The Harvard and U of NC cases

The Supreme Court today takes up the affirmative action cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In preparation, we have been putting episodes of the Gatecrashers podcast - edited to omit extraneous announcements - on this blog. The podcast is a series of explorations - school by school - of quasi-quotas on Jewish students starting in the 1920s in the Ivy League. The series notes that starting with Columbia, the system of admissions in the Ivy League developed concepts of geographic diversity and other devices such as the SAT which were originally designed to limit Jewish admissions. These devices are still in use today, albeit - some would argue - for other purposes.

From Gatecrashers: In the 1990s, Harvard’s student body was said to be nearly a quarter Jewish. According to the Harvard Crimson’s 2020 survey of the freshman class, 6.7 percent of respondents identified as Jewish. On the final episode of this series, we explore the declining numbers of Jewish students across the Ivy League, and try to understand why, at places like Harvard, there may be fewer Jewish students today than when discriminatory policies kept them out a century ago.

We also look at how the same playbook that was developed to keep Jews out of elite universities–from the application, to the interview, to legacy preferences, to the hunt for geographical diversity – is now being used against a different minority group: Asian Americans. [This episode] features Rabbi Jonah Steinberg, researcher and The Half Opened Door author Marcia Graham Synnott, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, and various former and current Harvard students.

You can hear the text above followed by the Harvard episode at the link below:

https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/harvard%20intro%20and%20gate.mp3