HEd History – A Jewish Student in the 1950s

1987 New Yorker piece by Philip Roth, who was a famous author at that time, about college life in the 1950s. I was particularly interested in his description of how Jewish students were treated post WWII at many colleges in the US.

“I knew from my uncle that despite the presence of Einstein, to whose house we’d made a pilgrimage, Princeton didn’t “take Jews.”(That’s why we’d rooted so hard for Rutgers.) As for Harvard and Yale, not only did they seem, like Princeton, to be bastions of the gentile upper crust, socially too exclusive and unsympathetic, but their admissions officers were revealed by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to employ “Jewish quotas,” a practice that disgusted a patriotic young American (let alone a member of an ineluctably Jewish family) like me. A champion of the Four Freedoms, a foe of the DAR, a supporter of Henry Wallace, I detested the idea of privilege that these elitist colleges, with their discriminatory policies, seemed to symbolize. What’s more, if I couldn’t win a scholarship to Rutgers, how could I expect assistance from the Ivy League?

“AN ATTRACTIVE WHITE CHRISTIAN MALE ENTERING Bucknell in the early fifties could expect to be officially courted by about half the thirteen fraternities. A promising athlete, the graduate of a prestigious prep school, the son of rich parents or of a distinguished alumnus, might wind up with bids from as many as ten fraternities. A Jewish freshman—or Jewish transfer student, like me—could expect to be rushed by two fraternities at most, the exclusively Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, which, like the Christian fraternities, was the local chapter of a national body, and Phi Lambda Theta, a local fraternity without national affiliations, which did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or color. A Jewish student who wished to take part in fraternity life but was acceptable to neither was in trouble. If he couldn’t bear being an “independent”—taking meals in the university dining hall, living in the dormitories or in a room in town, making friends and dating outside the reigning social constellation—he’d have to pack up and go home. There were a few reported cases of Jewish students who had.

I don’t  believe I ever found myself out of place just because I was a Jew, though I was not unaware, especially when I was still fresh from home, that I was a Jew at a university where the bylaws stipulated that more than half the Board of Trustees had to be members of the Baptist Church, where chapel attendance was required of lowerclassmen, and where the one extracurricular organization for which most Bucknellians seemed to have membership cards was the Christian Association.”