Posted on 05/05/2014 3:10:03 PM PDT by Scoutmaster
Back in the day, Columbia University had a 1% (1.5%?) quota against Jews, so this institutional discrimination pre-dates affirmative action. Affirmative action merely picks up where the old time discrimination left off, and Jews are still discriminated against as a subset of white people, no doubt now viewed as a particularly pernicious subset, since we’re all supposedly either oppressing the piece-loving palis, or at least buying Israeli Bonds and Sabra and Tribe Humus, so as to enable that oppression.
Fine with me. I turned my back on a university education decades ago, and instead opted to learn something. Those who are excluded from the university system are actually lucky. They won’t have to unlearn all the leftist drivel that they’d otherwise be pumped with.
Jewish applicants are considered to be part of the "white people" group by the bean counters.
Quite right. When was that decision made, and by whom? Who decided that all the many ethnic groups from Europee were henceforth to constitute a single agglomeration to be called "white?"
I assume you are aware that 100 years ago Jews weren't considered "white" by most Americans, and quite often neither were Italians, Greeks, etc.
If there is discrimination against Jewish applicants, it's precisely because all white applicants are discriminated against to make way for desired percentages (quotas) of African American and Hispanic students.
Well, no. There is still a large "white" quota, something like 60%. Within that large quota the slots are still distributed by merit. So Jews of merit still get in at the same proportion as if only merit were considered. At elite colleges this is in the 15% to 30% range or higher, iow 7x to 15x their proportion of the population. (Or considerably higher, depending on how you determine who is a Jew.)
I assume you will agree that Jews have been highly prominent in actively pushing for affirmative action programs that prevent large numbers of otherwise qualified whites from attending these colleges. Yet, since within the white category slots are distributed by merit, very few Jews are disqualified who would otherwise have qualified to attend.
Which can easily be seen by the wildly disprortionate number attending. Few would claim that instead of 15% to 30% Jews at Harvard, without affirmative action we'd instead have 50% or 75%.
My complain is not with successful Jews, and certainly not with the young man who wrote this essay, or with you.
It's with the very large group of "progressive" American Jews who enthusiastically promote policies that disadvantage large numbers of white people, most of them less privileged than those promoting the programs.
I would be entirely happy, as would you, with admission based entirely on merit. It is probably roughly the same number of Jews would get in on that system as do now.
I would be much less happy, though I would be able to see something resembling fairness, in admissions intended to "mirror America," with admissions distributed to provide equal representation for all groups.
Here's a quote from an article about what "diversity" means in practice in America.
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice "diversity" on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the "underrepresented" racial minority groups.
- See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html#sthash.ns6FcQRM.dpuf
What I object to is a policy that pretends to provide opportunity for all groups evenly, while in practice being a savage restriction of opportunity for one group (in reality an artificially-assembled conglomeration of groups, just as "Hispanic" is an artificially-assembled conglomeration of groups), gentile white Americans.
May I suggest you haven't looked very hard?
Here's a NYT article asking whether Princeton is anti-Semitic because (in 1999) its Jewish enrollment had dropped to about 10%, still at least 5x their percentage of the population.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/02/nyregion/princeton-puzzle-where-have-jewish-students-gone.html
This is as compared with the other Ivies, which are commended in the article for maintaining 1/4, 1/3 or higher numbers. (My understanding is that Princeton has since addressed this "problem.")
My question is this. Assuming people who think this way aren't idiots, aren't they aware that bringing "under-represented minorities" up to their appropriate representation, while at the same time recruiting 1/4 or 1/3 Jews is exactly the same thing as imposing a 25% cap on white gentile enrollment? Which is, of course, exactly what was done to Jews in the early 20th, except of course being far more savage.
During the quota period at Harvard, for example, Jewish enrollment never dropped below 15%, still far above their percentage of the population at the time. The effective quotas at Harvard today cap white gentiles at probably considerably less than half their percentage of the population. And nobody cares.
Well, no it didn't. Or, if they did, it wasn't very effective.
One of the groups affected by these policies was Jewish applicants, whose admission to some New England and New York City-area liberal arts universities fell significantly between the late 1910s and the mid-1930s.[5] For instance, the admission ... during that period fell ...in Columbia University from 32.7% to 14.6%. 15% was still 7x or 10x their percentage of the population.
Sounds more like they had a 15% quota, not 1.5% (or 1%). 15% was still 7x or 10x their percentage of the population.
Shouldn't have had any quota at all, of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus_in_the_United_States
Sorry, the last sentence is the second italics section got misplaced. It isn’t part of the quote.
My estimate is that the [Jewish] "quota period at Harvard" lasted roughly from the 1920s (when noted alum Franklin D. Roosevelt played a key role in instituting it) until sometime in the 1960s. My guess would be that Jewish enrollment at Harvard was below 15% during the earlier parts of that period, although I have no statistics in front of me at present. There was one particular Harvard president, whose name escapes me, who was notorious in lowering Jewish admissions numbers.
When you consider Jewish student enrollment in the Ivies, you have to take geography into account as well, in that the Ivies are located in the Northeast and draw most of their students from that section in the country. The Jewish population comprises - although to a lesser degree than it did back in previous decades - a significantly higher percentage of the population in the Northeast than it does nationally. So giving the national Jewish percentage of the population as a baseline is a bit of a distortion in this discussion. Most Jewish youngsters from other sections of the US never were interested in the Ivies and instead chose schools in their region. (Also the Jewish population nationally was more like 4% in in the 1930s and 1940s, and has now gradually diminished to 2% due to low birth rates, assimilation, and relatively small immigration rates.)
My intuitive take, overall, is that the current Jewish student population, though still represented in elite schools far out of proportion to its percentage in the population, has not statistically performed as remarkably well as its parents and grandparents generations of Jewish students. Asian students now seem to be accounting for even higher percentages of elite college admissions when compared to their percentages in the population than Jewish students are.
Don't think so.
Asians are about 5% of US population. I believe it's well known there's a very real, though unadmitted, cap on Asian enrollments at elite private colleges of 20% or 4x their percentage.
Meanwhile, Jews, with under 2% of the population, comprise 1/4 to 1/3 of the most elite colleges. Or 12x to 15x their percentage, or even more.
Primarily, the creepy leftist politicians who inscribed that notion into law, regulation, and policy.
Europee should be Europe. Apparently my left middle finger stutters.
Just like "Whites", "Asians" are bunch of vastly different national, ethnic, cultural, and religious groups. Yet the affirmative action and quota bean counters lump them into one group.
I have to apologize for using the term "Asians" in discussing college admissions policies, because it is inappropriate. I'm sure there are marked differences in academic achievement and college admissions percentages among these various subgroups. (Even an Israeli is an Asian, but you can be sure that the bean counters consider him "white.")
Absolutely. The term “Asian” has a completely different meaning in UK than here.Over there it means South Asians, not East Asians as in the US.
I don’t even know if Indians are counted as Asians here. If they are, it would be very weird, as Indians have at least as much in common with Europeans as with Chinese or Koreans.
We used to have a perfectly good term for East Asians, Orientals, which just means Easterners, which is geographically accurate. But for some obscure, and to me unexplained, reason the term became politically incorrect.
The US government counts Indians as Asians. Persians/Iranians apparently are counted as Caucasians/White even though they are related to the people of northern India. Apparently Afghanis may be considered Asians, though they are related to the Persians. There’s also trouble trying to fit some of the population groups in Russia into the US government’s categories.
Your post only cites a few of many examples of how foolish this US government obsession with demographic classification is. No matter how you classify this group or that group, there always going to be the proverbial round pegs in square holes. I'd much prefer NO official government classification of Americans, other than citizens and aliens, with aliens subdivided into legal and illegal.
Let's have people decide for themselves which group or groups they identify with, NOT government bean counters. But, you see, without government bean counters, there can be no affirmative action, quotas, or set asides, etc.
"Paging Procrustes...Will Procrustes please report to the Census Bureau...?"
You got it.
Support that agenda 100%.
I think the rules may have changed, but 20 years ago I worked with a guy named Martinez. He was married to an Anglo woman and they had two kids, a boy and a girl.
He told me that when his kids grew up, if both married Anglos, the children of his son would be classified as Hispanic, but the children of his daughter not, simply because of the different in surname. Even though all the kids would be equally 25% “Hispanic.”
Meanwhile, Bernardo O’Higgins and Anthony Quinn are classified as Hispanic, despite names as Irish as you can get.
Consider three brothers in 1900 Sicily. Brother A moves to Buenos Aires, brother B to Sao Paulo, brother C to New York. Under present law, when their descendants, all of pure Italian descent, get together for a family reunion in Las Vegas, those descending from brother A are Hispanic, those from the other two are just “white.”
Does that make any sense at all?
Meanwhile, it is to be simultaneously taken as an Article of Faith that "race" doesn't exist, and that there are no real differences between any two human groups.
Expressing interest in determining whether this is actually the case, much less really challenging it, can destry a person's life and career.
I believe you're wrong on the second brother's offspring. I may be wrong but I think that being a native Portuguese speaker or descendant thereof qualifies one as "Hispanic," just as being a native Spanish speaker or descendant thereof qualifies.
Nope. Or at least not uniformly across the government.
Census Bureau allows self-reporting as to who is Hispanic, but people from Portugal or Brazil do not meet the definition originally provided by law. “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America and other Spanish-speaking countries.”
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/05/28/whos-hispanic/
I believe other agencies use slightly different definitions, and Brazilians and others might qualify under them.
For at least a while, I believe people from Spain itself were not classified as Hispanic, though this may no longer be the case. How weird is that?
OUTSTANDING!!! A bit lengthy but worth reading every word.
Indeed. Thank you for this beautiful devotion!
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