicer sounding) to make the person bringing up the "insider doctrine" (less nice sounding but still completely accurate interpretation) feel like the problem. suddenly, the understanding we all had of "world = sinful" was my fault and my interpretation and my sin getting in the way of the ~perfect~ doctrine.

[loveoaths]

i will never stop thinking about how palpatine forces count dooku to kill his apprentice asajj ventress because she is getting too powerful, and palpatine refuses to tolerate a threat, even if it is useful and temporarily loyal. and how the nature of sith master and apprentice is built at the intersection of dependence and expendability. masters train apprentices to need them, and never teach them everything they know (implying that the sith have been steadily losing their own cultural knowledge and techniques over thousands of years because of their own selfishness) out of fear of their apprentice rising up and killing them, which is also the one thing they have trained their apprentice to do. meanwhile apprentices, resentful of their dependence, go out and create apprentices of their own to usurp their master and continue the entire useless cycle. by nature, both master and apprentice are inherently crucial and expendable all at once, which they then use as a threat to keep one another in line.

but in the cases of ventress and maul, they’re both uniquely expendable because their existence is only tolerated (first by plagueis, then by sidious) under the condition that they are a tool that will be disposed of once it’s usefulness has ended. that’s crazy. years and years of training someone only to off them; the time sink alone is ridiculous. and neither of them expects this, either, because they believe in the old lineage of the sith: that their masters will honor their agreement and make them Sith Lords so long as they obey without question, only to find out in the worst way that they were never intended to become true Sith Lords. they were a means to an end, and both of them feel so deeply betrayed and hurt by this that they cannot let it go. like… i dunno man, but as much as that is a leopards-ate-my-face situation, it’s also deeply sad because these two in particular are essentially raised in the sith tradition. ventress has some years as a jedi, but not many. the foundation of their beings, the one solid thing they believed in, turned out to be hollow. sad.

[kil9]

everyone agrees that the patriarchy teaches men to hide their emotions, and that this is a bad thing, so why is it that when men actually show an emotion everyone jumps to call him an abuser or manipulator or whatever :\

[resident-rats]

Next week when I’m at my mum’s, if she makes one (1) out of pocket comment about my appearance I swear I will watch vendetta really loudly with her in earshot

She’s incredibly antivaxx and most of the plot is them developing a vaccine

[sapphia]

life series scott really has it all. gay jokes? check. crazy pvp skills? check. an explicitly-romantic plot line across multiple seasons where he refers to another character as his husband and tells him he loves him? check. cute little builds? check.

[kamomie]

I understand Red, not so much Green, but if everytime Blue reaches out to change how cutthroat purgatory currently is, and Red absolutely refuses, they're never going to unite forces... never gonna come together to figure out who the cursed team is.

[eternal-fear]

Maedhros, the High King of Noldor, from my au.

[blarrghe]

About you writing Dorian. There is one specific scene I remember from matchsies on their first date. Having an absolutely horrible conversation and Dorian is being an absolute Ass about, it Dorian-Style (affectionate). And at the end Dorian gets desperate (?) and tries to convince Taren to let him give him a blowjob (character development important one ofc). All while still being an Ass about it Dorian-Style. And knowing/learning Dorian's sexual history puts everything in that scene in perspective while still letting him be the asshole he is <3 (it's been the same anon all day I have the day off and nothing better to do than analyze dragon age fanfiction) (im getting '#1 blarghe fan' tattooed on my forehead)

aww. I just reread that chapter yesterday actually bc a friend commented on it. definitely such a fun start to that fic. I love it when he's being The Worst.

[tittyinfinity]

you ever see a bunch of adults in their 20s and 30s absolutely dragging someone and then you go and check the person's blog and they're 15 years old

[fideidefenswhore]

I have another Wolf Hall related question :D

Is it true Cromwell wanted Mary to be kept as Princess? And, how true is it that Henry only took away her title because of Anne?

There's one reference to this in his remembrances (although...he does refer to Elizabeth as Princess, and Mary as Lady Mary) which would suggest he at least wanted to keep that option available:

To devise that the rest of the plate, not necessary for the Princess Dowager, may be brought to the Jewel-house. Those things for my Lady Mary, which are not meet for the Princess, to be also brought thither. [To remember what danger is in war, and that the commons were better to bear a contribution to find in the estate that she now is in, and to avoid war, than to diminish anything]

However, that part in the brackets is struck out, which rather suggests that if he ever shared this view with Henry, it was soundly rejected.

'Estate' and 'title' could be interchangeably used, but not always, it is also possible what he's referring to here when he writes 'estate' is her residence-- that he's predicting a poor reaction from the commons if she's removed from Beaulieu, that he's caught wind that Beaulieu is to be granted to George Boleyn (who he had an adversarial relationship with, pretty early on), and is wary of this.

I'm sure Anne influenced the decision, and likely would have continued to do so for as long as she lived and reigned, but time proved it was not solely due to Anne, it was because he believed his union with Catherine had been unlawful. If it was truly solely Anne's instigation than Henry would've reversed the decision mid-1536, instead Mary was pressurized to swear to her non-royal status and to write that it was just to her Imperial relatives abroad.

[desperatepleasures]

the main character being afraid of ghosts is the funniest fucking possible reveal you could drop 75% of the way into a series about an exorcist

[drachenblood]

the pattern i keep seeing over the past few days since the callout started circulating are people who feel extremely guilty for interacting with miles.

for what little comfort this can offer, please don't let him ruin your happiness or let him ruin your friendships. don't blame yourself for falling for his deceptions. he's very good at manipulating people.

additionally, a huge take away i've had from this is the importance of letting people be heard instead of shutting them down. it's disturbing the number of people who have come forward with their testimonials now that they feel safe to do so. people sharing their experiences with him as recently as the past month.

[owedfavors]

hi, this is me getting up on my soap box again this morning to complain about the fact that in two seasons of snw, they never once did anything with the 'number one is very resourceful; people have a tendency to end up owing her favors' piece of beautiful indirect characterization they gave us in disco, and this is both a travesty and a personal insult to me. I deserved it.