Freedman to Dartmouth: 'J'accuse!'

By Christopher Pearson | Wednesday, January 14, 1998

At a time when a last name like Rudenstine is no bar to the presidency of Harvard and no cry of concern is elicited when one third of the Penn student body is Jewish, a period when things were different can be difficult to imagine. In fact, however, admissions quotas tailored to disfavor Jews were a commonplace in the Ivy League half a century ago. Indeed, the present favoritism of the eight schools that now comprise the conference toward applicants from under-represented geographic areas originated shortly after World War II in an attempt to stem an increasing Jewish presence on their campuses. The influx of Jews, frequently more qualified than the Protestants who were the staple of Ivy League student bodies, so unsettled the elite schools that they instructed their admissions committees to grant preference to students living in the West. As Jews came predominantly from the Northeast, the policy change was designed to limit the number of Jews accepted. Dartmouth was no dissenter from such odious practices.

Why President Freedman deemed the opening of the Roth Center for Jewish life late last term the proper occasion to address this regrettable aspect of Dartmouth's past is unclear. Perhaps like Clinton, another lame-duck President, he is thinking of his legacy. Regardless of his motivation, Freedman did correctly note the prejudiced attitudes that characterized some persons once associated with Dartmouth. Yet in his attempt to pin the label of anti-Semitism on a college he did not attend, Freedman also included among his examples a 1945 statement by then Dartmouth president Ernest Martin Hopkins. Hopkins, explaining the quotas in admissions, had asserted that 'Dartmouth is a Christian college founded for the Christianization of its students.' For Freedman, such an assertion is evidence of an unalloyed bigotry.

William F. Buckley Jr., in a New York Times Op-Ed entitled 'God and Man at Dartmouth,' disagreed. Published a week after the Times' report on the Roth Center's opening, the piece took issue with Freedman's appraisal of Hopkins's sentiment. Discrimination in admissions of any kind is wrong, Buckley acknowledges. 'But is it meant,' he also rightly asks, 'in welcoming students from other creeds, that a college must forswear its own traditional creed?'

Dartmouth was founded as, and at least superficially still is, a Protestant institution. But some on this campus, President Freedman among them, seem intent on hiding all the incriminating evidence. Witness such absurd and now apparently perennial endeavors as last year's administrative fatwa against religious carols at the college's annual Christmas celebration and this years ideé ridicule: the campaign to move the Christmas tree slightly off the center of the green.

Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, and other minority religions have enriched the Dartmouth community and compromise such as kosher or vegan meals is necessary to allow for their diverse beliefs. Banning such benign symbols of Christianity as carols and a Christmas tree as biased displays, however, clearly is not compromise but bigotry of another kind. The historical religion of Dartmouth and the faith of the majority of its students deserves at least that precedence.

A similar set of issues has been raised at Yale after that College tried to prohibit five Orthodox Jewish students from moving off-campus. The so-called Yale Five have filed a lawsuit against the university alleging that it is illegally discriminating against their religion by requiring them, as Yale does of all its students their first two years, to live in college dormitories. Though the students have yet to take up residence in the dorms and many other Orthodox Jews at Yale do not object to their accommodations, such housing, the litigants contend, is a den of sin and debauchery hostile to their faith and therefore, they should not be compelled to live there.

This suit would be easy to dismiss as another example of runaway litigiousness if it were not for the support and positive publicity some usually discerning individuals have provided it. The eminent constitutional lawyer Nat Lewin has agreed to represent the Yale Five and several prominent commentators have already opined in the students' favor. Yale, according to the reasoning of the Five's supporters, has the responsibility to allot separate facilities for these five Orthodox Jews just as it has already done for other minorities, such as blacks or homosexuals, that so desire it. They see in Yale's refusal to accede to the students' wishes a bigotry against the religious no longer tolerated against other minorities. It is an argument Yale will be hard pressed to answer. If one minority group is worthy of its own housing why not all? It is a predicament, however, for which Yale has only itself to blame.

Minorities on campus, whether they be religious, racial, or sexual, certainly deserve to be free from harassment and can expect reasonable allowances from their school. Unfortunately, many colleges and universities, aware of often unsavory attitudes in their pasts but now bloated with the gas of tolerance, have often taken this mandate too far. While what constitutes a 'reasonable allowance' is admittedly imprecise, subsidizing minorities in order for them to live apart from the rest of the student body is clearly beyond such a standard and harmful for everyone involved. The factionalism promoted by these fiefdoms is inimical to a cohesive community and works against the collective understanding that bringing diverse groups together is intended to foster. One can only hope that Yale recognizes the hypocrisy of its opposition to separate but equal housing for some minorities while simultaneously promoting it for others.

Freedman to Dartmouth: 'J'accuse!'

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