Allegations of Jewish Admissions Quotas at Harvard Discussed in Historical Memo

4.2.12 WC: 191694 Jews had been subjected to “ceilings: no more than 7 to 8 percent. (When I started Yale Law School in 1959, I noticed that the university’s motto was written in Hebrew—the biblical words “Urim V’Tomim.” When I asked a friend who has graduated Yale College why Yale’s motto was in Hebrew, he replied: “It’s a test—if you can read it, you can’t go here!”) But in a zero sum game — which admissions surely are — floors can impose ceilings, especially if the Black percentage is taken from the Jewish percentage, as Jewish leaders feared was happening. This reality led to the famous “bagel” exchange: Dr. Chase N. Peterson, dean of admissions at Harvard, recently addressed a group of Jewish faculty members suspicious that Harvard had decided to reduce the number of Jews it would admit. Peterson averred that there is no particular “docket” or area of the country whose quota of admissions has been reduced. Rather, he said, it is “the doughnuts around the big cities,” which are not as successful with the Harvard Admissions Committee as they used to be...” But now we have to be terribly hard on people with good grades from the good suburban high schools, good, sold clean-nosed kids who really don’t have enough else going for them.” The doughnuts, said Peterson, included such areas as Westchester County and Long Island, New York, suburban New Jersey, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. When he described these areas to the Jewish faculty members, the Crimson reports, one stood up and said, “Dr. Peterson, those aren’t doughnuts, they’re bagels.” After the account of this exchange appeared, I received dozens of letters and calls from indignant alumni and parents of applicants concerned that Harvard was returning to a quota system. These concerns increased when the Bakke case came to the Supreme Court and Harvard took the lead in defending race-specific affirmative action programs, such as the one it has adopted. My brother, Nathan, was then working as the top lawyer for the American Jewish Congress, a generally progressive social action organization. He asked me to help draft an Amicus in the Bakke brief that presented the views of Jews who supported civil rights but who were concerned about the impact of race-specific affirmative action programs on Jewish applicants. It was a daunting task, requiring an exquisite balance. The Bakke case involved a white applicant to the medical school at the University of California at Davis (also a state school). Allan Bakke had been denied admission, he claimed, based on his race. The California Supreme Court agreed with Bakke, ruling that the medical school’s admission policy violated equal protection. The medical school sought and obtained review by the Supreme Court. This time there could be no claim of mootness, since Bakke was not completing his medical school education. The court would have to confront directly the divisive issue of race-specific affirmative action. Our brief strongly supported affirmative action as a mechanism for remedying past “educational handicaps” and for assuring diversity among the student body, but we opposed the concept that every racial, religious or other group was entitled to proportional representation—or quotas: A society permeated by racial, ethnic, religious and sexual proportional representation 294 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017381