From this Jewish conservative perspective, I am wholeheartedly opposed to any affirmative action and to any racial/ethnic/religious quotas in college admissions and favor a strict merit system. In schools which regrettably still employ college admissions affirmative action and/or racial/ethnic/religious quota practices, Jewish applicants are considered to be part of the "white people" group by the bean counters. If there is discrimination against Jewish applicants, it's precisely because all white applicants are discriminated against to make way for desired percentages (quotas) of African American and Hispanic students. Asian heritage students often have a fixed percentage set for them as well, but they are often discriminated against because they would outnumber their quota if a strict merit standard were used.
I don't care for Jewish leftists any more than other leftists, but I'm not exactly sure of who you refer to when you talk about "his ethnic/religious compatriots who have led the fight to have 'white people' limited to no more than their percentage of the population (actually much less) at elite colleges, while allowing, indeed encouraging, Jews to exceed their percentage by 10x or 15x." I'm unaware of even leftist Jews who advocate those policies. If anything, the Jewish left would have Jewish applicants sacrifice places in college admissions to get more (less qualified) black and Hispanic applicants admitted - a position which I staunchly oppose.
All the leftists see are groups.
And to them, all us Jews are "Jewish American Princesses" who have been spoiled rotten from working so hard and need to be knocked down a peg.
It's their Modus Operandi
Back in the day, Columbia University had a 1% (1.5%?) quota against Jews, so this institutional discrimination pre-dates affirmative action. Affirmative action merely picks up where the old time discrimination left off, and Jews are still discriminated against as a subset of white people, no doubt now viewed as a particularly pernicious subset, since we’re all supposedly either oppressing the piece-loving palis, or at least buying Israeli Bonds and Sabra and Tribe Humus, so as to enable that oppression.
Fine with me. I turned my back on a university education decades ago, and instead opted to learn something. Those who are excluded from the university system are actually lucky. They won’t have to unlearn all the leftist drivel that they’d otherwise be pumped with.
Jewish applicants are considered to be part of the "white people" group by the bean counters.
Quite right. When was that decision made, and by whom? Who decided that all the many ethnic groups from Europee were henceforth to constitute a single agglomeration to be called "white?"
I assume you are aware that 100 years ago Jews weren't considered "white" by most Americans, and quite often neither were Italians, Greeks, etc.
If there is discrimination against Jewish applicants, it's precisely because all white applicants are discriminated against to make way for desired percentages (quotas) of African American and Hispanic students.
Well, no. There is still a large "white" quota, something like 60%. Within that large quota the slots are still distributed by merit. So Jews of merit still get in at the same proportion as if only merit were considered. At elite colleges this is in the 15% to 30% range or higher, iow 7x to 15x their proportion of the population. (Or considerably higher, depending on how you determine who is a Jew.)
I assume you will agree that Jews have been highly prominent in actively pushing for affirmative action programs that prevent large numbers of otherwise qualified whites from attending these colleges. Yet, since within the white category slots are distributed by merit, very few Jews are disqualified who would otherwise have qualified to attend.
Which can easily be seen by the wildly disprortionate number attending. Few would claim that instead of 15% to 30% Jews at Harvard, without affirmative action we'd instead have 50% or 75%.
My complain is not with successful Jews, and certainly not with the young man who wrote this essay, or with you.
It's with the very large group of "progressive" American Jews who enthusiastically promote policies that disadvantage large numbers of white people, most of them less privileged than those promoting the programs.
I would be entirely happy, as would you, with admission based entirely on merit. It is probably roughly the same number of Jews would get in on that system as do now.
I would be much less happy, though I would be able to see something resembling fairness, in admissions intended to "mirror America," with admissions distributed to provide equal representation for all groups.
Here's a quote from an article about what "diversity" means in practice in America.
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice "diversity" on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the "underrepresented" racial minority groups.
- See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html#sthash.ns6FcQRM.dpuf
What I object to is a policy that pretends to provide opportunity for all groups evenly, while in practice being a savage restriction of opportunity for one group (in reality an artificially-assembled conglomeration of groups, just as "Hispanic" is an artificially-assembled conglomeration of groups), gentile white Americans.
May I suggest you haven't looked very hard?
Here's a NYT article asking whether Princeton is anti-Semitic because (in 1999) its Jewish enrollment had dropped to about 10%, still at least 5x their percentage of the population.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/02/nyregion/princeton-puzzle-where-have-jewish-students-gone.html
This is as compared with the other Ivies, which are commended in the article for maintaining 1/4, 1/3 or higher numbers. (My understanding is that Princeton has since addressed this "problem.")
My question is this. Assuming people who think this way aren't idiots, aren't they aware that bringing "under-represented minorities" up to their appropriate representation, while at the same time recruiting 1/4 or 1/3 Jews is exactly the same thing as imposing a 25% cap on white gentile enrollment? Which is, of course, exactly what was done to Jews in the early 20th, except of course being far more savage.
During the quota period at Harvard, for example, Jewish enrollment never dropped below 15%, still far above their percentage of the population at the time. The effective quotas at Harvard today cap white gentiles at probably considerably less than half their percentage of the population. And nobody cares.