Legacy preferences in admission were originally conceived as a way to limit the number of Jewish students at highly-selective, elite institutions. But today, according to The Herald’s fall 2024 poll, 39% of legacy students at Brown are Jewish despite making up 14% of the student body.
As many first-generation Jewish Americans sought higher education in the early 20th century, Jewish enrollment at elite universities increased significantly, according to Mark Oppenheimer, whose podcast “Gatecrashers” details the history of antisemitism in the Ivy League. At that time, most colleges “strove” to limit the number of Jewish students admitted, he told The Herald.
Universities did this in a few ways: evaluating geographic diversity, implementing legacy preferences, instituting standardized testing, requiring in-person interviews and introducing long-form applications with questions about an applicant’s family.
For many years, Brown did not limit its admissions — if you met the qualifications, you were accepted, according to Amy Sohn ’95, who wrote her public policy undergraduate honors thesis on the history of discrimination in Brown’s admissions.
In the 1910s, though, “Brown had to have a reckoning about what their purpose was,” she added.
At this point, the Ivy League focused less on research and academics and more on being a social club where students could make professional connections, Sohn said. Admissions offices were concerned about Jewish applicants’ abilities to make significant social and professional contributions that would benefit the school.
“The deans of these schools became very concerned that if the Jewish student body got too large, that the historically connected families — the Protestant families — would not want to come because they wouldn’t want to attend a school that was seen as too Jewish,” Oppenheimer said.
At Brown, administrators weighed whether University policies should resemble the United States’ Immigration Act of 1924, which greatly restricted immigration from European countries.
In a 1926 report, Brown University President William Herbert Perry Faunce echoed the national sentiment, writing that the US “itself only recently discovered that it could no longer pursue the policy of the open door; that without some limitation of immigration the ideals of America might be submerged, its standards of living depressed and its priceless heritage lost.”
A year later, Faunce wrote that Brown would not reject applicants based on religious affiliation, “but the American college is solemnly bound by legal and moral obligation to preserve its own identity,” adding the University could only receive “so many students of alien tradition as it can properly assimilate and guide.”
This was succeeded by a wave of antisemitic admission policies.
As a result, Brown and Pembroke started interviewing applicants with instructions for evaluating students and focusing on things such as “personal appearance, family background, mental equipment, traits, financial, activities, interests (and) goal,” according to Sohn’s research.
Sohn also documented comments written in application files between the late ’20s and early ’40s that show a concerted effort to identify Jewish or nonwhite applicants:
“Father has wavy hair, few front teeth and a marked accent. Says they speak German at home. Germans or Jews? Are blonde, so probably the former.”
“Not especially Jewish features.”
“Tall, dark, rather attractive recognizable Jewish features.”
“Small, refined features. Color just off-white. 32 years old. Mother, white — deceased. Father Black. Sister married a white man.”
“Not especially Jewish features.”
The University also started giving preferential treatment to applicants whose fathers had gone to Brown. “The boys whose dads graduated in 1890 were almost exclusively Protestant. So saying ‘we’re going to favor legacies’ is a way of saying ‘we’re going to favor non-Jews,’” Oppenheimer said.
Universities also started enforcing policies of geographic diversity which “disproportionately discriminated against Jews because Jews were much more likely to come from a very small number of large cities,” Sohn told The Herald.
Sohn also pointed to the implementation of the SAT as another way Jewish applicants were discriminated against in the admissions process.
In 1938, Brown’s dean of admissions wrote in a memo that at Penn, even if a Jewish student had the test scores to be accepted, Penn could still reject them and claim it was because their scores were too low. At this time, applicants could not view their test scores. In the memo, the admissions dean referred to the rise in Jewish applicants as the “X problem:”
The Director of Admissions at Pennsylvania a few years ago told me that it was the X problem which led Penn to require the S.A.T. Since the test results do not go to the boys themselves, the admission officers are better able to reject those applicants who should be refused. Students in one school are less able to compare the applicants and question why Jones was admitted and Smith refused. The X problem is unfortunately becoming more and more acute.
The dean went on to propose that Brown introduce the SAT into its admissions process so that Brown, like Penn, could reject qualified Jewish applicants while claiming that it was simply because their scores weren’t high enough. It is unclear whether the requirement of test scores at Brown was instated due to his suggestion.
According to Sohn, 38% of Brown’s class of 1928 was Jewish. The class of 1944, though, was 9% Jewish. In the ’30s and ’40s, the rate of admitted Protestant students remained consistently twice that of Jewish students.
Following the end of WWII and the passage of the GI Bill, public scrutiny on university admission practices intensified. Slowly, references to the Jewish identity of applicants started to disappear from University archives as the share of Jewish students on campus increased.
But, according to Sohn, the same practices that were used to discriminate against first-generation American Jews were used against Asian American applicants in the 1980s.
Richard Kahlenberg, the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, believes that in order for the University to overcome its controversial history, “Brown should give a meaningful leg up in admissions to economically disadvantaged students who have overcome odds.”
Brown practices need-blind admissions, a policy that states “applicants’ ability to pay for their education will not be a determining factor in the admission decision.”
Today, legacy admissions are again in the spotlight, as Brown reconsiders the practice and student activists plan to reintroduce a bill in the Rhode Island State House that would ban the preference statewide.
Though President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 announced over eight months ago that the University would seek community input on legacy admissions, it has only done so via the alumni magazine. The University has yet to publicize when — or if — it will solicit student input. According to The Herald’s Fall Poll, a majority of students oppose the practice.
“Non-legacies, a disproportionate share of whom are low income, working class and nonwhite, are negatively affected by Brown’s discrimination based on who one’s ancestors are,” Kahlenberg said.
Though Brown maintains that legacy students are equally qualified to be admitted to Brown as non-legacy students, he added “legacy admissions is affirmative action for the wealthy.”
Talia LeVine is a senior staff writer covering admissions and financial aid. They study Political Science and Visual Art with a focus on photography. In their free time, they can be found drinking copious amounts of coffee.
