Racial Discrimination
at Harvard, by Ron Unz
Newsletter published on November 24, 2018
(1) Racial
Discrimination against non-Jewish Whites
(2) Racial
Discrimination at Harvard, by Ron Unz
(3) Ron Unz's paper,
with embedded links made explicit
(1) Racial
Discrimination against non-Jewish Whites
by Peter Myers, November 25, 2018
Ron Unz's paper 'Racial Discrimination at Harvard' starts out
discusssing discrimination against Asian-Americans, and ends up exposing
discrimination against non-Jewish Whites.
When racial discrimination in the United States is discussed,
the usual implication is that this is exercised by non-Jewish Whites. But Ron
Unz found that Harvard and other tertiary institutions massively favour Jews
over every other ethnic group, and that non-Jewish Whites are severely
discriminated against.
Whereas a lawsuit is being launched by Asian-American groups,
regarding the discrimination against them, non-Jewish Whites have no-one to
represent them. They are not even identified by name.
In earlier decades, these are the people who were called
'Aryans' or 'Indo-Europeans'. Since Hitler, the term 'Aryan' has fallen into
disfavour.
The name of my website, 'Neither Aryan Nor Jew', brings this
juxtaposition into focus.
Communism in the Soviet Union, before Stalin, amounted to
Jewish Bolsheviks leading other minorities against the Great Russian
majority.
One of Stalin's most significant acts was introducing the 'J'
(for Jewish) nationality to be recorded on all identification documents.
Since Jewish Whites and non-Jewish Whites are conflated in
the statistics, whereas in fact their situations are dramatically different as
Ron Unz shows, there is a need to distinguish these two ethnic categories in all
statistical analyses.
I have long made much of Winston Churchill's 3-fold
categorisation of Jews as International
(Revolutionary) Jews, Zionist Jews, and National Jews.
International Jews were the Bolshevik Jews, then the
Trotskyist Jews, and now the Green Left Jews.
National Jews are the good guys, who are not promoting
Culture War, not trying to overthrow Western civilization, and not backers of
Israel. They are assimilated, just ordinary people, and often expose the other
two kinds. Ron Unz admirably fits this category.
(2) Racial
Discrimination at Harvard, by Ron Unz
From israel shamir <israel.shamir@gmail.com>
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ron Unz <<mailto:ronunz1@gmail.com> ronunz1@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 at 16:29
Subject: American Pravda: Racial Discrimination at Harvard,
by Ron Unz
Graph:
American Pravda: Racial Discrimination at Harvard
by Ron Unz
22 Oct 2018
This last week trial began in Boston federal court for the
current lawsuit in which a collection of
Asian-American organizations are charging Harvard University with racial
discrimination in its college admissions policies. The New York Times, our
national newspaper of record, has been providing almost daily coverage to
developments in the case, with the stories sometimes reaching the front
page.
American Pravda: Racial Discrimination at Harvard
RON UNZ
OCTOBER 22, 2018
10,300 WORDS
This last week trial began in Boston federal court for the
current lawsuit in which a collection of
Asian-American organizations are charging Harvard University with racial
discrimination in its college admissions policies. The New York Times, our
national newspaper of record, has been providing almost daily coverage to
developments in the case, with the stories sometimes reaching the front
page.
Last Sunday, just before the legal proceedings began, the
Times ran a major article explaining the general background of the controversy,
and I was very pleased to see that my own past research was cited as an
important factor sparking the lawsuit, with the reporter even including a direct
link to my 26,000 word 2012 cover-story “The Myth of American Meritocracy,”
which had provided strong quantitative evidence of anti-Asian racial quotas.
Economic historian Niall Ferguson, long one of Harvard’s most prominent
professors but recently decamped to Stanford, similarly noted the role of my
research in his column for the London Sunday Times.
Two decades ago, I had published a widely-discussed op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal on somewhat similar issues of racial discrimination in
elite admissions. But my more recent article was far longer and more
comprehensive, and certainly drew more attention than anything else I have ever
published, before or after. Soon after it appeared in The American Conservative,
its hundreds of thousands of pageviews broke all records for that publication
and it attracted considerable notice in the media. Times columnist David Brooks
soon ranked it as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year, a
verdict seconded by a top editor at The Economist, and the Times itself quickly
organized a symposium on the topic of Asian Quotas, in which I eagerly
participated. Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider,
and other publications all discussed my striking results.
Conservative circles took considerable interest, with Charles
Murray highlighting my findings, and National Review later publishing an article
in which I explained the important implications of my findings for the legal
validity of the 1978 Bakke decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
There was also a considerable reaction from the academic
community itself. I quickly received speaking invitations from the Yale
Political Union, Yale Law, and the University of Chicago Law School, while Prof.
Ferguson discussed my distressing analysis in a lengthy Newsweek/Daily Beast
entitled “The End of the American Dream.”
Moreover, I had also published an associated critique
suggesting that over the years my beloved Harvard alma mater had transformed
itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds with a vestigial school
attached for tax-exempt purposes. This also generated enormous discussion in
media circles, with liberal journalist Chris Hayes Tweeting it out and
generously saying he was “very jealous” he hadn’t written the piece himself,
while many of his colleagues promoted the piece with similarly favorable
remarks, while the university quickly provided a weak public response to these
serious financial charges.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to myself or other outside observers,
Harvard itself launched an internal investigation of the anti-Asian bias that I
had alleged. Apparently, the university’s own initial results generally
confirmed my accusations, indicating that if students were admitted solely based
upon objective academic merit, far more Asians would receive thick envelopes.
But Harvard’s top administrators buried the study and did nothing, with these
important facts only coming out years later during the discovery process of the
current Asian Quotas lawsuit.
Only the first part of my very long article dealt with the
question of anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite college admissions, but it
attracted vastly more attention than any other element.
For many years, there had been a widespread belief within the
Asian-American community that such discriminatory practices existed, a sentiment
backed by considerable anecdotal evidence. But the university administrations
had always flatly denied those claims, and the media had shown little interest
in investigating them. However, my powerful new quantitative evidence was very
difficult to ignore.
Among other things, I focused upon the publicly available
statewide lists of National Merit Semifinalists (NMS), a group that constituted
the highest-performing one-half percent of American high school seniors. By a
fortunate coincidence, this fraction of the American student body was reasonably
close in size to the total enrollment of students at the Ivy League schools
together with similarly elite schools such as Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. The
NMS dataset had previously been almost entirely ignored by researchers, but I
found it a treasure-trove of useful empirical information.
Since Asian last names are extremely distinctive, I was able
to estimate that Asians nationally constituted roughly 25-30% of this top
academic group, a figure considerably larger than their enrollment at Harvard
and other elite schools. This conclusion was supported by the even greater Asian
dominance in more highly selective academic competitions such as the Math
Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search, though the far smaller numbers
involved reduced the statistical validity of that analysis.
But my most dramatic finding relied upon an even simpler
analysis of public data, which had previously remained unnoticed. As I wrote in
my New York Times column:
Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the
existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the
other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.”
But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.
Each year, American universities provide their racial
enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes
this information available online. After the Justice Department closed an
investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University
discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment
of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993
to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.
This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a
huge increase in America’s college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled
between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost
unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of
Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last
two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in
relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of
Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to
15 percent.
The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at
most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over
the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have
converged to a very similar level and remained static over time. This raises
suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a
particular percentage.
This statistical finding was illustrated in a simple graph,
demonstrating that over the last two decades enrollment of Asian-Americans had
gradually converged across the entire Ivy League, while sharply diverging from
the rapidly increasing Asian-American population, with only strictly
meritocratic Caltech continuing to track the latter.
It would be difficult to imagine more obvious visual evidence
of an Asian Quota implemented across the Ivy League, and this chart was very
widely circulated among Asian-American organizations and activists, who launched
their lawsuit the following year. If they do succeed in winning their current
case in federal court, the history books may eventually record that the
wealthiest and most powerful university in the world was brought low by a single
striking graph.
For decades Affirmative Action based upon race has been an
extremely contentious topic in American politics, sharply dividing across
ideological lines, and it was hardly surprising that my new analysis of that
issue produced a wave of coverage. But buried deeper within that same article
were even more explosive findings, apparently far too sensitive to even become a
subject of significant media scrutiny.
Not without reason, most journalists regard matters touching
upon Jewish sensitivities as the lethal “third rail” of their profession, and
the bulk of my piece had presented some unexpected new insights in this area.
These attracted the widespread private fascination of numerous prominent
scholars and members of the media, but almost none of these individuals was
willing to publicly disclose the results that had drawn their rapt
attention.
As a consequence, these findings have remained largely
unnoticed except among those who have actually taken the time to read far into
my extremely long piece, while never penetrating into the awareness of the
broader public. For example, Prof. Jordan Peterson, a leading
celebrity-intellectual with a large YouTube following, recently demonstrated
that he was totally ignorant of these important facts. Therefore, I am now
taking this opportunity to summarize and excerpt those elements of my
Meritocracy analysis that attracted the greatest private interest but received
the least public attention.
A few years earlier, Jerome Karabel, an eminent Berkeley
sociologist, had published The Chosen, his magisterial history of Jewish
enrollment in the Ivy League, which won numerous scholarly accolades. His
research conclusively demonstrated the existence of the once-denied Jewish
Quotas of the past, employed by the reigning WASP elites to maintain control of
those institutions against their upstart ethnic competitors. As I wrote:
Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000
endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and
subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert
ethnic tribal warfare…
As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in
admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw
political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic
considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish
organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to
pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying
the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the
importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact
process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black
activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring
their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America’s national
population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on
purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and
extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69,
and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which
surrounded the campus.
Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of
the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals
and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic
factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired
for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long
battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in
admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the
university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the
following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.
Branches of Hillel, the Jewish student organization, exist
across most college campuses, and for decades they have provided estimates of
the percentages of the local Jewish enrollment, with Karabel and other scholars
relying upon these to chart the ebbs and flows of Jewish numbers. I discussed
how Karabel used this data to celebrate the final meritocratic victory of Jewish
college applicants over their former WASP oppressors.
Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by…noting
the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely
dominated America’s elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions
of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at
Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had
once sought to restrict. Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy
League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular
example emphasized by Karabel.
Karabel showed that the collapse of WASP resistance to the
admission of high-performing Jewish students soon drastically reshaped the
ethnic composition of these institutions, with his triumphalist narrative
suggesting that this transformation raised academic standards and lifted the
quality of the student body to new heights. And for decades, I had entirely
accepted this simple morality tale, which was implicitly or explicitly presented
in nearly all the accounts, liberal and conservative alike, that I had read
regarding the history of our leading East Coast universities.
But as I began to quantitatively explore this issue,
utilizing the same techniques and data sets I had applied to determining the
existence of severe discrimination against Asian applicants, I uncovered
evidence of an entirely contrary nature. I soon came to realize that many of my
beliefs were merely ideological fairy tales, sometimes little more accurate than
the Soviet claims of Russian peasants eagerly joining their collective
farms.
Although Jewish names are not nearly as distinctive as Asian
ones, they may usually be determined with reasonable accuracy, and applying Weyl
analysis to a subset of the most absolutely characteristic ones—such as
Goldstein, Silverberg, Cohen, and Kaplan—allows us to statistically validate the
results so obtained.
As I thus analyzed the many dozens of statewide NMS lists, I
soon discovered that Jews were far less heavily represented among America’s
highest-performing students than I had expected, probably constituting no more
than 6% of the national NMS total. The lists of the winners of the top
scholastic competitions I had previously examined for Asians produced reasonably
similar results.
Hispanic names are quite distinct and blacks are fewer in
number and somewhat less successful academically, so the NMS totals for those
two groups are also not difficult to determine. Once we subtract the totals of
Asians, Jews, Hispanics, and blacks, what remains is the NMS total of
non-Hispanic white Gentiles. And the results were extremely eye-opening:
The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the
most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As
discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in
academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at
the Ivy League and America’s other most elite academic universities. In
California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas,
over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York,
America’s most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white
Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of
America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s
highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish
total of under 6 percent.
Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different
from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite
peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of
American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics,
Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most
of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed,
the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s
most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of
their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher
academic test scores.
When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation
of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of
Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent
NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age
population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The
Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with
both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial
presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics,
foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no
evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact
of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.
However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio
turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites
drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a
consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of
seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of
all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or
geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a
similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian
figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all
relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.
Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current
numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I
graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70
percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic
performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has
actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of
Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But
it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense
of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.
Several graphs from my article effectively illustrated these
remarkable findings.
Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000%
more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white
Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given
that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts
as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.
Furthermore, I noted the possibility that this discrepancy
might be related to the overwhelming Jewish dominance of the top administration
of those institutions:
It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this
massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides
with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the
universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels
Karabel’s account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry, and the same
is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly
Columbia, as well as Princeton’s president throughout during the 1990s and
Yale’s new incoming president, while all three of Harvard’s most recent
presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.
At most universities, a provost is the second-ranking
official, being responsible for day-to-day academic operations. Although
Princeton’s current president is not Jewish, all seven of the most recent
Princeton provosts stretching back to 1977 have had such ancestry, with several
of the other Ivies not being far behind. A similar degree of massive
overrepresentation is found throughout the other top administrative ranks of the
rest of the Ivy League, and across American leading educational institutions in
general, and these are the institutions which select our future national
elites.
Since the publication of my 2012 article, Harvard and
Princeton have both selected new presidents, each of them Jewish, while Yale’s
Jewish president has remained in office.
The exact mechanism by which this seemingly enormous bias in
favor of Jewish applicants to our most elite colleges manifests itself is not
entirely clear, and I very doubt that it takes the crude form of top
administrators directing admissions officers to enroll under-qualified Jewish
applicants. Instead, I strongly suggested that a leading factor was the
“negative pressure” of America’s overwhelmingly Jewish media and Jewish activist
groups, which might respond harshly to any significant decline in Jewish
numbers:
Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is
regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish
enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For
example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to
just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s,
and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted
in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New
York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and
the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of
Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official
apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During
these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had
dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but
this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the
further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.
I suspect that the combined effect of these separate
pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of
the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above. In effect,
somewhat dim and over-worked admissions officers, generally possessing weak
quantitative skills, have been tasked by their academic superiors and media
monitors with the twin ideological goals of enrolling Jews and enrolling
non-whites, with any major failures risking harsh charges of either
“anti-Semitism” or “racism.” But by inescapable logic maximizing the number of
Jews and non-whites implies minimizing the number of non-Jewish whites.
I further noted that this 1999 firestorm of media controversy
attacking Princeton for its alleged “anti-Semitism” took place at a time when
university’s president and provost were both Jewish, and the campus had recently
opened a $4.5 million Center for Jewish Life.
In 2002, Jacques Steinberg, a longtime National Educational
Correspondent for the New York Times, published The Gatekeepers, a widely
praised best-seller that provided an “inside look” at the college admissions
process based on the year he had spent embedded with those officials at
Wesleyan, and the 2012 edition of his book stated that few aspects of the
process had changed during the previous decade. I was deeply distressed by his
description of the background of the admissions officers:
In fact, it seems likely that some of these obvious
admissions biases we have noticed may be related to the poor human quality and
weak academic credentials of many of the university employees making these
momentous decisions. As mentioned above, the job of admissions officer is poorly
paid, requires no professional training, and offers few opportunities for career
advancement; thus, it is often filled by individuals with haphazard employment
records. As one of the “Little Ivies,” Wesleyan is among America’s most
prestigious liberal arts colleges, and Steinberg’s description of the career
paths of its handful of admissions officers is eye-opening: the interim Director
of Admissions had most recently screened food-stamp recipients and run a
psychiatric half-way house; another had worked as an animal control officer and
managed a camera store; a third unsuccessfully sought a job as a United Airlines
flight attendant; others were recent college graduates, whose main college
interests had been sports or ethnic studies. The vast majority seem to possess
minimal academic expertise and few intellectual interests, raising serious
questions about their ability to reasonably evaluate their higher-quality
applicants.
Books by former members of the Harvard and Dartmouth
admissions strongly supported the same conclusions.
As additional evidence, we can consider What It Really Takes
to Get into the Ivy League, a 2003 advice book written by Chuck Hughes, who
spent five years as a Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, after having himself
graduated from that university. Although he strongly emphasizes his own college
participation in varsity sports, he never says a word about any personal
academic interests, and near the end of his book on elite college admissions, he
appears to describe Duke, Northwestern, and Rice as being members of the Ivy
League.
A more explicit statement of this exact problem is found in A
for Admission, a very candid 1997 description of the admissions process at elite
private universities written by Michele A. Hernandez, who had spent four years
as Dartmouth’s Assistant Director of Admissions. Near the beginning of her book,
Hernandez explains that over half of Ivy League admissions officers are
individuals who had not attended such academically challenging universities, nor
probably had the intellectual capability to do so, and were sometimes confused
about the relative ranking of SAT scores and other basic academic credentials.
She also cautions students to avoid any subtlety in their essays, lest their
words be misunderstood by their readers in the admissions office, whose degrees
are more likely to have been in education than in any serious academic
discipline.
Given this unfortunate situation, we should not be overly
surprised by the egregious aspects of the particular admissions stories that
Steinberg recounts.
Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant
student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an
engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over
100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit
Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school
students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless,
the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more
positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school’s Asian-American
club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to
Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous
time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political
cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who
boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars
might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar
reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices,
including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised
and disappointed her immigrant father.
There was also the case of half-Brazilian Julianna Bentes,
with slight black ancestry, who came from a middle-class family and attended on
a partial scholarship one of America’s most elite prep schools, whose annual
tuition now tops $30,000; her SAT scores were somewhat higher than Tiffany’s,
and she was an excellent dancer. The combination of her academic ability,
dancing talent, and “multiracial” background ranked her as one of America’s top
college recruitment prospects, gaining her admission and generous financial
packages from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and every other elite university to which
she applied, including the University of Chicago’s most prestigious academic
scholarship award and a personal opportunity to meet Chelsea Clinton while
visiting Stanford, which she did, before ultimately selecting Yale.
Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a
very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep
school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite
her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam,
her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her
toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on
the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal
drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an
old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion,
he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial
decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full
admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to
gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already
selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted
from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her
folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.
In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received
admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from
more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at
Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she
“didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic
ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her
admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he
personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This
exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including
classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly
traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After
graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm,
thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy
League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”
Jannol’s account also contains a particularly intriguing
element. Personal essays have become a crucial component of application packages
to elite colleges, and these are considered especially effective if they provide
strong evidence of hardships and victimhood. Given her extremely wealthy and
privileged background, Jannol had originally considered focusing on her status
as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, but ultimately decided against it
because so many of her peers would be following exactly that same stratagem,
explaining to Steinberg that “Everyone’s going to write about their Holocaust
grandma.”
Over the last few decades, our news and entertainment
industries have elevated Jewish suffering during World War II into the most
horrific and monumental tragedy of the modern era, and it not impossible that a
substantial fraction of the unfair Jewish advantage in elite admissions may
derive from something as simple as the ability of the children of elite Jewish
families to wrap themselves in the ultimate victimhood of Holocaust survivor
status.
If so, this situation would be particularly ironic, given the
considerable evidence that the Holocaust is substantially fraudulent, or even
almost entirely so, merely a hoax
promoted by heavily Jewish Hollywood, perhaps partially intended to conceal
the inescapable reality that in per capita terms Jews worldwide were surely the greatest
mass-murderers of the twentieth century.
I had been stunned by my evidence of the unreasonable
over-representation of Jewish students at our most elite academic institutions,
and most of the prominent scholars and journalists who read my analysis seemed
to have a similar reaction. Further analysis suggested some of the crucial
reasons for this widespread myopia, which I explicated in a section entitled
“The Strange Collapse of Jewish Academic Achievement.”
From my own perspective, I found these statistical results
surprising, even shocking.
I had always been well aware of the very heavy Jewish
presence at elite academic institutions. But the underwhelming percentage of Jewish students
who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally
unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own
high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other
available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for
a dramatic recent decline in the
academic performance of American Jews
The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of
the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of
the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fraction averaged
about one-third. However, during the
thirteen years since 2000, just two names out of 78 or 2.5 percent appear to be
Jewish. The Putnam Exam is the most difficult and prestigious mathematics
competition for American college students, with five or six Putnam winners
having been selected each year since 1938. Over 40 percent of the Putnam winners
prior to 1950 were Jewish, and during every decade from the 1950s through the
1990s, between 22 percent and 31 percent of the winners seem to have come from
that same ethnic background. But since 2000, the percentage has dropped to under
10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in the last seven years.
This consistent picture of stark ethnic decline recurs when
we examine the statistics for the Science Talent Search, which has been
selecting 40 students as national finalists for America’s most prestigious high
school science award since 1942, thus providing a huge statistical dataset of
over 2800 top science students. During
every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jewish students were consistently
22–23 percent of the recipients, with the percentage then declining to 17
percent in the 1990s, 15 percent in the 2000s, and just 7 percent since 2010. Indeed, of
the thirty top ranked students over the
last three years, only a single one seems likely to have been Jewish.
Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics
Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just 5 percent over the last
decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his
grave.
* * *
Taken in combination, these trends all provide powerful
evidence that over the last decade or more there has been a dramatic collapse in
Jewish academic achievement, at least at the high end.
Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem
reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to
drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and
today’s overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in
their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or
grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant
experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math
Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly
distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the
Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top
Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents
only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible
that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the
late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high
academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have
become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.
This pattern of third
or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity
of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the
case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the
same era. America’s Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a
strong academic tradition, and Japan’s international PISA academic scores are
today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of
California’s NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese,
roughly in line with their share of the California population. Meanwhile,
Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50
percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major
likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin.
In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a
significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated
Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from
that tiny group.
In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used
last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America’s
Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely
disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various
reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the
disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British
life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels
seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does
provide some possible explanations.
In some respects, perhaps it was the enormously outsize
Jewish academic performance of the past which was highly anomalous, and the more
recent partial convergence toward white European norms which is somewhat less
surprising. Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that the mean
Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100,
but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world’s
foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located
some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14
studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close
to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average
figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.
In a previous article “Race, IQ & Wealth,” I had
suggested that the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than
many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of
urbanization, education, and affluence. Given that Jews have always been
America’s most heavily urbanized population and became the most affluent during
the decades in question, these factors may account for a substantial portion of
their huge IQ rise during most of the twentieth century. But with modern
electronic technology recently narrowing the gaps in social environment and
educational opportunities between America’s rural and urban worlds, we might
expect a portion of this difference to gradually dissipate. American Jews are
certainly a high-ability population, but the innate advantage they have over
other high-ability white populations is probably far smaller than is widely
believed.
This conclusion is supported by the General Social Survey
(GSS), an online dataset of tens of thousands of American survey responses from
the last forty years which includes the Wordsum vocabulary test, a very useful
IQ proxy correlating at 0.71. Converted into the corresponding IQ scores, the
Wordsum-IQ of Jews is indeed quite high at 109. But Americans of English, Welsh,
Scottish, Swedish, and Catholic Irish ancestry also have fairly high mean IQs of
104 or above, and their combined populations outnumber Jews by almost 15-to-1,
implying that they would totally dominate the upper reaches of the white
American ability distribution, even if we excluded the remaining two-thirds of
all American whites, many of whose IQs are also fairly high. Furthermore, all
these groups are far less highly urbanized or affluent than Jews, probably
indicating that their scores are still artificially depressed to some extent. We
should also remember that Jewish intellectual performance tends to be quite
skewed, being exceptionally strong in the verbal subcomponent, much lower in
math, and completely mediocre in visuospatial ability; thus, a completely
verbal-oriented test such as Wordsum would actually tend to exaggerate Jewish
IQ.
Stratifying the white American population along religious
lines produces similar conclusions. An analysis of the data from the National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church
actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ, while several other religious categories
came quite close, leading to the result that the overwhelming majority of
America’s high-ability white population had a non-Jewish background.
Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or
environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been
reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical
Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little
more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are
ultra-Orthodox often marry in their
teens and then produce seven or eight children. As a consequence, this
extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years,
and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher
percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been
academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and
government dependency. Therefore, the combination of these two radically
different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number
of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average
academic achievement.
Although the relative importance of these individual factors
behind Jewish academic decline is unclear, the decline itself seems an
unmistakable empirical fact, and the widespread unawareness of this fact has had
important social consequences.
My casual mental image of today’s top American students is
based upon my memories of a generation or so ago, when Jewish students,
sometimes including myself, regularly took home a quarter or more of the highest
national honors on standardized tests or in prestigious academic competitions;
thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Harvard and most of the other Ivy
League schools might be 25 percent Jewish, based on meritocracy. But the
objective evidence indicates that in present day America, only about 6 percent
of our top students are Jewish, which now renders such very high Jewish
enrollments at elite universities totally absurd and ridiculous. I strongly
suspect that a similar time lag effect is responsible for the apparent confusion
in many others who have considered the topic.
For example, throughout his very detailed book, Karabel
always seems to automatically identify increasing Jewish enrollments with
academic meritocracy, and Jewish declines with bias or discrimination, retaining
this assumption even when his discussion moves into the 1990s and 2000s. He was
born in 1950, graduated Harvard in 1972, and returned there to earn his Ph.D. in
1977, so this may indeed have been the reality during his formative years. But
he seems strikingly unaware that the world has changed since then, and that over
the last decade or two, meritocracy and Jewish numbers have become opposing
forces: the stricter the meritocratic standard, the fewer the Jews admitted.
Evidence of the remarkable collapse of Jewish academic
achievement is easily seen in a series of charts:
Important results with major policy implications will only
have significant impact if they are widely distributed, and in this regard I
faced formidable obstacles.
My article was running in The American Conservative, a small
circulation political opinion magazine of which I was the publisher, and so my
findings needed to break through into far larger and more mainstream outlets in
order to reach a sizable audience. But in the past TAC had often been fiercely
denounced by Jewish activists and organizations, mostly on foreign policy
issues, and elements of my piece were far more inflammatory than had been any of
that other material. While harsh attacks might help promote my information
within particular ideological circles, they would surely dissuade mainstream
publications from taking notice, and would also sufficiently stigmatize my
research that no respectable individual would be willing to cite it in the
future.
My first decision was to place my Asian Quota section near
the front of my very long text. Aside from the intrinsic importance, this would
also provide interested readers with a relatively safe “hook” that they could
use to describe and promote my analysis, while allowing them to safely avoid
mention of the “third rail” material that constituted the bulk of my text; and
this was exactly what eventually occurred. But such a strategy would obviously
fail unless I could also somehow induce hair-trigger activist groups to maintain
silence about my article rather than crudely demonizing it. Therefore, I decided
to launch what I considered a decapitating first strike against those central
organs of Jewish activism but to do so in a rather oblique manner.
Jerome Karabel certainly ranked as the world’s foremost
authority on Jewish admissions to the Ivy League, and his celebrated opus had
been the central text I had used, although my ultimate conclusions were
radically different than his own. It seemed likely to me that once Jewish
organizations became aware of the controversial elements of my article, he would
be among the first individuals they contacted, both to seek his assessment of my
analysis and perhaps also receive suggestions for an effective rebuttal.
Therefore, I obtained Karabel’s contact information and sent
him an advance copy of my completed article weeks before it was generally
released, explaining that I thought he would find it rather interesting although
some of my conclusions were quite different than his own. My expectation was
that once he carefully read my detailed analysis, he would conclude that the
case I made was far too strong to be effectively refuted, and he would pass
along that verdict to the activist organizations when they eventually contacted
him, thus leading them adopt a response of “strategic silence” in order to avoid
drawing attention to my claims. For whatever reason, that was exactly how they
reacted, and no prominent Jewish activist or group ever issued a public response
to my extremely controversial findings despite the considerable attention these
ultimately attracted.
Not only did this complete absence of organized attacks
provide a green light for the very favorable mainstream coverage I soon began
receiving, but it even opened the door to quite friendly treatment from numerous
members of the organized Jewish community itself, as they discovered and read my
article without any prior negative preconceptions. Most of these discussions
focused directly upon the evidence of the sharp recent decline in Jewish
academic ability and the resulting Jewish over-representation at elite
universities, with a professor of Talmud Studies at Yeshiva University
publishing a thousand-word column entitled “Endangered Jewish Genius” and NYU’s
Berman Jewish Policy Center featuring my article on its website. Even the
Israeli press took notice, with a columnist for Israel Hayom, Sheldon Adelson’s
top-circulation newpaper, devoting a 1500 word column to my analysis, focusing
especially upon my claims of Jewish over-representation.
But although prominent Jewish activists maintained their
strict blockade against any discussion of my findings, the Jewish community has
never lacked for extreme zealots, and some of these did eventually launch
ferocious attacks on my work. However, these were fringe figures, so they were
very slow off the mark in their responses and lacked significant credibility or
media support. Therefore, their complaints had little impact, especially because
they were largely self-refuting.
My fiercest academic critic was a certain cancer researcher
named Janet Mertz, a fanatic feminist whose previous public efforts had been
focused on vilifying and refuting former Harvard president Larry Summers for his
mild but impolitic suggestion that perhaps men might be a bit better at math
than women, a position she regarded as utter anathema. To that end, she had
published a 10,000 word peer-reviewed analysis of decades worth of International
Math Olympiad participants, which convincingly demonstrated that across almost
every time period and country, roughly 95% of the best mathematicians had been
male and only 5% female. But she rather bizarrely claimed that this conclusively
proved that males and females had exactly equal mathematical aptitude, and then
persuaded Science Daily and other gullible media outlets to publish headlined
news stories touting her powerful debunking of male chauvinist mythology.
Mertz was equally zealous in her Jewish identitarianism, and
she had invested enormous effort in exhaustively determining the exact
fractional Jewish ancestry of all of America’s recent Math Olympians. As a
consequence, she fiercely denounced as mere “guesswork” my own estimates of
Jewish numbers, based as they were upon a much more casual inspection of
surnames, supplemented by Weyl analysis. I think my response was quite
effective.
As it happens, she and her co-authors had exhaustively
researched the ethnicity of the 1988-2007 American Math Olympians in their
aforementioned 2008 article, and through a combination of extensive biographical
research and confidential personal interviews had determined the exact number of
full-Jews and part-Jews among those 120 individuals, publishing the results in
their Table 7 mentioned above, together with the broader racial categories.
Given that I had produced my own ethnic estimates for those
same students based on perhaps five minutes of cursory surname analysis, while
Mertz and her associates seemingly devoted five weeks of research to the same
task, I readily acknowledge that her results are certain to be vastly more
accurate than my own. Indeed, if we regard the Mertz figures as the “gold
standard,” then comparing them with my own numbers provides a useful means of
assessing the overall quality of my direct inspection technique, a technique
that constituted a central pillar of my entire study. This allows us to decide
whether my approach was indeed just the worthless “guesswork” that she
alleges.
Her peer-reviewed journal article determined that the 120
American Math Olympians from 1988-2007 consisted of exactly 42 Asians, 26 Jews,
and 52 non-Jewish whites. My crude surname estimate had been 44 Asians, 23 Jews,
and 53 non-Jewish whites. Individual readers must decide for themselves whether
these estimation errors seem so enormous as to totally invalidate my overall
conclusions, but personally I would be quite satisfied if they remained in this
range across the tens of thousands of surnames I had inspected throughout the
rest of my paper.
Obviously, such estimation techniques may be completely
incorrect for tiny handfuls of names, and should only be relied upon across
substantial lists. For example, in one sentence of my 30,000 word article I
stated that just 2 of the 78 names of Olympiad winners since 2000 seemed likely
to be Jewish, and Mertz has repeatedly attacked me for this claim, now pointing
out that I had missed the Hebrew name of winner “Oaz Nir.” She is correct, and
since Nir was a double winner in 2000 and 2001, this single surname error on my
part accounts for virtually the entire discrepancy between my own 1988-2007
Olympiad results and those produced by the exhaustive research undertaken by
Mertz and her three academic co-authors.
The only reason that I or anyone else even became aware of
Mertz’s harsh critique of my analysis was the heavy promotion she received by
Andrew Gelman, a professor of Statistics at Columbia University and a prominent
blogger, who thereby apparently hoped to undercut my findings without directly
involving himself and thereby risking his own reputation. But once I informed
him of some of her previous scholarly claims regarding gender issues, he seemed
to abandon the project.
A close Mertz ally was a much younger woman named Nurit
Baytch, whom I actually encountered in person. As I was giving my lecture at the
University of Chicago Law School, I couldn’t help but notice a rather short
young woman sitting in the front row, glaring at me with a glassy-eyed stare. I
am hardly a clothes-horse, but she was dressed very strangely, and when she
afterward came up to “confront me,” her mannerisms and style of speaking were
quite odd as well. All in all, her appearance much reminded me of the photos of
female Weather Underground terrorists of the late 1960s, most of whom had also
come from a Jewish background.
Eventually, Ms. Baytch wrote a massive document purportedly
refuting my Meritocracy analysis, and since it was never published anywhere, she
posted it on the Internet as a GoogleDocs file, which countless Jewish activists
have subsequently cited as a conclusive debunking of my claims. But all her tens
of thousands of words of complex verbiage cannot get around the simple fact that
only about 6% of America’s high-performing NMS students are Jewish and the
remaining 94% are Gentile.
Her other line of criticism was to denounce my use of the
Hillel numbers for Jewish enrollment, which she claimed were completely
fraudulent, though without any evidence buttressing her claim. Although for
decades, these Hillel figures had been accepted without reservation by all our
leading media outlets and academic researchers, I had actually treated them with
some caution, perhaps being the first analyst to do so.
Similarly, nearly all
our figures on Jewish enrollment were ultimately drawn from the estimates of
Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization, and these are obviously
approximate. However, the Hillel data is the best we possess for recent decades,
and is regularly used by the New York Times and other prominent media outlets,
while also serving as the basis for much of Karabel’s award-winning scholarship.
Furthermore, so long as any latent bias in the data remained relatively
constant, we could still correctly analyze changes over time.
Completely discarding as unreliable the tens of thousands of
annual Jewish enrollment estimates compiled by Hillel over the last half-century
would completely eliminate almost everything we know about the historical size
and trajectory of the Jewish presence at thousands of American colleges,
destroying the sociological studies of many scholars. But fortunately, it seems
quite unlikely that the figures are as completely nonsensical as Baytch casually
claims.
These Hillel estimates have been very widely circulated
within the Jewish community for decades and republished in Jewish magazines,
being primarily intended to help guide strongly-identified Jewish families in
selecting a college campus with a Jewish enrollment in the range they considered
necessary. For most families, the cost of a college education is one of the
largest investments they will ever make, and if for decades, tens or hundreds of
thousands of committed Jewish families had picked their colleges based on the
Hillel numbers only to discover that those figures had no connection to reality,
surely there would have been a huge and angry backlash. But there is no record
of any such complaints.
For many years, Harvard Hillel had regularly claimed that
half or more of all the white undergraduates on the campus came from a Jewish
background, and if this figure were wildly inaccurate, surely someone at Harvard
Hillel would have eventually noticed that error and corrected it, with the same
being true for Yale, Columbia, Penn, and numerous other colleges. Obviously, the
criteria used to classify a student as Jewish are somewhat elastic, and we can
easily suppose that the estimate generally includes part-Jews who in any way
identified with that community, and may have been been somewhat exaggerated due
to ethnic boosterism. But it seems highly unlikely that the figures would be
utterly and demonstrably false.
These arguments based on general plausibility are strongly
supported by quantitative evidence, and ironically enough, it is Baytch herself
who provided it. Around the time she produced her lengthy and unpublished
document, Harvard Hillel was claiming a Jewish undergraduate enrollment of 25%,
and near the beginning of her text, she claimed that figure was obviously false
by citing a Harvard Crimson survey indicating that only 9.5% of the Class of
2017 were Jewish. However, she failed to notice that the survey referred to
being religiously Jewish, which is entirely different than being Jewish in the
broader ethnic or ancestral sense, especially since Jews are among the most
secular population in American society and a full 42% of the Harvard students
described their religious beliefs as atheist, agnostic, or “other.” Indeed, a
worldwide survey finds that only 38% of (ethnic) Jews follow the Jewish
religion. So if the Crimson survey were correct and Harvard Jews were typical in
their religiosity, this would imply that 9.5% / 0.38 = 25%(!!!) of Harvard
freshman were ethnically Jewish, exactly the figure claimed by Harvard Hillel.
Fanatic ideologues such as Baytch sometimes have a tendency to score game-ending
own-goals without even realizing what they have done.
In general, classifying an individual as Jewish has a rather
protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion,
ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded
or contracted for various reasons. I suspect that Baytch’s confusion on this
matter was entirely sincere, related to the obsessive tendencies she exhibited
in real life. But others may employ these shifting definitions based upon more
pragmatic considerations.
It is well known that for many decades the American Communist
Party and especially its top leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a
time when Jews were just 3% of the national population. But Jewish community
leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied
the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists
whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious
belief?
Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at
Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white
Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells
within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to
manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information. With a high-profile
Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own
unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard
Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very
large.
Baytch’s apparent confusion between having Jewish ancestry
and practicing the Jewish religion would have been well-known in these circles,
and offered an obvious solution. If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to
only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices,
the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly
reduced. Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish
ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by
writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile
population being none the wiser.
For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted
this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish
enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring
example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel
website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge
reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the
Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their
religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite
colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.
One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish
enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is
quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith. According to the
Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no
Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life
at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and
projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between
individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.
As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated,
in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen
year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from
Jewish organizations. The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent
sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that
little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.
Many years ago as a young and naive undergraduate, I would
usually spend my dinners discussing all sorts of political and policy issues
with my fellow classmates in our Harvard dining hall.
Affirmative Action was a regular topic of our conversations,
and I would occasionally note how odd America was in that regard. No other
example came to mind in which an ethnic group had established a legalized system
of racial discrimination against its own members, while similar sorts of systems
aimed at excluding or disadvantaging rival ethnic groups were all too common in
world history.
As the decades went by, I gradually noticed that the huge and continuing increase in the
enrollment of non-white and foreign students at our most elite universities
had caused a complete collapse in the
enrollment of white American Gentiles, but oddly enough, no similar reduction in Jewish
numbers. It was well-known that Jewish activists had been the primary force
behind the establishment of Affirmative Action and related policies in college
admissions, and I began to wonder about their true motivation, whether conscious
or unconscious.
Had the goal been the stated one, of providing educational
opportunities to previously excluded groups? Or had that merely been the excuse
used to advance a policy that eliminated the majority of white Gentiles, their
primary ethnic competitors? With the Jewish population numbering merely 2%,
there was an obvious limit as to how many elite college slots they themselves
could possibly fill, but if enough other groups were also brought in, then
Gentile numbers could easily be reduced to low levels, despite the fact that
they constituted the bulk of the national population.
Asians represented an interesting test-case. As their numbers
rapidly grew, white Gentiles were consequently pushed out, and this process was
celebrated across the academic community. But by the late 1980s, Asian numbers had increased to such an
extent that they inevitably began to impinge upon elite Jewish enrollment as
well and future increases would surely worsen the situation. And at that point,
the process suddenly halted, with Asian numbers being sharply reduced and
thereafter permanently capped. The implications of this situation were already
in the back of my mind when I published my 1998 Wall Street Journal column
describing some of these striking racial facts.
The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict
between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the
current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose
numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely
portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would
scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term
“white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it
reveals.
The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are
certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the
ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies
ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never
subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the
unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain
absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions
involved.
Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the
Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are
doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that
fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant
in today’s American society.
(3) Ron Unz's paper,
with embedded links made explicit
American Pravda: Racial Discrimination at Harvard
by Ron Unz
22 Oct 2018
This last week trial began in Boston federal court for the
current lawsuit in which a collection of
Asian-American organizations are charging Harvard University with racial
discrimination in its college admissions policies. The New York Times, our
national newspaper of record, has been providing almost daily coverage to
developments in the case, with the stories sometimes reaching the front
page.
Last Sunday, just before the legal proceedings began,
the Times ran <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/us/harvard-affirmative-action-asian-students.html>
a major articleexplaining the general background of the controversy, and I was
very pleased to see that my own past research was cited as an important factor
sparking the lawsuit, with the reporter even including a direct link to my
26,000 word 2012 cover-story <http://www.unz.com/runz/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/>
“The Myth of American Meritocracy,” which had provided strong quantitative
evidence of anti-Asian racial quotas. Economic historian Niall Ferguson, long
one of Harvard’s most prominent professors but recently decamped to Stanford,
similarly noted the role of my research <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/americans-are-weary-of-this-new-civil-war-mxbtddgdg>
in his column for the London Sunday Times.
Two decades ago, <http://www.unz.com/runz/some-minorities-are-more-minor-than-others/>
I had published a widely-discussed op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on somewhat
similar issues of racial discrimination in elite admissions. But my more recent
article was far longer and more comprehensive, and certainly drew more attention
than anything else I have ever published, before or after. Soon after it
appeared in The American Conservative, its hundreds of thousands of pageviews
broke all records for that publication and it attracted considerable notice in
the media.Times columnist David Brooks <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/opinion/brooks-the-2012-sidney-awards-i.html>
soon ranked it as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year, a
verdict <https://twitter.com/adwooldridge/status/290498045899059200>
seconded by a top Economist editor, and the Times itself quickly organized <https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/19/fears-of-an-asian-quota-in-the-ivy-league/statistics-indicate-an-ivy-league-asian-quota>
a symposium on the topic of Asian Quotas, in which I eagerly participated. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2012/11/30/do-the-ivy-league-universities-discriminate-against-asian-americans/>
Forbes, <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/is-the-ivy-league-fair-to-asian-americans/266538/>
The Atlantic, <https://washingtonmonthly.com/2012/12/22/discrimination-against-asian-american-students-in-ivy-league-admissions/>The
Washington Monthly, <https://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-discriminates-against-asians-2012-12>
Business Insider, and other publications all discussed my striking results.
Conservative circles took considerable interest, with Charles
Murray <http://www.aei.org/publication/at-the-ivies-asians-are-the-new-jews/>
highlighting my findings, and National Review later publishing <http://www.unz.com/runz/bakk76067/>
an article in which I explained the important implications of my findings for
the legal validity of the 1978 Bakkedecision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
There was also a considerable reaction from the academic
community itself. I quickly received speaking invitations from the Yale
Political Union, Yale Law, and the University of Chicago Law School, while Prof.
Ferguson discussed my distressing analysis in a lengthy Newsweek/Daily
Beast entitled <http://www.niallferguson.com/journalism/journalism/the-end-of-the-american-dream>
“The End of the American Dream.”
Moreover, I had also published <http://www.unz.com/runz/paying-tuition-to-a-giant-hedge-fund/>
an associated critique suggesting that over the years my beloved Harvard alma
mater had transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds with a
vestigial school attached for tax-exempt purposes. This also generated enormous
discussion in media circles, with liberal journalist Chris Hayes Tweeting it out
and generously saying he was “very jealous” he hadn’t written the piece himself,
while many of his colleagues promoted the piece with similarly favorable
remarks, while the university quickly provided <http://www.unz.com/runz/harvard-as-hedge-fund-harvard-replies/>
a weak public response to these serious financial charges..
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to myself or other outside observers,
Harvard itself launched an internal
investigation of the anti-Asian bias that I had alleged. Apparently, the
university’s own initial results generally confirmed my accusations,
indicating that if students were admitted solely based upon objective academic
merit, far more Asians would receive thick envelopes. But Harvard’s top
administrators buried the study and did nothing, with these important facts only coming out years later during
the discovery process of the current Asian Quotas lawsuit.
Only the first part of my very long article dealt with the
question of anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite college admissions, but it
attracted vastly more attention than any other element.
For many years, there had been a widespread belief within the
Asian-American community that such discriminatory practices existed, a sentiment
backed by considerable anecdotal evidence. But the university administrations
had always flatly denied those claims, and the media had shown little interest
in investigating them. However, my powerful new quantitative evidence was very
difficult to ignore.
Among other things, I focused upon the publicly available
statewide lists of National Merit Semifinalists (NMS), a group that constituted
the highest-performing one-half percent of American high school seniors. By a
fortunate coincidence, this fraction of the American student body was reasonably
close in size to the total enrollment of students at the Ivy League schools
together with similarly elite schools such as Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. The
NMS dataset had previously been almost entirely ignored by researchers, but I
found it a treasure-trove of useful empirical information.
Since Asian last names are extremely distinctive, I was able
to estimate that Asians nationally
constituted roughly 25-30% of this top academic group, a figure considerably
larger than their enrollment at Harvard and other elite schools. This conclusion
was supported by the even greater Asian dominance in more highly selective
academic competitions such as the Math Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent
Search, though the far smaller numbers involved reduced the statistical validity
of that analysis.
But my most dramatic finding relied upon an even simpler
analysis of public data, which had previously remained unnoticed. As <https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/19/fears-of-an-asian-quota-in-the-ivy-league/statistics-indicate-an-ivy-league-asian-quota>
I wrote in my New York Times column:
Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the
existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and
the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian
quotas.” But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.
Each year, American universities provide their racial
enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes
this information available online. After the Justice Department closed an
investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University
discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment
of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993
to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.
This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a
huge increase in America’s college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled
between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost
unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of
Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last
two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in
relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of
Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to
15 percent.
The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at
most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over
the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have
converged to a very similar level and remained static over time. This raises
suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a
particular percentage.
This statistical finding was illustrated in a simple graph,
demonstrating that over the last two decades enrollment of Asian-Americans had
gradually converged across the entire Ivy League, while sharply diverging from
the rapidly increasing Asian-American population, with only strictly
meritocratic Caltech continuing to track the latter.
It would be difficult to imagine more obvious visual evidence
of an Asian Quota implemented across the Ivy League, and this chart was very
widely circulated among Asian-American organizations and activists, who launched
their lawsuit the following year. If they do succeed in winning their current
case in federal court, the history books may eventually record that the
wealthiest and most powerful university in the world was brought low by a single
striking graph.
For decades Affirmative Action based upon race has been an
extremely contentious topic in American politics, sharply dividing across
ideological lines, and it was hardly surprising that my new analysis of that
issue produced a wave of coverage. But buried deeper within that same article
were even more explosive findings, apparently far too sensitive to even become a
subject of significant media scrutiny.
Not without reason, most journalists regard matters touching
upon Jewish sensitivities as the lethal “third rail” of their profession, and
the bulk of my piece had presented some unexpected new insights in this area.
These attracted the widespread private fascination of numerous prominent
scholars and members of the media, but almost none of these individuals was
willing to publicly disclose the results that had drawn their rapt
attention.
As a consequence, these findings have remained largely
unnoticed except among those who have actually taken the time to read far into
my extremely long piece, while never penetrating into the awareness of the
broader public. For example, Prof. Jordan Peterson, a leading
celebrity-intellectual with a large YouTube following, <https://jordanbpeterson.com/psychology/on-the-so-called-jewish-question/>
recently demonstrated that he was totally ignorant of these important facts.
Therefore, I am now taking this opportunity to summarize and excerpt those
elements of my Meritocracy analysis that attracted the greatest private interest
but received the least public attention.
A few years earlier, Jerome Karabel, an eminent Berkeley
sociologist, had published The Chosen, his magisterial history of Jewish
enrollment in the Ivy League, which won numerous scholarly accolades. His
research conclusively demonstrated the existence of the once-denied Jewish
Quotas of the past, employed by the reigning WASP elites to maintain control of
those institutions against their upstart ethnic competitors. As I wrote:
Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000
endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and
subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert
ethnic tribal warfare…
As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in
admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw
political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic
considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish
organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to
pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying
the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the
importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact
process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black
activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring
their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America’s national
population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on
purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and
extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69,
and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which
surrounded the campus.
Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of
the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals
and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic
factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired
for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long
battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in
admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the
university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the
following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.
Branches of Hillel, the Jewish student organization, exist
across most college campuses, and for decades they have provided estimates of
the percentages of the local Jewish enrollment, with Karabel and other scholars
relying upon these to chart the ebbs and flows of Jewish numbers. I discussed
how Karabel used this data to celebrate the final meritocratic victory of Jewish
college applicants over their former WASP oppressors.
Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by…noting
the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely
dominated America’s elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions
of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at
Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had
once sought to restrict. Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy
League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular
example emphasized by Karabel.
Karabel showed that the collapse of WASP resistance to the
admission of high-performing Jewish students soon drastically reshaped the
ethnic composition of these institutions, with his triumphalist narrative
suggesting that this transformation raised academic standards and lifted the
quality of the student body to new heights. And for decades, I had entirely
accepted this simple morality tale, which was implicitly or explicitly presented
in nearly all the accounts, liberal and conservative alike, that I had read
regarding the history of our leading East Coast universities.
But as I began to quantitatively explore this issue, utilizing the same techniques and data
sets I had applied to determining the existence of severe discrimination
against Asian applicants, I uncovered evidence of an entirely contrary nature. I
soon came to realize that many of my beliefs were merely ideological fairy
tales, sometimes little more accurate than the Soviet claims of Russian peasants
eagerly joining their collective farms.
Although Jewish
names are not nearly as distinctive as Asian ones, they may usually be determined with reasonable
accuracy, and applying Weyl analysis to a subset of the most absolutely
characteristic ones—such as Goldstein, Silverberg, Cohen, and Kaplan—allows us
to statistically validate the results so obtained.
As I thus analyzed the many dozens of statewide NMS lists, I soon discovered that Jews were far less
heavily represented among America’s highest-performing students than I had
expected, probably constituting no
more than 6% of the national NMS total. The lists of the winners of the top
scholastic competitions I had previously examined for Asians produced reasonably similar
results.
Hispanic names are
quite distinct and blacks are fewer in number and somewhat less successful
academically, so the NMS totals for those two groups are also not difficult
to determine. Once we subtract the
totals of Asians, Jews, Hispanics, and blacks, what remains is the NMS total of
non-Hispanic white Gentiles. And the results were extremely eye-opening:
The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the
most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As
discussed earlier, these students
constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000
high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America’s
other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names
outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and
Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America’s most heavily Jewish
state, there are more than two
high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the
overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability
students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of
under 6 percent.
Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different
from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite
peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of
American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber
non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which
seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s
most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction
of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher
academic test scores.
When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation
of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of
Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent
NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age
population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The
Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with
both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial
presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics,
foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no
evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact
of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.
However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio
turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites
drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a
consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of
seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of
all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or
geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a
similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian
figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all
relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.
Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current
numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I
graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70
percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic
performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has
actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of
Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But
it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense
of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.
Several graphs from my article effectively illustrated these
remarkable findings.
Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more
likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white
Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given
that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts
as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.
Furthermore, I noted the possibility that this discrepancy
might be related to the overwhelming Jewish dominance of the top administration
of those institutions:
It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this
massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides
with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the
universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels
Karabel’s account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry, and the same
is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly
Columbia, as well as Princeton’s president throughout during the 1990s and
Yale’s new incoming president, while all three of Harvard’s most recent
presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.
At most universities, a provost is the second-ranking
official, being responsible for day-to-day academic operations. Although
Princeton’s current president is not Jewish, all seven of the most recent
Princeton provosts stretching back to 1977 have had such ancestry, with several
of the other Ivies not being far behind. A similar degree of massive
overrepresentation is found throughout the other top administrative ranks of the
rest of the Ivy League, and across American leading educational institutions in
general, and these are the institutions which select our future national
elites.
Since the publication of my 2012 article, Harvard and
Princeton have both selected new presidents, each of them Jewish, while Yale’s
Jewish president has remained in office.
The exact mechanism by which this seemingly enormous bias in
favor of Jewish applicants to our most elite colleges manifests itself is not
entirely clear, and I very doubt that it takes the crude form of top
administrators directing admissions officers to enroll under-qualified Jewish
applicants. Instead, I strongly suggested that a leading factor was the
“negative pressure” of America’s overwhelmingly Jewish media and Jewish activist
groups, which might respond harshly to any significant decline in Jewish
numbers:
Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is
regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish
enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For
example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to
just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s,
and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted
in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New
York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and
the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of
Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official
apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During
these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had
dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but
this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the
further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.
I suspect that the combined effect of these separate
pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of
the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above. In effect,
somewhat dim and over-worked admissions officers, generally possessing weak
quantitative skills, have been tasked by their academic superiors and media
monitors with the twin ideological goals of enrolling Jews and enrolling
non-whites, with any major failures risking harsh charges of either
“anti-Semitism” or “racism.” But by inescapable logic maximizing the number of
Jews and non-whites implies minimizing the number of non-Jewish whites.
I further noted that this 1999 firestorm of media controversy
attacking Princeton for its alleged “anti-Semitism” took place at a time when
university’s president and provost were both Jewish, and the campus had recently
opened a $4.5 million Center for Jewish Life.
In 2002, Jacques Steinberg, a longtime National Educational
Correspondent for the New York Times, published The Gatekeepers, a widely
praised best-seller that provided an “inside look” at the college admissions
process based on the year he had spent embedded with those officials at
Wesleyan, and the 2012 edition of his book stated that few aspects of the
process had changed during the previous decade. I was deeply distressed by his
description of the background of the admissions officers:
In fact, it seems likely that some of these obvious
admissions biases we have noticed may be related to the poor human quality and
weak academic credentials of many of the university employees making these
momentous decisions. As mentioned above, the job of admissions officer is poorly
paid, requires no professional training, and offers few opportunities for career
advancement; thus, it is often filled by individuals with haphazard employment
records. As one of the “Little Ivies,” Wesleyan is among America’s most
prestigious liberal arts colleges, and Steinberg’s description of the career
paths of its handful of admissions officers is eye-opening: the interim Director
of Admissions had most recently screened food-stamp recipients and run a
psychiatric half-way house; another had worked as an animal control officer and
managed a camera store; a third unsuccessfully sought a job as a United Airlines
flight attendant; others were recent college graduates, whose main college
interests had been sports or ethnic studies. The vast majority seem to possess
minimal academic expertise and few intellectual interests, raising serious
questions about their ability to reasonably evaluate their higher-quality
applicants.
Books by former members of the Harvard and Dartmouth
admissions strongly supported the same conclusions.
As additional evidence, we can consider What It Really Takes
to Get into the Ivy League, a 2003 advice book written by Chuck Hughes, who
spent five years as a Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard, after having himself
graduated from that university. Although he strongly emphasizes his own college
participation in varsity sports, he never says a word about any personal
academic interests, and near the end of his book on elite college admissions, he
appears to describe Duke, N
From: israel shamir <israel.shamir@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 16:05:09 +0200
Subject: Pittsburgh: Advice to Jews, by Israel Shamir
To: readers <shamireaders@yahoogroups.com>,
Israel Shamir <adam@israelshamir.net>
Bcc: peter@mailstar.net
X-ME-Bayesian: 0.000000
X-Read: 1
Pittsburgh: Advice to Jews
<https://www.unz.com/author/israel-shamir/>ISRAEL
SHAMIR • NOVEMBER 2, 2018
• 1,600 WORDS
<https://www.unz.com/ishamir/pittsburgh-advice-to-jews/>https://www.unz.com/ishamir/pittsburgh-advice-to-jews/
Police stand at the entrance to Rodef Shalom Temple before
funeral services for brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, victims of the Tree of
Life Synagogue shooting, in Pittsburgh
I was hesitant to write on the subject while the Pittsburgh
dead weren’t buried yet. I know, it is not a valid consideration for the
militant pundits. The US Jews accused President Trump and the Israeli Jews
blamed Palestinians for the shooting as on the cue before the victims were
declared dead. However, you can’t talk sense before the dead are laid to rest.
Now we can deliberate on guilt and blame.
The man who killed eleven Jews in Pittsburgh did it to have
his objection to immigration heard. If he would be allowed to say that on his
page in Facebook, instead of being blocked, these old people would still be
alive. If the New York Times would allow anti-immigration feelings to be
expressed and discussed on paper instead of being delegitimised, these old
people would be still alive. The closing of all but ultra-liberal outlets for
opinion expression had created a powerful pent-up pressure that caused the
already unhinged man to go crazy.
If there are no newspapers, no public TV stations, not even a
post in Facebook to say what you are eager to say, sooner or later guns will do
the talking. Surely the guys who organised this massive silencing and censorship
campaign are smart enough to expect exactly this outcome. They aren’t entitled
to act surprised.
The US has never had a mass shooting of Jews until now, but
the US has never had such an effective silencing campaign with at least half of
its population including the President banned from sharing their marginalised
views. It is elementary physics, the pent-up pressure leads to explosion.
Problems should be discussed and feelings vented, otherwise people will die.
<https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/armedJews.png>
President Trump, a simple soul, said the Jews had to defend themselves and
install armed guards. Jews have enough armed guards. There is an
Israeli-established <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeJwdbZS7GA&feature=youtu.be>institution<http://savefrom.net/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DyeJwdbZS7GA%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&utm_source=chameleon&utm_medium=extensions&utm_campaign=link_modifier> that
trains and arms Jews for the Jewish organisation in Pennsylvania. The US Jews
have enough of everything, and a lot of power, but they are short of
responsibility. Irresponsible power breeds hubris, while hubris leads to nemesis
in the shape of a man with a rifle.
Instead of taking responsibility for their actions, Jews
prefer to deny it. At a demo confronting President Trump upon his arrival to
Pittsburgh, they flatly denied their actions in favour of immigration. The
gunman, they said, “believed anti-semitic lies that Jews were funding the
caravan.” At the same time, before the victims were buried, the Jewish
organisations, such as HIAS, swore they will continue to deliver immigrants to
the unwilling country, even if it is against the law. They defied the law by
hiding illegals and protecting the smugglers. This readiness to break or bend
the law is a dangerous feature for a powerful but rather small elite group. They
should stick to the law with both hands, instead of setting an example of
bracing illegality.
Indeed some ethical considerations could be placed above the
law, but not with such abandon, not with such ease. Antigone broke the law and
buried her brother, but she was not surprised to die for this transgression.
These guys break the law and expect to be lauded for that.
Why American Jews support immigration, while Israeli Jews do
not allow Gentiles to immigrate into the Jewish state? Double standards, you’d
say. They do to you what they do not want to be done to them. – Not exactly. The
Jews consider themselves the unique exterritorial community, while other nations
are territorial. In the much-loved New Year prayer, the Jews praise Almighty for
“He didn’t make us as the Nations of the Lands, the Families of the Earth”
(???????????????? ??????????? ???????????????????).
In the Jewish view, the difference between [non-Jewish]
territorial nations is of slight importance in comparison with the existential
distinction between Jews and the nations of the lands. For this reason, Jews
aren’t ‘racists’ – they do not think one race is preferable to another.
Excepting Jews, for sure, who are a totally different story. As all Gentiles are
quite the same for Jews, preferences (aka racism) of a Gentile are silly and
meaningless, in the Jewish eyes.
Iroquois may consider themselves totally different from Huron
or Blackfoot, but for the Europeans, all of them are Red Indians. Likewise, for
Jews all Gentiles are quite the same.
Though this beautiful Jewish non-racism of being above races
is based on theological grounds, it has economic consequences. Jewish economics
is a miraculous magic of turning anybody’s blood and sweat into gold, and this
magic works fine with whites, blacks and Latinos. Jews were traditionally into
money, and the money of the black is of the same colour as the money of the
white. The black and the white pay the same rent for the apartment the Jew lets
them. The Mexican and the German pay the same commission to the Jewish bank.
Jews are exterritorial, in contra-distinction to the rest of
humanity, to the Nations of the Lands. Israel is a brave [British?] experiment
to ‘range Jews’ (in the words of Halford Mackinder), and indeed settled
territorial Jews of Israel behave like all settled nations: they understand the
difference between tribes and object to immigration. The US Jews still act as
exterritorial Jews: they approve of immigration as it enlarges the pool of
available customers. This is fine; such views are legitimate; Jews always
embrace them. What is not so fine, that they tend to delegitimise the regular
view of territorial nations.
If there is a lesson to Jews to be learned from Pittsburgh
shooting it is “you should act responsible”. The Jews took control over a
valuable public resource, that is the US mass media, and use it for their
advantage with childish abandon. This is irresponsible. They should allow other
views to be published and discussed without being marginalised and
delegitimised.
Whenever people complain about Jewish behaviour, the Jews
usually answer with the accusation of antisemitism, a mysterious and eternal
Gentile hatred of Jews. This is too easy. The second lesson is “be more critical
to yourself”. If your child comes home and complains about being bullied, you
should ask him in what way his behaviour contributed to it. Bullying is surely
bad, but the victim contribution should be discussed and taken care of.
Alas, in the modern paradigm it is not encouraged. There is a
veritable taboo on dealing with victim contribution, whether it is the sexual
misconduct or immigration argument. While unreservedly condemning the criminal
action, we should also help victim by discussing his or her contribution.
If you want to eliminate negative feelings towards Jews, you
should listen to complaints. If people complain about Jewish landlords or Jewish
bankers, there is a easy way for a Jew, that is to retort “It is an old
antisemitic canard” and a hard way: don’t be a landlord, don’t be a banker, eat
your bread by the sweat of your brow, behave towards your non-Jewish neighbour
in the same way you want him to relate to you. Take a position for regulation of
banks and landlords. Do not allow them to skin people, for they will blame
Jews.
Do not use your Jewishness as a spade to dig with. If you
want to help refugees, or promote free trade or gay marriages, do not say “I do
it because of my Jewish principles”, for it is silly. If you want President
Trump to be impeached or re-elected, do not call for it “as a Jew”, do it as an
American. Leave Jewishness for your Sabbath.
The victims weren’t connected with the immigration issue at
all. There is no possible justification for the murder. But the sick head of the
murderer accepted as positive truth silly claims of the immigration activists
that they act as Jews and for the Jewish cause. They should be more cautious and
more responsible before they claim acting for the whole body of American
Jews.
Be honest and avoid weasel words. If you support affirmative
action for blacks and Latinos, demand the Jews to be counted as a separate
group. At present, the affirmative action is fuelled at sole expense of the
white Gentiles, while the Jewish students still have their seats at the Ivy
League secured, as Ron Unz <http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-racial-discrimination-at-harvard/>proved.
If you support immigration of labourers, demand recognition
of their learning certificates. If you are a physician, demand immediate
acceptance and unlimited entry of foreign doctors. If you are a lawyer, ditto.
It is unfair that immigrants you invite and bless can’t compete with you.
If you don’t do it, show your understanding of people who had
suffered because of immigration and positive discrimination, instead of calling
them ‘racists’. This is called for by the Jewish law saying ??????????????, the
poor of your town should be attended before the poor of other towns. Usually
Jews think it refers only to poor Jews, but you may count it in a more general
way.
Some Pittsburgh mourners wrapped up in Israeli flags. This is
not appropriate. The Squirrel Hill Jews didn’t come under fire because of
Israel, though Israeli government ministers were pleased to use the occasion to
do their shtick and call for aliyah and for eternal hatred to Arabs and Muslims
(unless they are called Mohammed bin Salman, live in Riyadh and want to fight
Iranians). Israeli Jews have their own reckoning; their treatment of Gaza will
bring retribution on their heads yet. The US Jews will do wise if they would not
undersign this huge and growing debt.
Their own debt caused by irresponsible behaviour should be
taken care of. And that can be done by paying heed to complaints of their
fellow-citizens.
Israel Shamir can be reached at <mailto:adam@israelshamir.net>adam@israelshamir.net
This article was first published at <http://www.unz.com/ishamir/pittsburgh-advice-to-jews/>The
Unz Review.
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