// features //
Fall 2016
Columbia for Jews?
The Untold Story of Seth Low Junior College
Leeza Hirt
On April 10th, 1935, fifteen-year-old Isaac Asimov ventured into Manhattan on his own for the very first time. He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge that day for an occasion so significant that he would remember that date for the rest of his life: his interview at Columbia College.
Unfortunately for Asimov, the interview did not go as well as he had hoped; he was rejected from Columbia College on the spot. The interviewer told him that Columbia College had a strictly enforced minimum age of entry at sixteen, and that he should instead apply to Seth Low Junior College, the short-lived extension of Columbia University in Brooklyn.
Asimov had never heard of this school before, and for the rest of his life had “never heard of anyone who has ever heard of it—unless he, too, had been a student there.”
At first, he was satisfied with the interviewer’s excuse, as it was consistent with the information he read in the Columbia College pamphlet. Asimov later came to the conclusion that he was relegated to Seth Low Junior College for one main reason: he was Jewish.
Asimov wrote on his experience: “Afterward, I checked the requirements for Seth Low Junior College and it set sixteen as an entrance requirement there as well, so I saw the excuse for what it was—a well-meant lie.”
“The interviewer didn’t say something that I eventually found to be the case, which was that the Seth Low student body was heavily Jewish, with a strong Italian minority. It was clear that the purpose of the school was to give bright youngsters of unacceptable social characteristics a Columbia education without too badly contaminating the elite young men of the College itself by their formal presence.“
Asimov’s suspicion that Seth Low Junior College was really Columbia’s way of keeping “undesirable” Jewish students off of the Morningside campus was problematic, to say the least. To explore the veracity of his concerns requires a deeper understanding of the history of Seth Low Junior College, and of Jews at Columbia more generally.
Seth Low Junior College: An Aborted Experiment
Few Columbia students know that from 1928 through 1936 the university operated a two-year junior college in Brooklyn. Named for former president of Columbia University and mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low, the junior college operated out of a few rented floors in Brooklyn Law School as the second undergraduate college of Columbia University.
The official University statement published in Spectator stated that the school was established “with the purpose that the University might more adequately serve the educational needs of the community.” Spectator reported that the new college was a natural outgrowth of the University Extension program, which had been offering night courses to pre-professional students in Brooklyn since 1925.
Seth Low had the same requirements for entry as Columbia College, as well as the same price of tuition: $380 annually. However, the education was of a decidedly lesser quality; it was only a two-year program, and was not a degree-granting institution. Upon completion of the program, students could go on to enroll in professional schools that only required two years of college or they could matriculate into the Morningside campus as “University Undergraduates” but not as Columbia College students. They would receive Bachelors of Science degrees instead of Bachelors of Arts degrees, which were considered less prestigious, and the students would not be allowed to live on campus. This was the status that Asimov assumed when he entered the Morningside campus, and he found it to be “humiliating.”
Because of the demographic makeup of the Seth Low Junior College student body—it was predominantly Jewish--and the restrictions placed upon them once they transferred to the Morningside campus, some observers, including Asimov, took its real purpose to be keeping Jews away from Columbia.
Throughout the eight years of the junior college’s existence, Asimov’s theory of discrimination was never explicitly confirmed by official Columbia literature. For example, the Columbia Catalogue, the university-wide annual report, in its yearly update on Seth Low Junior College, always wrote that the college was established “with the purpose that the University might more adequately serve the educational needs of the community.” The Seth Low Junior College promotional pamphlet also never mentioned that it was meant to keep academically qualified but culturally and socially lacking applicants from Brooklyn high schools out of Columbia College. This is not surprising: institutions generally do not publicize their discrimination tactics, they just enforce them.
When viewed within the context of the sordid history of Jews at Columbia, however, the evidence suggests that there may have been truth to the suspicions of Asimov and his peers.
The Jews and the “Problem of the Vanishing Knickerbocker”
Columbia has historically had the reputation of being the most Jewish school in the Ivy League.
One popular frat song had lyrics as follows:
“Oh Harvard’s run by millionaires
And Yale is run by Booze
Cornell is run by Farmer’s sons,
Columbia’s run by Jews.”
This reputation was not completely unwarranted. At the turn of the 20th century, Jews comprised 15% of entering Columbia College classes. In 1917, when general enrollment dropped because of World War I, the proportion of Jewish students topped 25%. Even during the 1920s, when Columbia actively practiced discriminatory admissions, Jews regularly constituted over 20% of the university’s student body. In relation to the general population of the United States--of which only 3% was Jewish at the turn of the century--it seems that Jews were disproportionately overrepresented at Columbia. But when you consider that Jews comprised over 25% of the population of New York City and over one third of the city’s high school graduates at the time, these numbers begin to make a lot more sense. At this point in its history, Columbia was largely a regional school: most of its students came from the New York metropolitan area. Therefore, it was reasonable for its population to somewhat reflect that of New York City.
Nonetheless, the Columbia administration was not thrilled with this reputation. In his 2003 book, Stand Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, Barnard history professor Robert McCaughey suggests that the university administration was worried that this influx of Jews would intensify the already-occurring exodus of the college’s target clientele: the sons of wealthy New York patricians, also known as “Knickerbockers.” For years, Columbia had been dealing with what the administration called the “Problem of the Vanishing Knickerbocker”; the sons of esteemed Columbia alumni were choosing to attend other colleges instead of the alma mater of their fathers.
Once Columbia began to be abandoned by its target applicants, its student body became markedly more Jewish. As the number of applicants from New York prep schools and country boarding schools declined, the number of applicants from Jewish graduates of New York public schools increased. The administration wanted to maintain Columbia’s original demographic makeup in spite of this new reality. They worried that an influx of “uncultured” Jewish students would only further repel “Knickerbockers” from Columbia.
Internal Columbia memos from this time reveal this anxiety felt by the administration. In 1909, Dean of Columbia College Frederick Keppel wrote to University President Nicholas Murray Butler that “the particular trouble at this time is that a number of ill-prepared and uncultured Jews are trying to obtain a cheap College degree by transferring, usually in February, from the City College, which they entered after only a three year High School course.”
An admissions update in 1914 read: “Most of these [Jewish students] are excellent and desirable students, but the danger of their prepondering over the students of the older American stocks is not an imaginary one. This has already happened at NYU and CCNY.”
Columbia did not want to become like the other predominantly Jewish colleges in New York City; instead, it desperately clung to a romanticized vision of its past. Several reforms to admission were passed, making Columbia less hospitable to Jews and to New York City public school students in general. The incoming class size was capped at 400, and the University changed the terms of scholarships that were originally intended specifically for Brooklyn students (most of whom were Jewish) to make them available to non-Brooklyn residents (i.e. non-Jews).
Keppel went public with his reflections on Columbia’s Jewish Problem in his 1914 book, Columbia. He asked preemptively, “Isn’t Columbia overrun by European Jews who are most unpleasant persons socially?” He answered that this is not the case, and that there were fewer “unpleasant” Jews in Columbia than there were previously and also fewer than the public imagined. He continued: “By far a majority of Jewish students who come to Columbia are desirable students in every way. What most people regard as a racial problem is really a social problem. The Jews who have had the advantages of decent social surroundings for a generation or two are entirely satisfactory companions. Their intellectual ability, and particularly their intellectual curiosity, are above the average.”
In an effort to attract Columbia’s target demographic, Keppel recast the “Jewish problem” as a social problem that can be fixed by acculturation, while also reassuring them that the Jewish students did not constitute too much of the student body.
During the 1920s, another reform was added to the admissions process as a way of evaluating the applicant’s personal and social suitability for Columbia: the personal interview. Even if an applicant had all of the proper academic qualifications, he could be rejected based upon the prejudices of his interviewer. Social unfitness––a characteristic oft-attributed to Jews––became a legitimate excuse to reject candidates for admission. At the same time, the College made a concerted effort to win back the loyalty of the prep school crowd by sending admissions representatives to their schools to recruit them. Although this is common practice today, such recruitment tactics were nonexistent in the 1920s.
In an effort to keep a “Knickerbocker majority” on the Morningside campus, the administration tried to limit the number of Jewish students at the College by finding another place for them to go. Since most of these students were coming from Brooklyn, and Brooklyn College did not yet exist, the natural choice was to establish a branch of Columbia in Brooklyn.
When Brooklyn College eventually opened its doors in the 1930s, many of the students who would have attended Seth Low went there instead, due to the free tuition. This decreasing interest in Seth Low, combined with the economic struggles of the university during the Great Depression, contributed to the board’s decision to close Seth Low Junior College in 1936.
Low Spirits at Seth Low?
Despite its nonexistent residential culture and lack of a proper campus, Seth Low was home to a myriad of clubs and organizations, including sports teams, a debate team, a student orchestra, a student newspaper called The Scop, a literary magazine called The Talisman, a yearbook, a pre-medical association, and a Jewish Culture Society. There were even talks of introducing Greek life to the young school, though these plans never came to fruition.
Though the student life appears to be vibrant in hindsight, one of the most common criticisms of Seth Low at the time was the lack of camaraderie and school spirit among the student body.
In one 1932 editorial, the editors of The Scop blamed this “toxic” culture on the “preponderant majority” of “the Jewish type of student” at Seth Low. They go on to write that the quotas in place at many universities (including Columbia College) that limited the number of Jewish students are perfectly reasonable, as Jews display “sneering, hypercritical, protesting, and disloyal characteristics”, and “only a small limited number of Jews can be assimilated each year. They [the universities] often cite incidents, from past experiences, of disloyalty, redundant individualism, and undeserved disparagement which they claim have been characteristically displayed by large bodies of Jewish students.”
The article concludes that the “ostensible disloyalty and lack of delicacy on the part of the Seth Low student has frequently been attributed by the students, faculty and officials of the various leading colleges, as well as by the general public itself, to the large number of Jews in Seth Low.” According to the editors of The Scop, the culture at Seth Low was proof that the other universities were right in discriminating against Jews.
Shockingly, The Scop editorial board was almost entirely Jewish. The fact that a predominantly Jewish group of students wrote such a virulently anti-Semitic editorial proves how deeply ingrained these impressions of Jews were within society at the time, or at least within the academic elite. The Scop editorial board internalized the unfavorable rhetoric about Jews that surrounded them, and believed it was smart for Columbia College to limit its number of Jewish students, for if it didn’t do that, it would end up as miserable as Seth Low.
Given its controversial content and the constitution of the student body to which it was directed, this editorial caused somewhat of a storm.
The following week, a student, Alexander Gralnick, responded in his column in The Scop, pointing out “that it is a reflection of a complex that is naturally, and unfortunately, peculiar to many of his [the authors’] Semitic extraction, for many obvious reasons.” He writes that the reason for Jewish quotas at universities like Columbia was not because of Jews’ specific character traits--as it is impossible to generalize in such a way--but because of racial prejudice.
He continues to defend Seth Low, arguing that the lack of spirit wasn’t due to the Jews, but to several other crucial factors. First of all, Seth Low was a young school that lacked tradition and proper facilities to facilitate a vibrant student culture. Secondly, the word “junior” in the title connotes anything but a full-fledged college: it is patronizing and infantilizing. Finally, it was not even a degree-granting institution! How were students supposed to feel loyal to the school when they would not even become proper alumni?
Nevertheless, he ends on an optimistic note, writing that these are all surmountable challenges, and that if the students cooperate with one another, they can lead Seth Low to “prominence and expansion, which in turn must lead to buildings and campus of our own in the near future, with the consequent removal of ‘Junior’ from our title and recognition as a full-fledged liberal arts and science college, granting its own degree.”
Clearly, the students of Seth Low were conscious of its Jewish reputation, and different individuals chose to engage with it in varying ways. Far from the only episode of its kind, discussion of the treatment and perception of Seth Low Junior College due to heavily Jewish population is a recurring undertone of many Scop articles. However, the backlash against this specific editorial shows that there were people who took it upon themselves to expose the bigotry of this rhetoric.
80 Years Later: Should We Care?
The days of Jew quotas and satellite campuses in Brooklyn are long gone; today, the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life is a Columbia building, supported and protected by the University. In stark contrast to the discriminatory practices of its past, multiculturalism is now a major priority of the University. The Admissions Committee works tirelessly to ensure that each incoming class is as diverse as possible, with an entire professional and student volunteer team devoted to the recruitment of students from minority backgrounds and underrepresented communities. In the class of 2020, 60% of students self-identify as non-white, and 16% of students are first generation college students. These demographics would cause Nicholas Murray Butler to roll over in his grave.
And yet, recent events have shown that the attitude that compelled the Columbia administration to keep Jews away from the Morningside campus is incredibly prevalent within American society today. With his promise to “make America great again,” President-elect Trump compelled voters to hark back to a time that in their minds represents a paradise lost. On election day, millions of Americans voted to turn back the clock; to recreate the America of their imagined past, free of people who do not look or pray like they do.
This sort of nostalgia is dangerous; leading to bigotry, discrimination, and persecution.
Despite the retrogressive sentiment rampant in our country, Columbia must continue the progress it has made since 1936. This university’s history of racial and religious discrimination obligates it to be an oasis of ethnic and cultural diversity today. Instead of whitewashing the dark spots of its history, Columbia must compensate for them in the only way it can: by existing as an alternative to the terrifyingly intolerant culture that is emerging before our very eyes.
Note from the Author:
I owe a huge thank you to my friend Ethan Herenstein, CC ‘16 and former Managing Editor of The Current, for introducing me to the story of Seth Low Junior College last spring and for helping me with the preliminary steps of my research. I am also deeply indebted to Jocelyn Wilk from the Columbia University Archives, without whom I would not have been able to write this article. The archives are so expansive that I would not have known where to begin my research––let alone been able to find anything––without her expert guidance.
Unfortunately for Asimov, the interview did not go as well as he had hoped; he was rejected from Columbia College on the spot. The interviewer told him that Columbia College had a strictly enforced minimum age of entry at sixteen, and that he should instead apply to Seth Low Junior College, the short-lived extension of Columbia University in Brooklyn.
Asimov had never heard of this school before, and for the rest of his life had “never heard of anyone who has ever heard of it—unless he, too, had been a student there.”
At first, he was satisfied with the interviewer’s excuse, as it was consistent with the information he read in the Columbia College pamphlet. Asimov later came to the conclusion that he was relegated to Seth Low Junior College for one main reason: he was Jewish.
Asimov wrote on his experience: “Afterward, I checked the requirements for Seth Low Junior College and it set sixteen as an entrance requirement there as well, so I saw the excuse for what it was—a well-meant lie.”
“The interviewer didn’t say something that I eventually found to be the case, which was that the Seth Low student body was heavily Jewish, with a strong Italian minority. It was clear that the purpose of the school was to give bright youngsters of unacceptable social characteristics a Columbia education without too badly contaminating the elite young men of the College itself by their formal presence.“
Asimov’s suspicion that Seth Low Junior College was really Columbia’s way of keeping “undesirable” Jewish students off of the Morningside campus was problematic, to say the least. To explore the veracity of his concerns requires a deeper understanding of the history of Seth Low Junior College, and of Jews at Columbia more generally.
Seth Low Junior College: An Aborted Experiment
Few Columbia students know that from 1928 through 1936 the university operated a two-year junior college in Brooklyn. Named for former president of Columbia University and mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low, the junior college operated out of a few rented floors in Brooklyn Law School as the second undergraduate college of Columbia University.
The official University statement published in Spectator stated that the school was established “with the purpose that the University might more adequately serve the educational needs of the community.” Spectator reported that the new college was a natural outgrowth of the University Extension program, which had been offering night courses to pre-professional students in Brooklyn since 1925.
Seth Low had the same requirements for entry as Columbia College, as well as the same price of tuition: $380 annually. However, the education was of a decidedly lesser quality; it was only a two-year program, and was not a degree-granting institution. Upon completion of the program, students could go on to enroll in professional schools that only required two years of college or they could matriculate into the Morningside campus as “University Undergraduates” but not as Columbia College students. They would receive Bachelors of Science degrees instead of Bachelors of Arts degrees, which were considered less prestigious, and the students would not be allowed to live on campus. This was the status that Asimov assumed when he entered the Morningside campus, and he found it to be “humiliating.”
Because of the demographic makeup of the Seth Low Junior College student body—it was predominantly Jewish--and the restrictions placed upon them once they transferred to the Morningside campus, some observers, including Asimov, took its real purpose to be keeping Jews away from Columbia.
Throughout the eight years of the junior college’s existence, Asimov’s theory of discrimination was never explicitly confirmed by official Columbia literature. For example, the Columbia Catalogue, the university-wide annual report, in its yearly update on Seth Low Junior College, always wrote that the college was established “with the purpose that the University might more adequately serve the educational needs of the community.” The Seth Low Junior College promotional pamphlet also never mentioned that it was meant to keep academically qualified but culturally and socially lacking applicants from Brooklyn high schools out of Columbia College. This is not surprising: institutions generally do not publicize their discrimination tactics, they just enforce them.
When viewed within the context of the sordid history of Jews at Columbia, however, the evidence suggests that there may have been truth to the suspicions of Asimov and his peers.
The Jews and the “Problem of the Vanishing Knickerbocker”
Columbia has historically had the reputation of being the most Jewish school in the Ivy League.
One popular frat song had lyrics as follows:
“Oh Harvard’s run by millionaires
And Yale is run by Booze
Cornell is run by Farmer’s sons,
Columbia’s run by Jews.”
This reputation was not completely unwarranted. At the turn of the 20th century, Jews comprised 15% of entering Columbia College classes. In 1917, when general enrollment dropped because of World War I, the proportion of Jewish students topped 25%. Even during the 1920s, when Columbia actively practiced discriminatory admissions, Jews regularly constituted over 20% of the university’s student body. In relation to the general population of the United States--of which only 3% was Jewish at the turn of the century--it seems that Jews were disproportionately overrepresented at Columbia. But when you consider that Jews comprised over 25% of the population of New York City and over one third of the city’s high school graduates at the time, these numbers begin to make a lot more sense. At this point in its history, Columbia was largely a regional school: most of its students came from the New York metropolitan area. Therefore, it was reasonable for its population to somewhat reflect that of New York City.
Nonetheless, the Columbia administration was not thrilled with this reputation. In his 2003 book, Stand Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, Barnard history professor Robert McCaughey suggests that the university administration was worried that this influx of Jews would intensify the already-occurring exodus of the college’s target clientele: the sons of wealthy New York patricians, also known as “Knickerbockers.” For years, Columbia had been dealing with what the administration called the “Problem of the Vanishing Knickerbocker”; the sons of esteemed Columbia alumni were choosing to attend other colleges instead of the alma mater of their fathers.
Once Columbia began to be abandoned by its target applicants, its student body became markedly more Jewish. As the number of applicants from New York prep schools and country boarding schools declined, the number of applicants from Jewish graduates of New York public schools increased. The administration wanted to maintain Columbia’s original demographic makeup in spite of this new reality. They worried that an influx of “uncultured” Jewish students would only further repel “Knickerbockers” from Columbia.
Internal Columbia memos from this time reveal this anxiety felt by the administration. In 1909, Dean of Columbia College Frederick Keppel wrote to University President Nicholas Murray Butler that “the particular trouble at this time is that a number of ill-prepared and uncultured Jews are trying to obtain a cheap College degree by transferring, usually in February, from the City College, which they entered after only a three year High School course.”
An admissions update in 1914 read: “Most of these [Jewish students] are excellent and desirable students, but the danger of their prepondering over the students of the older American stocks is not an imaginary one. This has already happened at NYU and CCNY.”
Columbia did not want to become like the other predominantly Jewish colleges in New York City; instead, it desperately clung to a romanticized vision of its past. Several reforms to admission were passed, making Columbia less hospitable to Jews and to New York City public school students in general. The incoming class size was capped at 400, and the University changed the terms of scholarships that were originally intended specifically for Brooklyn students (most of whom were Jewish) to make them available to non-Brooklyn residents (i.e. non-Jews).
Keppel went public with his reflections on Columbia’s Jewish Problem in his 1914 book, Columbia. He asked preemptively, “Isn’t Columbia overrun by European Jews who are most unpleasant persons socially?” He answered that this is not the case, and that there were fewer “unpleasant” Jews in Columbia than there were previously and also fewer than the public imagined. He continued: “By far a majority of Jewish students who come to Columbia are desirable students in every way. What most people regard as a racial problem is really a social problem. The Jews who have had the advantages of decent social surroundings for a generation or two are entirely satisfactory companions. Their intellectual ability, and particularly their intellectual curiosity, are above the average.”
In an effort to attract Columbia’s target demographic, Keppel recast the “Jewish problem” as a social problem that can be fixed by acculturation, while also reassuring them that the Jewish students did not constitute too much of the student body.
During the 1920s, another reform was added to the admissions process as a way of evaluating the applicant’s personal and social suitability for Columbia: the personal interview. Even if an applicant had all of the proper academic qualifications, he could be rejected based upon the prejudices of his interviewer. Social unfitness––a characteristic oft-attributed to Jews––became a legitimate excuse to reject candidates for admission. At the same time, the College made a concerted effort to win back the loyalty of the prep school crowd by sending admissions representatives to their schools to recruit them. Although this is common practice today, such recruitment tactics were nonexistent in the 1920s.
In an effort to keep a “Knickerbocker majority” on the Morningside campus, the administration tried to limit the number of Jewish students at the College by finding another place for them to go. Since most of these students were coming from Brooklyn, and Brooklyn College did not yet exist, the natural choice was to establish a branch of Columbia in Brooklyn.
When Brooklyn College eventually opened its doors in the 1930s, many of the students who would have attended Seth Low went there instead, due to the free tuition. This decreasing interest in Seth Low, combined with the economic struggles of the university during the Great Depression, contributed to the board’s decision to close Seth Low Junior College in 1936.
Low Spirits at Seth Low?
Despite its nonexistent residential culture and lack of a proper campus, Seth Low was home to a myriad of clubs and organizations, including sports teams, a debate team, a student orchestra, a student newspaper called The Scop, a literary magazine called The Talisman, a yearbook, a pre-medical association, and a Jewish Culture Society. There were even talks of introducing Greek life to the young school, though these plans never came to fruition.
Though the student life appears to be vibrant in hindsight, one of the most common criticisms of Seth Low at the time was the lack of camaraderie and school spirit among the student body.
In one 1932 editorial, the editors of The Scop blamed this “toxic” culture on the “preponderant majority” of “the Jewish type of student” at Seth Low. They go on to write that the quotas in place at many universities (including Columbia College) that limited the number of Jewish students are perfectly reasonable, as Jews display “sneering, hypercritical, protesting, and disloyal characteristics”, and “only a small limited number of Jews can be assimilated each year. They [the universities] often cite incidents, from past experiences, of disloyalty, redundant individualism, and undeserved disparagement which they claim have been characteristically displayed by large bodies of Jewish students.”
The article concludes that the “ostensible disloyalty and lack of delicacy on the part of the Seth Low student has frequently been attributed by the students, faculty and officials of the various leading colleges, as well as by the general public itself, to the large number of Jews in Seth Low.” According to the editors of The Scop, the culture at Seth Low was proof that the other universities were right in discriminating against Jews.
Shockingly, The Scop editorial board was almost entirely Jewish. The fact that a predominantly Jewish group of students wrote such a virulently anti-Semitic editorial proves how deeply ingrained these impressions of Jews were within society at the time, or at least within the academic elite. The Scop editorial board internalized the unfavorable rhetoric about Jews that surrounded them, and believed it was smart for Columbia College to limit its number of Jewish students, for if it didn’t do that, it would end up as miserable as Seth Low.
Given its controversial content and the constitution of the student body to which it was directed, this editorial caused somewhat of a storm.
The following week, a student, Alexander Gralnick, responded in his column in The Scop, pointing out “that it is a reflection of a complex that is naturally, and unfortunately, peculiar to many of his [the authors’] Semitic extraction, for many obvious reasons.” He writes that the reason for Jewish quotas at universities like Columbia was not because of Jews’ specific character traits--as it is impossible to generalize in such a way--but because of racial prejudice.
He continues to defend Seth Low, arguing that the lack of spirit wasn’t due to the Jews, but to several other crucial factors. First of all, Seth Low was a young school that lacked tradition and proper facilities to facilitate a vibrant student culture. Secondly, the word “junior” in the title connotes anything but a full-fledged college: it is patronizing and infantilizing. Finally, it was not even a degree-granting institution! How were students supposed to feel loyal to the school when they would not even become proper alumni?
Nevertheless, he ends on an optimistic note, writing that these are all surmountable challenges, and that if the students cooperate with one another, they can lead Seth Low to “prominence and expansion, which in turn must lead to buildings and campus of our own in the near future, with the consequent removal of ‘Junior’ from our title and recognition as a full-fledged liberal arts and science college, granting its own degree.”
Clearly, the students of Seth Low were conscious of its Jewish reputation, and different individuals chose to engage with it in varying ways. Far from the only episode of its kind, discussion of the treatment and perception of Seth Low Junior College due to heavily Jewish population is a recurring undertone of many Scop articles. However, the backlash against this specific editorial shows that there were people who took it upon themselves to expose the bigotry of this rhetoric.
80 Years Later: Should We Care?
The days of Jew quotas and satellite campuses in Brooklyn are long gone; today, the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life is a Columbia building, supported and protected by the University. In stark contrast to the discriminatory practices of its past, multiculturalism is now a major priority of the University. The Admissions Committee works tirelessly to ensure that each incoming class is as diverse as possible, with an entire professional and student volunteer team devoted to the recruitment of students from minority backgrounds and underrepresented communities. In the class of 2020, 60% of students self-identify as non-white, and 16% of students are first generation college students. These demographics would cause Nicholas Murray Butler to roll over in his grave.
And yet, recent events have shown that the attitude that compelled the Columbia administration to keep Jews away from the Morningside campus is incredibly prevalent within American society today. With his promise to “make America great again,” President-elect Trump compelled voters to hark back to a time that in their minds represents a paradise lost. On election day, millions of Americans voted to turn back the clock; to recreate the America of their imagined past, free of people who do not look or pray like they do.
This sort of nostalgia is dangerous; leading to bigotry, discrimination, and persecution.
Despite the retrogressive sentiment rampant in our country, Columbia must continue the progress it has made since 1936. This university’s history of racial and religious discrimination obligates it to be an oasis of ethnic and cultural diversity today. Instead of whitewashing the dark spots of its history, Columbia must compensate for them in the only way it can: by existing as an alternative to the terrifyingly intolerant culture that is emerging before our very eyes.
Note from the Author:
I owe a huge thank you to my friend Ethan Herenstein, CC ‘16 and former Managing Editor of The Current, for introducing me to the story of Seth Low Junior College last spring and for helping me with the preliminary steps of my research. I am also deeply indebted to Jocelyn Wilk from the Columbia University Archives, without whom I would not have been able to write this article. The archives are so expansive that I would not have known where to begin my research––let alone been able to find anything––without her expert guidance.
\\LEEZA HIRT is a junior in Columbia College and Editor in Chief for The Current. She can be reached at [email protected]. The photograph of the 1931-1932 Scop Editorial Board and the clipping from the Seth Low Junior College informational pamplet are courtesy of the Columbia University Archives.