Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

90 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:89
From the time Hitler assumed power in Germany on January 30, 1933,
Columbia students were much more engaged in the struggle against Nazism
than were those at other elite schools. This was largely because Columbia,
as a result of its New York City location, attracted more students of Jewish
and working- and lower middle-class backgrounds than did other elite colleges.
Jewish students and those from union families expressed the most
concern about Hitler’s Germany because of the Nazis’ severe persecution of
Jews—widely reported in the American press—and their destruction of the
labor movement.
To be sure, President Butler had spearheaded the movement to restrict
Jewish admissions in American higher education during and immediately
after World War I. Butler sharply decreased Jewish enrollment from 40 to
20 percent by reducing the importance of scholastic achievement in admissions.
Columbia heavily emphasized interviews by the Columbia College
dean and assistant deans, none of whom was Jewish, and required applicants
to identify their religion and parents’ birthplace. Preference was given
to students from elite private boarding schools that excluded Jews. During
the period that Herbert Hawkes was dean of the college (1918-1943), its
“anti-Semitic admissions policies acquired a harder edge.” 1
Even so, New York society preferred to send its sons to the more
socially prestigious “Big Three”—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. As early
as 1914, Columbia College dean Frederick Keppel had stated: “One of the
commonest references that one hears with regard to Columbia is that its
position at the gateway of European immigration makes it socially uninviting
to students who come from homes of refinement.” 2 As a pro-labor Irish-
American working his way through Columbia, Burke felt much closer to
the Jewish minority on campus than to the affluent Protestants from preparatory
schools who dominated the college’s social life.
1. E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in
America (New York: Vintage, 1966 [1964]), 211; Robert A. McCaughey, Stand,
Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 267-269.
In 1914, President Butler told Dean Keppel: “I suggest treating the candidate
for graduation as one treats a candidate for admission to a club.” In 1934, Columbia
College’s new admissions director, Frank Bowles, informed Butler that he had
admitted over half of the non-Jewish and only one-sixth of the Jewish applicants.
Butler told Bowles to “keep up the good work.” McCaughey, Stand, Columbia,
266, 272-273.
2. McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, 257; Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New
York: Random House, 1967), 46; Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History
of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2005), 87, 577.