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A Little History of Jewish Enrollment in Higher Learning

"In Effort to Lift Their Rankings, Colleges Recruit Jewish Students." That was the front page headline from the April 29, 2002, Wall Street Journal. The article tells a marvelous tale of tantalizing ironies. "'Yes, we're targeting Jewish students,' Chancellor Gordon Gee told a March 17 board meeting of the Vanderbilt affiliate of Hillel, the nonprofit national Jewish campus organization. 'There's nothing wrong with that. That's not affirmative action. That's smart thinking.'" Later in the story, Gee, a Mormon who left Brown University to head Vanderbilt, indicated the effort was part of his "elite strategy" to move Vanderbilt into Ivy League status. "'Jewish students," he said, "by culture and by ability and by the very nature of their liveliness, make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life."

The irony arises from the Ivy League's historic efforts, from the 1920s until at least the end of World War II, to use "quotas" and other means to constrain the number of Jews attending Ivy League schools. One delights at how interesting it would be if one could listen to a conversation between Chancellor Gee and A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's president in 1922. Eighty years earlier, Lowell's plans to establish a quota of 15 percent Jewish students at Harvard was derailed by Harry Starr, a second-generation Russian Jewish emigrant student. Starr learned of Lowell's plan and challenged it. He made the issue public and ultimately forced Lowell to back away from the quota. The retreat however, was only tactical. Shortly thereafter, Harvard and other Ivy League schools introduced "geographic diversity," refined standards for reviewing applications, and in 1926 adopted the SAT tests, all steps intended, at least in part, to accomplish the same result, namely, reduce Jewish enrollment.

In one of the two recent Michigan cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, an issue for Court consideration was whether awarding extra points to minorities during the college admission process was a de facto quota. In Michigan's case, the quota was used to enroll more minorities, rather than to exclude them as was Lowell's purpose 80 years earlier. One is struck by the shifting notions of "diversity" as a concept utilized in support of a "greater good." In 1922, it was "geographic diversity" to enhance the educational opportunity for all students. In the 1990s, "racial diversity" intends to serve the same purpose. Interestingly, some who would opposed quotas to exclude Jews and considered "geographic diversity" to be code for "fewer Jews," would today jump through the required logical conundrums to encourage "racial diversity" and, perhaps, minority quotas in support of affirmative action.

To set the context for Vanderbilt's Jewish recruitment and Michigan's affirmative action, we must to go back in time. From the 1600s till about 1880, it is generally fair to say that the United States had two groups of Jews. The first were the early immigrants, mostly Sephardic, whose roots traced back to the Revolutionary War and before. Some left Spain during the Inquisition (three, perhaps, even sailed with Columbus). Never large in numbers, between 1654 and the Revolution, the Jewish population in North America is estimated to have grown from roughly 25 to 2,500 (out of 2,500,000 Americans). Particularly during the nineteenth-century, a second group, the Our Crowd Jews of Western and Central Europe (many of them German Jews) arrived, set up businesses, and became successful and prosperous. They brought with them a strong educational and cultural legacy from Europe, and they continued to demonstrate those values in their newly adopted country. By 1880, the United States had 250,000 Jews (one-half of one percent of the country's 50 million people).

Between 1880 and 1920, everything changed. The pogroms of Russia and the open immigration policies of the United States brought millions of Eastern European Jews through Ellis Island and other ports of entry into the United States. By 1920, the United States had 3.6 million Jews representing 3.4 percent of the country's 106 million people. Thus, while the U.S. population more than doubled, the number of Jews had increased fourteen fold. These new arrivals may have been "People of the Book," but most were illiterate or nearly so. Opportunities for learning in areas now called Russia, Poland, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states were almost nonexistent for Jews. In that part of the world, so hard on Jews for so long, education may have been treasured, but only in an abstract "next year in Jerusalem" sort of way. Poverty, serfdom, and the kind of anti-Semitism that led to the pogroms afforded very limited opportunities for schools and schooling. When tested at Ellis Island upon arrival, most Jews performed poorly on what were then considered reliable measures of intelligence. And no group of people was more put off by the illiterate, pushy, difficult new group of Jews than the old line Our Crowd German Jews of the Upper East Side.

But if the United States offered a modicum of safety for the oppressed and a chance to prosper, it also offered an opportunity for education. The newly arrived Jews grabbed it like water in the Sahara. First in the public grade schools and high schools as well as the night schools one could attend while holding down a job, Jews went after whatever education they could get. Later, with the same zest, they pursued education in the Eastern colleges, many of them part of today's Ivy League. At Harvard, Jewish enrollment reached 6 percent by 1909 and soared to 22 percent by 1922. At Columbia University, more convenient because of its New York location, Jewish enrollment climbed to 40 percent of the student body and at Hunter College, it was 80 percent.

This was the "Jewish problem" facing Lowell at Harvard and his colleagues at other Ivy League schools. The flood of Jews was displacing old-line Gentile Americans. And, it was all happening in the emerging era of eugenics, when tests, such as those administered earlier at Ellis Island and later on World War I Army recruits, were believed to have clearly established that people of Nordic, Alpine, and similar Western and Northern European backgrounds were intellectually superior to blacks, Jews, "Mediterraneans," and others of Southern and Eastern European origin. In the language of the times, admissions personnel, particularly at the Ivy League schools, would "reclaim the right to use social as well as academic criteria" "New application blanks would ask for personal background, including religious affiliation, father's name and place of birth . . . Columbia required a photograph, a personal interview, and three letters of recommendation." Prospective students were evaluated based on "character" and "background." Admissions staff would look favorably on the "boys of old American stock" and Gentile boys of "a desirable social type," while holding back on Jews whose energy and ambition was seen to outstrip their native IQ.

Lowell opted to face the issue more directly with a 15 percent quota, saying it would help Jews by mitigating resentment and anti-Semitism. Starr took the issue public and challenged the notion that a larger enrollment of "pure American stock" was a legitimate basis for restricting the entrance of Jews. The Boston press picked up on Starr's argument, criticized the quota and a thirteen member committee set up by Harvard's Board of Overseers rejected the quota. Harvard, like the rest of the Ivy League schools, retreated to less obvious, but equally successful techniques to retain the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) character of their schools (most of which were created by Christian denominations in the first place).

They added a couple of new twists. First, the Harvard Board of Overseers agreed to promote "geographic diversity" in its student body. The idea was that the Southern guy would have a better educational experience if he was exposed to a Midwestern farm kid, the son a Maine fisherman and a Northwest logger. This "diversity" would "enhance the learning experience." Of course the downside was that it didn't leave much room for numerous otherwise qualified applicants from the Lower East Side.

Second, in 1926, Harvard and other Ivy League schools began using the SAT test to replace the admissions test on which urban Jews had performed well. The SAT was grounded in the earlier Ellis Island and U.S. Army World War I tests in which Jews, among others, had performed poorly. That the poor performance was largely based on the lower literacy of the foreigners and their unfamiliarity with English and American terminology was not perceived to be the principal cause for the poor test performance. Here was a test that had provided evidence Jews did not perform well; its use might help bring about the desired results. Moreover, the fact that some of the SAT questions were developed and tested on Princeton freshman and Cooper Union students (all scholarship recipients), demonstrated that smart Gentiles did well on the tests. Ironically, as time passed and Jews became literate, absorbed American terminology, and learned how to take such tests, the outcomes completely reversed. But that was in the future and not anticipated when SAT testing began in 1926.

With the revised processes for handling applications, the push for "geographic diversity," and the adoption of the SAT, the stage was set to bring Jewish enrollment back in line. (And some would say that Lowell helped it along by actually putting in place the quota the Board of Overseers had nixed.) Selectivity, "geographic diversity," and SAT tests did, in fact, do the trick. Jewish enrollment fell, and by 1931, Jews were only 15 percent of Harvard's enrollment. (Still not bad, considering Jews were 3.4 percent of the U.S. population at the time.)

In the late 1930s, Lowell's successor, James Bryant Conant, completely changed the direction for Harvard admissions, and apparently did so for reasons that had little to do with Jews. According to Nicholas Lehman, author of The Big Test -- Secret History of the American Meritocracy:

"Conant believed that a narrow constricted group of wealthy descendents of the early settlers of America - people born into money, privately educated, often in New England boarding schools, especially Episcopalian - had formed a kind of club. They weren't especially able, to Conant's mind, and they kind of controlled everything. . . Conant's primary goal. . . was to break the hold of this old elite and put in its place, a new elite that would be made up of people from. . .all over the country, people selected on pure intelligence, not on their background." (Lehman Frontline interview)

Conant envisioned a pure meritocracy and worked with colleague Henry Chauncey to change the SAT, making it more of a pure IQ or aptitude test, rather than what he saw as an "achievement test" favoring the already privileged. At the same time, Conant dropped the emphasis on "geographic diversity." His pursuit of a pure meritocracy also shifted emphasis away from family background, religion, father's name and birthplace, and any standard giving a premium to "old American stock." This push for merit and de-emphasis of the old-line preppy Anglican Ivy League legacy had the unforeseen consequence of reopening admission to Jews based on merit.

Particularly after World War II and the Holocaust, as attitudes in the United States changed, and as Jews continued to aspire to more and better education, their levels of enrollment at quality schools grew. In this same era it became easier for a Jewish professor to become tenured, and that resulted in ever larger percentage of Jews in senior teaching positions at America's best universities.

Ironically, it was a Jew who saw an entrepreneurial opportunity in the SAT tests. Stanley Kaplan began his SAT test preparation company in 1946. It focused on training students to take the tests. While training students to take the test might have been considered "untoward," or sort of like cheating in the 1950s, it has evolved to become the standard. Now, if one doesn't strive to learn how to take the SAT, you do yourself a grave disservice. Today Kaplan's company is a $500 million a year enterprise owned by the Washington Post and is only the largest of a number of such companies.

After performing poorly on initial versions of such tests, Jews got ever better with the passage of time. The published results for the 2001 SAT test place Jews second, behind only the small group of self-identified Unitarians. The Unitarians had average scores of 1209 (out of a maximum of 1600) versus the Jews at 1161 and the national average of 1020.

Current Levels of Jewish Enrollment

With today's better-dispersed Jewish population, the reduced emphasis on geographic diversity, and outstanding SAT scores, Jews have climbed to remarkable levels of enrollment at our best schools.

Exhibits 6a and 6b show what that means. Two caveats deserve mention before plowing into the numbers. First, realize the 2.1 percent estimate for Jews as a percent of the U.S. population is probably high for college-age students. This is because Jews are not reproducing at a replacement rate, and they have a median age of forty-one, six years higher than the U.S. average of thirty-five. Moreover, the percentage of Jews under age eighteen is only 21 percent of the Jewish population versus 26 percent for the overall U.S. population. The second caveat is that most of the enrollment numbers for Jews on the various campuses come from Hillel, the nonprofit association supporting Jewish students on campus. Hillel is not exactly a disinterested party, though they appear to be the single best source for such data, and both Jews and non-Jews draw on the data and regard them as credible.

In any case, Jews now are 21 percent of the enrollment at Ivy League schools (30 percent at Penn, 29 percent at Yale and 26 percent at Harvard). Perhaps now we now know why Bill Clinton had so many Jews in his administration. Like Lanny Davis, they were all his Yale classmates! Princeton and Dartmouth bring up the rear at 10 percent Jewish enrollment, and interestingly both have had something of a reputation for anti-Semitism despite until recently having had Jewish presidents. Even in the less prestigious but still excellent Big 10 and PAC 10 schools, enrollment numbers for Jews are impressive at 8 percent and 7 percent respectively. In that regard, since Big 10 and PAC 10 schools, unlike the Ivy League, tend to draw heavily from the local populations, it is instructive to compare the school-by-school averages with the percent of Jewish populations of the respective states. In that sense, the 8.4 percent Jewish enrollment at the University of Washington is even more impressive, since the state has a Jewish population of only 0.7 percent. The University of Michigan and Northwestern are similarly notable by that standard.

Jewish enrollment rates are even higher at the fifty small schools that U.S. News and World Report ranks among the "Top 50 Undergraduate Schools of 2003," That average is 12.3 percent with some schools like Sarah Lawrence, Vassar, Barnard and Skidmore showing 20 to 31 percent Jewish enrollment. (Exhibit 6b.)

This is an amazing accomplishment. For Ivy League schools, Jews are represented ten times more than one would expect and for individual schools, the range is five times at Dartmouth or Princeton to fifteen times at Pennsylvania, fourteen at Yale and thirteen at Harvard. (And, mind you, it is really better than that. This outcome arises in competition with the best students in the United States (and to some extent the best students worldwide), for the limited number of slots at the premier U.S. schools. Further, estimates say 80 to 85 percent of all college-age Jews do go to college. This is dramatically above most other ethnic groups (though the Asians are closing fast). It is also much above the 1999 national average of 25.2 percent.

A final note on this topic. At Harvard, the current enrollment is 26 percent Jewish, 17 percent Asian, 7 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic and 1 percent American Indian/Alaskan native. In short, the minorities are the majority at Harvard.

All of which brings us back to Vanderbilt. As reported in the Wall Street Journal Story, Vanderbilt saw that its #21 ranking in U.S. News and World Report's annual survey of colleges and universities put it behind both Emory (#18) and Washington University in St Louis (#14). Perhaps it had not missed Gee's attention that Vanderbilt's Jewish enrollment had dropped from an estimated 7 to 9 percent in the 1970s to only 2 to 4 percent in 2002. Washington University and Emory, on the other hand, had 35 percent and 30 percent Jewish enrollments respectively. A 1996 study by Greg Perfetto, who by 2002 had become assistant provost at Vanderbilt, found that "Vanderbilt was competitive with Emory and Washington University on every demographic sector but one: Jewish students."

It is no coincidence that Vanderbilt faces competition in its efforts to recruit Jews. Similar efforts have also begun on other campuses, such as University of Southern California, and for the same reason. USC worked hard to improve its rating and perceived that cross-town rival UCLA, Northern California's UC Berkeley, and the Ivy League schools were all better ranked and all had more Jews. As of 2002, USC had a recruiter, Jessica F. Pashkow, to specialize in recruiting Jews and a faculty that is one-third Jewish. USC now has 8.2 percent Jewish enrollment, up from 4.6 percent a decade ago. And in the rankings, they have climbed to thirty-one.

Joining Vanderbilt and USC (according the Wall Street Journal story and the March 5, 1999, issue of Jewish Times) in Jewish recruitment are schools such as Southern Methodist, Texas Christian, and Duke. It may also not be coincidental that both Princeton and Dartmouth, which lagged the rest of the Ivy League in Jewish enrollment, recruited Jews to become their presidents, though both have recently stepped down from that role.

The fact that Jews are now recruited openly has brought criticism from some Jewish quarters. In a July 18, 2002, Baltimore Sun editorial, "Jews Should Reject Preferences," Justin Shubow writes:

". . . it is not a stretch to imagine that having targeted Jews for admission, universities will be unable to resist selecting them over equally or even more qualified non Jews" Further, ". . .polls have consistently shown that Jews while vehemently rejecting all quotas, support affirmative action." And finally, "The majority of Jews care strongly about social justice and willingly support social engineering policies for the sake of that goal. But they hold dear the fundamental principle that people ought to be regarded and treated as individuals, not merely as members of a certain group."

How one squares affirmative action and bonus points for minorities as a group while regarding people as "individuals, not merely as members of a certain group" remains part of the mental jujitsu alluded to earlier in this chapter.

In the end, over a period of eighty years, Jews have gone from being discriminated against to being enticed. And both paradigms arise from the insatiable drive of Jews to be educated.

Achievement and Leadership in Academic Domains

One cannot conceive of the study of economics without understanding its debt to Jews who have led the field. Whether it is: Karl Marx, whose Das Kapital changed the world and is still studied as "gospel" by millions around the world despite the failure of Soviet Communism; David Ricardo who developed the theory of comparative advantage; Paul Samuelson, the MIT professor whose book was the leading college economics textbook for more than thirty years; or Milton Friedman, who almost single-handedly moved the discipline away from its love affair with John Maynard Keynes, Jews have played a seminal role in economic theory. Perhaps the clearest representation of their importance is measured in the 38 percent of Nobels for economics that have gone to Jews, most while serving as professors at major universities. For example:

On one of the most enduring questions of all time -- What is the best economic system that brings the most benefit to the most people? -- it is Jews, more than any other single group, who have helped lead the way in thinking through and debating the different economic theories and alternative courses of action.

Physics is another domain that explores enduring questions, in particular, "What is the nature of our universe?" In physics, as in economics, Jews have been prominent researchers and teachers. Much, if not most, of their work has been done in an academic environment. Einstein taught at Princeton after he immigrated to the United States. Leo Szilard (with Fermi, who was not Jewish), conducted the first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago. Felix Bloch taught at Stanford, Hans Bethe at MIT, Max Born at University of Edinburgh, Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann at Cal Tech, Niels Bohr at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. The list simply goes on and on. Nearly all of the forty-nine Jewish Nobel Prize winners in Physics have done their research and taught in an academic environment, and therein stimulated succeeding generations of other young physicists.

By now, one hundred years later, we might well have finally stumbled onto relativity, the conversion of mass to energy, the nature of light and the relationship between the speed of light, mass, and energy, but it was Einstein who did it in 1905. More recently, it was Richard Feynman who used a glass of ice water to explain to the world how the freezing temperatures at Cape Canaveral (Kennedy) brought down the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. Again, our debt to this one group of people for their contributions is enormous.

Mathematics, like physics, is a largely academic domain. And like physics, Jews have played a huge role. The comments in Chapter 4 are on point. Of all winners of the Fields Medal for mathematics, twelve of the forty-four medals (27 percent) have gone to Jews. Among them, Efim Zelmanov at the University of Wisconsin and Yale; Edward Witten at Princeton; Michael Freedman at the University of California, San Diego; Charles Fefferman at Princeton; Jesse Douglas at MIT; Paul Joseph Cohen at Stanford; and many, many more. And these are only those who won the Fields Medal. Felix Mandelbrot, who created fractal geometry, is the Sterling Professor of Mathematics at Yale. John Von Neuman, whose mathematical genius encompassed game theory, computers, and many other fields taught at Princeton. Marcel Grossman, who helped Einstein in the integration of mathematical and theoretical physics, was a professor of geometry at Eidgenoossische Technische Hochschule in Germany. Finally, Paul Erdos, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the twentieth-century was another of the great mathematical minds teaching at Princeton.

Chemistry, in which Jews have won 18 percent of the Nobels, is another domain in which the leadership of Jews is most demonstrated in academia. Alan Heeger, winner of the 2000 Nobel spent twenty years at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to the University of California at Santa Barbara. Walter Kohn, the 1998 winner, taught at Harvard and Carnegie-Mellon. Harold Kroto, the 1996 winner, taught at Sussex University. George Olah, 1994, taught at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. And on and on.

Franz Boas is often credited with being the "father of anthropology." While that might be considered excessive by some, the Encyclopedia Britannica does credit Boas with being the founder of the "relativistic, culture-centered school of anthropology that became dominant in the twentieth-century." Boas, who taught at Columbia University, inspired a succeeding generation of leading anthropologists including Margaret Mead, Alfred L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict.

Linguistics in the second half of the twentieth-century was heavily influenced by Noam Chomsky, an MIT professor. Controversial both in his selected field - for his notion that humans have an innate capability to understand formal principles of language - as well as for his outspoken political views, Chomsky was the single most well-known linguist of the era. Interestingly, Esperanto, the "world language" which it was hoped would become a universal second language everyone could speak so we might reduce human misunderstanding, was created in 1887 by the Polish Jew Ludwig L. Zamenhof. An old joke says that one reason Esperanto never took off was because at meetings of the Esperanto Association, "Everyone was speaking Yiddish."

In philosophy, the debt is to Moses Maimonides, Baruch de Spinoza, Ludwig Wittenstein, Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida and others. The incidence of Jews is illustrated in a compilation of four lists: 1) The BBC Great Philosophers Series; 2) Chronological Map of the Great Philosophers; 3) Trinity College Philosopher's List; and 4) Fifty Major Philosophers. Combined, one-sixth of the major philosophers identified from the four lists are Jews.

Medical education in the United States and later in other parts of the world was fundamentally reshaped by Abraham Flexner, founder and director of a college-preparatory school in Louisville. Flexner received a commission to study medical education in the United States. He issued his report in 1910 calling for medicine to be treated as an academic study, rather than an apprenticeship organized for profit. He called for full-time faculties, laboratories, libraries, and access to hospitals for students and staff. After his report was issued, many of the schools he criticized were closed. Flexner went on to found the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, one of America's foremost academic havens.

And once again, in medicine, we find the Nobel winners working in academic environments and therein researching and teaching those that will follow them. Stanley Prusiner, the 1997 winner for his discovery of Prions is at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. Sydney Brenner and H. Robert Horvitz, winners in 2002, are at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley and MIT in Cambridge, respectively. Paul Greengard and Eric R. Kandel, the winners in 2000, are at Rockefeller University and Columbia. Going back, nearly all of the forty-nine Jewish winners of Nobels in Physiology and Medicine have spent much of their careers at a university. Even Salk and Sabin who deserved, but did not get Nobels, worked at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Cincinnati, respectively.

Within the various specialties of medicine are areas where Jews have led the way. Psychiatry (including psychotherapy and psychology) is but one, from Sigmund Freud, (who felt indebted to Josef Breuer and his work with hysteria) and passed along to Anna Freud a father's guidance to her practice in psychotherapy). Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Bruno Bettelheim, Freida Fromm-Reichmann, and David Rapaport are but a few of the Jewish leaders in psychoanalysis. In psychology, the first doctorate ever awarded went to a Jew, Joseph Jastrow at Johns Hopkins in 1886 and two of the most influential psychologists of the "Human Potential" movement were Abraham Maslow and Erich Fromm. Throughout its history, Jews have played prominent roles in psychology.

In legal studies, political science, history, engineering and nearly any other field of academic endeavor, one could perform the kind of exercise written in the last few pages. Lawrence Tribe, Harvard Law School, argued the case that Al Gore should have been awarded Florida's 2000 electoral votes before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mortimer Adler was a professor at Columbia and University of Chicago where he co-directed creation of the fifty-four volumes of the Great Books of the Western World. Alan Bloom, professor at the University of Chicago, Yale, and Cornell wrote the influential Closing of the American Mind about the "dumbing down" of American culture.

Daniel Boorstin was a professor of history at the University of Chicago for twenty-five years. Among others of his books, he wrote The Discovers, The Genius of American Politics and The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson. In 1975, he took over as head of the Library of Congress. Steven Jay Gould, paleontologist at Harvard was a prolific writer on evolution (and baseball). Nathan Glazer and David Riesman, both Harvard professors, wrote The Lonely Crowd, one of the seminal books of sociology of the 1950s and 60s. Carl Sagan, who popularized astronomy, was a professor at Cornell, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard.

In short, it is impossible to find an academic domain in which Jews have not played a disproportionate role. As John Derbyshire, a National Review contributing editor said in a November 2, 2000, piece, quoting Paul Johnson in A History of the Jews, "If you take almost anything, science, law, philosophy, literature, medicine, music - and track it back to its roots, you will find Jews there, or at least meet an awful lot of them along the way."

Jewish Faculty and Administration Roles

If Jews have done well in college enrollment and research, they have mirrored the performance in serving on college and university faculties and in positions of leadership. Jews would not be shy in saying they have had to overcome much the same discrimination in those roles as students faced in the 1920s and 30s, really only breaking out of those constraints in a significant way after World War II.

The American Jewish Desk Referencenotes that it was pretty tough sledding in the early days. Yale, for example, was reputed not to allow tenure to any Jewish professor until the late 1940s. And even those who got teaching positions were required to have sponsors willing to "testify that the candidate did not "push" his Jewish traits and was "courteous and quiet in disposition." In the 1920s, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and Felix Frankfurter challenged Harvard in its prejudice. But with the growth of Jews in the student body, the end of World War II, the reactions to the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of ethnic background, race, and sex, things changed for the better. The American Jewish Desk Reference says that by the end of the 1960s, 12 percent of college teaching positions were filled by Jews, and that number was 20 percent at elite private universities. It goes further in saying that "at some institutions, the percentage of Jewish professors now approaches almost half the total faculty." Pinning the numbers down with precision is not easy because, unlike the domains of leadership where many Jewish winners are famous and thus easily identified, such recognition rarely filters down to the level of professors.

As such, two Exhibits may provide some limited insight. The first, Exhibit 6c, lists the faculties of the Stanford, Harvard, and Yale Law schools as of May 2003. The three schools were selected because they are the top three ranked law schools in the 2003 U.S. News and World Report ranking. Hence the effort is focused on the premier schools. The Law School Exhibit does not identify who among the faculty members are Jews. But a cursory review by the author and a software review was done, using so called "onomastic" software that compares names to large lists (5,000 or more names) of Jews and non-Jews to provide an indication or probability. In both the author's and the software review, the results were similar. Namely, that as a percent of the faculty members, Jews at Stanford, Harvard, and Yale are probably between 23 percent and 34 percent of the faculty.

A second Exhibit (6d) shows similar information for the prestigious Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. This has been the academic home of some of the world's greatest scholars, among them Albert Einstein, John Von Neumann, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and many others. The institute consists of five programs: the School of Historical Studies, the School of Mathematics, the School of Natural Sciences, the School of Social Sciences, and the newest program in theoretical biology (from its Web site).

Nearly 5,000 members have spent time at the institute over the years since it was founded in 1933 and many will recall that this is where John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind) made his academic home. Of the roughly 5,000 "members," only eighty-five are considered "Present and Past Faculty." They are shown on Exhibit 6d. Again, no effort has been made to definitively confirm each identity, but the perusal and software review both end up saying that at least 15 percent of those listed are Jewish - and this from Princeton, like Dartmouth, long regarded as a very difficult Ivy League school for Jewish admission and tenure. In this case, Jews are 7.5 times what they should be among this prestigious academic community.

Similar exercises done by others using onomastics software yielded additional data about likely Jewish representation on college faculties. Among its findings:

Interestingly, of the 246 names of mechanical engineering professors at the University of Illinois, Penn State, and the University of Maryland, only two percent are Jews. (Mechanical engineering appears to be one of very few domains in which Jews match their demographics!)

Rabbi Chaim Seidler Feller, the executive director of the Hillel at UCLA, now estimates that Jews hold 50,000 to 60,000 professorships on American campuses, and he also estimates they are a third of the faculty at some of the best schools. Jews have much to be proud of.

Our final exercise is to look at college and university presidents (Exhibit 6e). As with the students, the Ivy League, Big 10, and PAC 10 are the groups chosen, if only because they are among the larger and more prestigious schools in the United States. In this case, the names tend to have a bit more fame, and thus at least some of the Jews are well known. Among the Jewish incumbents are:

This is five of twenty-nine or 17 percent, eight times what we would expect. To fill out the picture, the Exhibit also identifies the Ivy League predecessors of the eight Ivy League incumbents. The Exhibit also serves to make the point that three of eight Ivy League presidents are Jews. Not shown on the listing are some of the Jewish presidents of other major universities including:

And with that, it seems realistic to say that Jews have broken down nearly all the anti-Semitic barriers of academia whether in terms of student enrollment, academic contribution to knowledge, representation on faculties, or leadership of our leading colleges and universities.