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Thread ID: 20918 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-11-06
2005-11-06 14:35 | User Profile
History of elite schools' policies traces the path of U.S. society
By Charles Matthews
Mercury News
If you didn't go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, why should you bother with a book about people who did? Maybe because Jerome Karabel's hefty book is about power -- specifically, the power of universities to shape American society. And conversely, about the power of a mutating American society to shape universities. That give-and-take dynamic plays out in this unexpectedly fascinating book, which tells how meritocracy won the day.
Until the 1920s, the student bodies of the Big Three -- Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- were overwhelmingly made up of white Protestant male graduates of elite Eastern boarding schools. But as turn-of-the-century American cities were being flooded with Catholic and Jewish immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, Establishment types like Harvard's president A. Lawrence Lowell worried about, as Karabel puts it, ``a dire threat to American democracy and to the Anglo-Saxon character of the nation's culture.'' And sure enough, in the decade after World War I, the universities experienced a culture shock when they started getting applications from the smart and ambitious children of those immigrants.
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The irony is that the mechanisms set up in the 1920s to exclude Jews and wispy intellectuals were eventually turned against the brawny WASPs they were designed to favor. Non-academic qualifications played a key role in the affirmative action programs devised in the 1960s and after to increase racial and ethnic diversity -- and to forestall civil unrest.
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[url]http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/books/13035224.htm?source=rss&channel=mercurynews_books[/url]