THE ACADEMIC POGROM
It is natural that in a time of reaction such as the present, every form
of organized cruelty and hatred should lift its ugly head; and so we
have in our colleges not merely campaigns of religious bigotry, but also
of race prejudice.
We know the ideal American college student. He comes from our best
families, his figure is tall and straight, and his features regular and
blank, according to the Gibson standard. He is perfectly groomed, in the
Arrow collar and the Kuppenheimer clothes and the Brogue boot. He has
always had plenty of servants to wait on him, so he does not know how to
work. He is thoroughly skilled, however, in every form of play, and has
been raised in a system of conventions which constitute “good manners.”
He comes to college to spend the four pleasantest years of his life in
the company of his social equals. His father and big brothers before him
have belonged to the right clubs, and are prominent in the alumni
association. He goes in for athletics, and for the glee club, and gets a
fraternity pin and a big Y, or whatever letter it may be, on his
sweater; he becomes a leader of his class and a social favorite, and
takes the college girls to dances in his big car, and now and then he
takes one of the town girls out into the country on summer evenings, or
to a road-house in winter. He is an expert in smoking tobacco, and
connects up with the best university boot-legger—but all quietly, of
course, and nothing to excess, except on football nights and special
occasions.
There is only one thing wrong with this four years of paradise, and that
is a lot of fool pedants and bookworms, who think they have something to
do with running the college, and worry a fellow to death stuffing his
head with old Anglo-Saxon roots and mathematical formulas, names and
dates of dead kings and battles, and peculiarities of French and Greek
irregular verbs. The young gentleman in college regards these pedants as
his natural enemies, and the outwitting of them as one of his
entertainments. If you have plenty of money you can hire sharp fellows
to study examination papers and work out the science of “getting by,”
and two weeks before examinations you shut yourself up in your room,
with a wet towel about your head and a pot of strong coffee on your
desk, and you cram your mind with the necessary mass of facts, and so
you pass. You understand the unwritten law of colleges—just as the old
French marquis understood the heavenly system, when he said that God
would think twice before he damned a gentleman like him. Make yourself a
power in athletics and in social life, and pay a certain minimum debt to
the thing called “learning,” and you may be sure that no member of the
faculty will have the insolence to “flunk” you. Such is American college
life today, and when we read in college journals and in the capitalist
press about the preservation of Anglo-Saxon traditions in our
institutions of higher education, that is what we are talking about.
But now along come a lot of fellows—and worse, a few girls as well—whose
features lack the regular vapidity of the Gibson type, but on the
contrary, have been distorted by suffering and struggle. These people
have for the last two thousand years been an oppressed race, and they
display the painful qualities which oppression causes in human beings.
Sometimes they cringe, and again, when they get power they may become
insolent. For two thousand years they have survived in the world by two
qualities, racial and religious solidarity, and commercial shrewdness.
We in America are full of the raptures of dollar-getting; but here is a
people who can make two dollars while we are making one, and can save
ten dollars while we are squandering a hundred. Being people who have
had to make their own way in the world, they are apt to be pushing and
thick-skinned; they sometimes come where they are not wanted, and do not
always take a hint to leave.
They try to break into “society”; that is, having acquired wealth, they
assume they are entitled to the perquisites of wealth. But we bar them
from our dinner-parties and our clubs, and sometimes from our hotels.
Naturally their sons and daughters turn their eyes upon our colleges;
and here is an atrocious situation. These institutions have established
no social tests, but have left their doors open for anyone who can pass
an examination. And these people take advantage of us—they actually
expect to break in among our sons and daughters, just by learning more
than our sons and daughters know! That is easy for them, you understand;
not being admitted to fraternities and glee clubs, they have nothing
better to do than to sit in their rooms and read and study. And what
chance do our “Gibson types” stand against such a proposition? They
stand no chance whatever; and so the Jews carry off the honors and the
prizes—actually, if things were allowed to go on, they would become
members of the faculty, and we should be sending our future Anglo-Saxon
conquerors to be taught by Jewish scientists and men of letters!
Such is the problem faced by our interlocking trustees and their
faculties; it is an embarrassing problem, because, in the first place,
the Jews are enormously wealthy, and they stand together, and have not
merely financial but political power. Also, they take pride in their
culture; they point out that they gave the world its first great
literature, and have given to Anglo-Saxon countries practically
everything in the way of religion which these countries consider divine.
They have contributed their due share of scientists and writers and
statesmen of modern times; also they have given to the world the
religion of the future, through the labor of Marx and Lassalle, Jaurès
and Liebknecht.
In the light of these varied facts, we cannot come out boldly and say
that we refuse to admit Jews to our universities; we find it easier to
employ those peculiar talents for prevarication which our college heads
have developed. We invent what are called “psychological tests”; we fill
our examination papers with “catch” questions—little details of language
idiom and social observance and historical tradition, with which the
Jews are less apt to be familiar. Or we conduct oral examinations,
concerning which there are no records, and therefore no proofs of
prejudice. By these means, in a couple of years we cut down the
percentage of Jews at Columbia from forty percent to twenty-two percent,
and at New York University we cut it down from fifty percent to fifteen.
Our really aristocratic university, Princeton, has never “made any
bones” about it. Very few Jews and no Negroes have been able to pass the
“examinations” for admission to Princeton. At Harvard it has always been
possible to get in by passing a much stricter examination; but even by
this method the percentage of Jews keeps creeping up, and when I was in
Harvard last spring they were talking about introducing the
“psychological tests,” as at Columbia. One student reported a
conversation with Richard Cabot, professor of “social ethics,” who said
that he did not object to the exclusion of Jews, but thought it should
be done frankly. His idea prevailed among the overseers, and shortly
afterwards a statement was issued which gives an amusing illustration of
what Harvard regards as frankness. The statement set forth that there
were more applicants for admission than Harvard was able to accommodate,
and the governing body must take some action in the matter. Then: “It is
natural that with a widespread discussion of this sort going on there
should be talk about the proportion of Jews at the college.” In the
course of the “discussion” that followed, we find President Lowell
deploring the growth of anti-Semitic feeling, and suggesting a marvelous
plan to eliminate it from American colleges—let the Jews keep away!
And then the Negro question. They have a Memorial Hall at Harvard, and
make much of their heroes who died to abolish Negro slavery. I have a
cousin who went to Harvard twenty years ago, and though he is a Southern
man, he was able to live comfortably in a dormitory in which there was a
Negro student. But a year or two ago a student engaged a room in a
freshman dormitory, and went to occupy it, and when they made the
discovery that he was a Negro, they told him that a mistake had been
made, they had no room vacant in that dormitory, or in any other
dormitory. Not until they had been exposed several times in such
evasions, did they come forward and announce that in future no Negroes
would be admitted to freshman dormitories at Harvard.
We have mentioned New York University. During the controversy over Jews
at Harvard, Chancellor Brown favored the press with the proud
announcement that there was no discrimination against Jews at
Jabbergrab; and a week or two later there was published in the “Nation”
(July 12, 1922) a letter from Mr. Joseph Girdansky, who made a
reputation as an athlete at this place, telling about the experience of
his younger brother, also an athlete, and presumably acceptable to his
fellow students, since he was elected president of the junior class.
When this result was announced, the faculty of Jabbergrab rose up and
called off the election. First, it appeared, the officers elected were
Bolshevists; second, there had been ballot-stuffing; and third, fourth
and fifth, the elections were null and void. Several Jewish boys were
threatened with expulsion for having been elected to class offices!
Mr. Girdansky went on to tell about his interview with Dean Archibald
Banton of Jabbergrab. This was two or three years ago, and the dean
quite frankly admitted that it was a Jewish question. In the elder
Girdansky’s day, said the dean, the percentage of Jews had been from two
to four, while now it had got to fifty. So the university was
introducing what it called an “Americanization plan.” Mr. Girdansky
threatened to expose this state of affairs—right in the midst of
Chancellor Brown’s advertising campaign for funds! The dean begged him
to wait until the fall, promising that the class elections would be
settled satisfactorily. They were settled by a great number of the
Jewish students leaving, and new class officers being elected, or
appointed by the faculty—all the important ones being non-Jews!
At Barnard, which is the women’s college of Columbia University, they
have a committee on admissions, which in actual practice means the dean
and the secretary, who decide upon the eligibility of girls who have
passed the examinations. Highly competent graduates of New York high
schools are left out, because they happen to be Jewesses; and in their
place girls are taken from the fashionable “finishing schools,” who are
so poor in scholarship that they have to be conditioned. I was told of
one case of a Russian Jewish girl who had been excluded and went to
Hunter College and made a brilliant record. There was some agitation
about this case, and the dean sent someone to look it up, and the report
was that “keeping her out was a good job.” The teacher who told me this
story was interested in the matter, and went over to Hunter College
herself to find out what was wrong about the girl. There were two things
the matter with her: first, she was a Socialist, and second, she had
expressed her opinion in favor of the recognition of Soviet Russia.
Also at the University of Pennsylvania the issue has been taken up. The
endowment drive was held up because the leaders wished to engraft upon
it the verbal pledge to anti-Semitic contributors that Jewish enrollment
would be curtailed. One seminary course at the university during the
past year was largely devoted, under cover, to sounding out the views of
the graduate students in economics upon the Jew menace. It was freely
stated in that course that desire to reduce the high percentage of Jews
in the Wharton School was the motive prompting the “intelligence test”
requirement for admission.
Needless to say, the academic pogrom extends not only to students, but
to professors. You may find this situation effectively set forth in a
vital criticism of America, “Up Stream,” by Ludwig Lewisohn. Mr.
Lewisohn tells how he studied under the aegis of Nicholas Murray Butler,
and made himself a master of English literature and English style. You
do not have to take his word for this; he proves it in his book. Few
indeed are the Anglo-Saxon professors in American universities who can
demonstrate equal attainments! This German-Jew was poor, his family had
made heavy sacrifices to give him an education; but he could get no
teaching position, and for a long time the Columbia professors who had
charge of his career kept from him the dark secret, that Jews are not
employed to teach literature in American universities. Lewisohn was
forced to do newspaper work, and not until years later did he get a
chance to teach at the University of Wisconsin.
Also you ought to hear the experience of Professor Kornhauser of Denison
University, at Granville, Ohio. He taught zoology, and was admitted to
have one of the best departments in this Baptist institution; he was an
active Y. M. C. A. worker, president of the Faculty Club, and commander
of the American Legion post—it is difficult to see what more a Jew might
do to take the curse off himself! He was offered an important position
at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and as the price of declining this, was
made a full professor at Denison, and spent three years building up his
department. But last April the president of the university asked him to
resign, and stated as his reason that some of the financial supporters
of the university objected to the presence of a Jew on the faculty. The
students protested, and in the effort to silence them the president
threatened that if they published anything about the case he would
refuse to recommend Professor Kornhauser for a job at any other
university. The senior class, by a vote of eighty to six, passed a
resolution asking for the president’s removal.
Also you should consider the experience of Professor Robert T. Kerlin, a
high-minded and devoted Christian gentleman, who was dismissed from the
Virginia Military Institute for having written a dignified open letter
to the governor of Arkansas, protesting against the execution of some
Negroes for the crime of having defended their lives against a mob. You
may read his letter in the files of the “Nation,” June 15, 1921.
And then, to return to the Jews, hear the strange experience of Mr. S.
S. Catell, who was an instructor in accounting at the University of
Oklahoma. Mr. Catell happens to be near-sighted, and was turned out upon
the pretext that he was unable to teach properly on this account. He
sent a questionnaire to his students, and out of a total of forty-nine,
thirty said that his work was above the average, while eighteen said it
was average; one was absent and did not reply. But this did not get Mr.
Catell restored, and so he investigated, and discovered that the head of
his department did not like Jews. The way in which the young instructor
made this discovery would seem sufficiently convincing to anyone. He met
the head of his department in the hallway of the latter’s home, and the
department head put to him a question: “Do you know who killed Jesus
Christ?” Mr. Catell, in his letter to me, says that he contented himself
with the answer: “I do not know, since it was so long ago!”
If I were a cultured Jew in America, I know what I should do. I should
not flatter the race conceit of Anglo-Saxon colleges; I should make it
my task to persuade wealthy Jews to establish an endowment and gather a
faculty of Jewish scientists and scholars—there are enough of them to
make the most wonderful faculty in the world. And then I should open the
doors of this university to seekers of knowledge of all races—save that
I should bar students who had anti-Semitic prejudice!