Applicants were asked to supply a greater pool of personal information than ever before: letters of personal reference, photographs, and personal essays listing extracurricular activities as well as answers to questions about “race and color,” “religious preference,” “maiden name of mother,” “birthplace of father” and any name changes that might have occurred to the applicant since birth. The private lives of students became crucial to the admissions process in an effort to keep out Jewish applicants through genealogy, family history, and other personal information…
From this article about the long changing road of affirmative action…
At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was “very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view” and 4 was “undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be.” The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.
and from the Malcolm Gladwell piece she’s quoting.
HAHAHAHA! There sure are no parallels here for any modern group of people widely limited in admissions and then told that the reason they’re being kept out is affirmative action (those darn black and brown people!) and not, say, an equally pervasive but different in action form of limitation on them in favor of the current definition of white people. Thank God we live in a world where no ethnic group of disproportionately merited students are kept out of positions of power through a system of constantly shifting standards. It would just be fucking awful if—to take a random, arbitrarily chosen example—students of East Asian heritage were told that they couldn’t go to Ivy Leagues because the Ivies used a holistic acceptance process that studied the whole student, but students of African and Latin American heritage were told that they couldn’t go to Ivies because the cold fact of their numbers meant that they were just not as talented as white students and the schools had to keep up standards. I would hate to live in that kind of country! It would make me really upset.
#do you get it #it’s funny because the oppression used to limit my grandfathers is now being used to limit others #it’s funny because the supreme court is gonna rule with fisher #and people will look you in the eye on tv #and tell you that this is a victory against racism #and i will THROW UP ON THEM
(via pseudo-tsuga)
