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Monday, January 9, 2006

The wilderness of New Hampshire can be an alien landscape for Dartmouth's Jewish students. Aside from the quotidian concerns of finding a decent bagel, scaling the Everest that is the Pavilion's kosher raspberry chicken—or even fasting through classes because of the College's unwillingness to grant a holiday for Yom Kippur—Dartmouth is a thoroughly un-Jewish place. Statistically, it is the least Jewish of the Ivy League-figures vary, but only around 10 percent of Dartmouth's students are Jewish, compared to greater than 20 percent at Harvard and even more at Penn and Columbia.

Why the comparative paucity of Jews? As the review of Jerome Karabel's The Chosen shows on pages six and seven, Dartmouth was long one of the most anti-Semitic of the Ivy League colleges. Granted, fewer Jewish students from urban New York, applied to spend four years in brumal New Hampshire than did to live in Morningside Heights or Cambridge. But the College itself did much explicitly and implicitly to discourage Jews: from placing quotas on their numbers to placing a heavy emphasis on athletic prowess in admissions, Dartmouth was not a friendly place for Jews. Even in August 1945, when the rest of the Ivy League was removing quotas on Jewish enrollment in the wake of the Second World War, Dartmouth's president Ernest Martin Hopkins wrote to an alumnus that "I should not be willing to see the proportion of Jews in the College so greatly increased as to arouse widespread resentment and develop widespread prejudice in our own family."

Ironically enough, though, despite the end of quotas on Jews' numbers, today's admissions policies are almost as discriminatory. Under the mantle of affirmative action, the same high test scores that made Jewish students undesirable to the WASP elite eighty years ago still count against them today. The very brightest still get their golden tickets, of course, but the well-qualified Long Island public school graduate is shunted aside in the post-Grutter v. Bollinger world by a mysteriously subjective system. Perhaps even more ironic is that much the underlying logic for affirmative action programs has been unknowingly cribbed from the anti-Semitic admissions policies of the 1920s. In the historic Bakke case, Justice Lewis Powell wrote that ethnic diversity was the overriding goal, since the "nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples." Yet diversity in and of itself—differing sets of beliefs, points of view, and socioeconomic statuses—is not what Karl Furstenberg is seeking when he creates Dartmouth's freshman class. Rather, the code word of diversity, along with its lesser-publicized companion, "geographical distribution," are used to advance a very specific agenda of advantaging black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants (Asian students from poor backgrounds are always curiously absent from this calculus above others). Earnest Martin Hopkins himself used similar arguments when justifying Dartmouth's policies that excluded Jews, writing that admissions was based on the principle of "proportionate selection," since "the interchange of ideas among youthful minds is most successful when the College most nearly represents the population of the nation in general in its own population." The intentions of the selective admissions process have changed, but its effect has not.

In many ways, then, the affirmative action policies today at Dartmouth are eerily reminiscent of the condescending "happy bottom quarter" philosophy that guided Harvard's admissions director, Fred Glimp, throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Since "any class, no matter how able, will always have a bottom quarter," in natural talent, that bottom quarter should be composed of those who are less ambitious and driven than their peers, so that they do not mind bringing up the rear. But such a policy, in addition to consigning low-talent admits to an academic netherworld before they even arrive at college, creates an unhealthy bifurcation between those who are admitted for their brains and those who are admitted to satisfy administrators' guilty egos. Indeed, as Dartmouth's median SAT score continues its gradual ascent (the class of 2009 had an average score of 1461 out of 1600), this split only becomes more pronounced as the rising tide fails to lift all boats equally. Soon, we may have two Dartmouths: one to coddle the beneficiaries of non-academic preferences, and the other for the high-achievers who were admitted on the strength of their academic qualifications, a result that benefits neither group.

The more skeptical might wonder, though, why I do not muster the same arguments against other groups accorded non-academic preferences in the admissions process: legacies, athletes, and the children of potential large donors. Sure, athletes are let in with lower scores than would be accepted from non-athletes, but there are many fewer meatheads than affirmative action admits. Legacies certainly receive a boost, but perhaps as a testament to the child-rearing ability of Dartmouth graduates, they tend to not be substantially different than other applicants in their test scores or their qualifications. At Harvard, for instance, the average SAT score of an admitted legacy student is just two points lower than the school's overall average.

But neither should these attacks on today's affirmative actions programs be interpreted as a rallying call for purely academic admissions criteria. The underlying idea behind selective admissions, that it takes more than just raw intelligence and high test scores to be successful at Dartmouth, remains true. Force of personality, ambition, and virtue remain just as important today as they were eighty years ago. Rather than assuming Dartmouth will transform its less-talented students into high-achievers over the four years, admissions officers should seek out the applicants who are the most driven nationally.

So, what is the answer for Dartmouth? Much of the admissions process today is certainly fair and does a fine job in selecting extraordinary students for the College. But there is still much to be done to make Dartmouth a more hospitable place, aside from procuring better bagels. Dartmouth may have a checkered past in its admissions policy when it comes to the Jews, but that is no reason to sacrifice its essential character on the altar of "diversity." The entirety of the process could and should be made to be more meritocratic—admissions procedures made be more transparent, and affirmative action programs reformed to look for evidence of overcoming hardship, rather than skin color alone. The result, though it might bring more Jewish students to Dartmouth, (and thus force them to fast through their 2As on Yom Kippur), would undoubtedly be a stronger College.

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