In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

In a Washington Monthly essay, The College Board Capitulates to Trump , Richard D. Kahlenberg ignores what to my mind are the two most convincing discussions of selective college admissions programs since their start a century ago, Alan Dershowitz's 1991 Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's 2005 The Chosen . Both argue that as Jews became more numerous, prosperous, and influential in the US after the late 19th century, this created a problem for the Ivy League, which had been a bastion of upper-crust WASP society since before the Revolution. More and more Jews had the money and cultivation to send their sons to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with the result that their student bodies were becoming noticeably Jewish. Selective admissions programs simply began as way to limit this trend. An obvious way to do this would have been to require photos with applications and reject applicants with aquiline features, or simply to cull those with identifiably Jewish surnames, but that would be...