The national embrace of antisemitism, particularly on college campuses, continues apace. We have previously written about past incarnations thereof at our alma mater, Harvard College, The Harvard Marching Bund – Antisemitism at Cambridge, but the temperature on college campuses had risen several degrees since then. In that article, we also noted how antisemitism was particularly rife in New York City, where the American Nazi Party, or the Bund, would hold marches on East 86th Street at the heart of the predominately German Yorkville neighborhood, and where it most famously held a massive rally at a sold-out Madison Square Garden.
Given the combination of its status as an elite Ivy League institution and its location in New York City, it is hardly surprising that the campus apparently at the center of the pro-Hamas contagion, and the one garnering the most headlines, is Columbia University. On Tuesday, students occupied Hamilton Hall, a building that houses the Classics Department, as well as that of German and Slavic languages, but were subsequently removed by the police. The outburst of antisemitism at Columbia is even less surprising given its long history of antipathy to Jews, an antipathy that arguably exceeded that of Harvard. Columbia was at the forefront of efforts by Ivy league institutions to limit the number of Jewish students that they accepted, and it provided a platform for the Nazi regime in Germany and the Fascist one in Italy,
The antisemitism on display at Columbia today is just another chapter in a saga spanning more than a century.
Nicholas Murray Butler
Any discussion of antisemitism at Columbia must have, as its principal, the university’s famous and long-serving president, Nicholas Murray Butler, dubbed by Theodore Roosevelt as “Nicholas Miraculous.” As a sidenote, Butler is one of those towering figures of the past whom history has since seemed, for the most part, to have forgotten. At the time of his death, the New York Times described him as "one of the best-known Americans of his generation the world over." Indeed, the Times, for years, published his annual Christmas greeting.
As an educator, he was one of the founders of what would become Columbia’s Teachers College as well as the elite high school, Horace Mann. He was a central figure in both New York and New Jersey debates as to the future of public education. He was a key proponent of a bill, opposed by Tammany Hall that reformed the New York City school system, and served on the New Jersey Board of Education. He helped establish the College Entrance Exam Board, which would go on to create the SAT, and was a tireless advocate for standardized entrance requirements among the elite universities.
As a political figure, Butler became close friends with Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root long before either entered the national stage. He worked with the latter in his efforts to reform New York City’s schools. When Roosevelt unexpectedly became President as a result of William McKinley’s assassination, Butler became a close advisor to him and to Root, who by then was Secretary of State. Butler was instrumental in securing Roosevelt’s nomination to serve a full term as President.
Butler broke with Roosevelt in 1907 over his economic policies, particularly his antitrust activities. His support for William Howard Taft in 1912 was key to the latter’s securing his renomination. In fact, when the Republican nominee for Vice President, John Sherman, died, Butler replaced him on the ballot as Taft’s running mate. He sought the presidential nomination itself in 1920. Butler’s influence continued through the administration of Warren Harding and into that of Calvin Coolidge. William Allen White, the subject of our article, What's The Matter With -- Not Kansas, But -- New York & California?, labeled him “an insider of insiders.” Ultimately, he became a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt.
Butler was famous internationally as well. He was the driving force behind the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, having persuaded Andrew Carnegie to provide the funding. He served as president of that organization. For his efforts promoting the adoption of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing wars, he was awarded, together with Jane Addams, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Notwithstanding his many achievements, Butler is best known for his forty-three-year tenure as president of Columbia University. During that tenure, he transformed Columbia from a small, regional college, into a national university. When Butler took office, there were 407 teachers on the roster at Columbia. Thirty-five years into his tenure, there were 3,325. During the same period, the number of students rose from 4,293 to 32,245. The growth of Columbia during Butler’s tenure reflected his view of the university, which was directly at odds with that of his predecessor, Seth Low.
Low, like Butler, wished to transform Columbia from a sleepy college into a modern research university. It was to accomplish this goal that Low oversaw the campus move from Madison Avenue and 49th Street to Morningside Heights. However, Low did not see this move as a withdrawal from New York. To the contrary, he wanted Columbia to be part of New York, and New York part of Columbia. He resisted moving the campus out of the City, a move favored by many trustees, and he worried, until the completion of the subway, that the move uptown would put the university out of the reach of many New Yorkers. Low deemed the diversity of New York an advantage to the education of his students: “The great city itself gives a view of life which is no small part of the student’s education.” Low wanted the student population to reflect the population of the City, and he sought to attract the most qualified students from the City’s school system.
Butler had a different view of the university, one that he put into practice after he succeeded Low. Butler saw Columbia as a national university, and sought to attract gentlemen who were the sons of the leadership class of the country as w hole. These sons tended to be Episcopalian. Butler considered Columbia’s location in New York City to be a “nuisance,” and he wanted to seal the campus from its influences. Whereas, at one point, more than half of Columbia’s students were from New York City, Butler reduced this figure to 23 percent. One of the greatest influences that Butler sought to keep from Columbia was that of the Jewish immigrants that permeated New York.
Columbia’s “Hebrew Question”
The presence of a mass of intelligent, hard-working, and ambitious Jewish young men throughout New York’s high schools seeking admission ran headlong into Butler’s vision of a Columbia geared to the Christian sons of the elite and aristocratic. Butler perceived Columbia as a “Christian institution,” and, to achieve his vision, Butler first had to stem what one Columbia administrator termed the “invasion of the Jewish student.”
As recounted in Michael Rosenthal’s biography of Butler, Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Butler was worried about the number of Jewish students from the first year he took office at Columbia. His friend, John B. Pine, who was clerk to the trustees, wrote to Butler “in regard to what threatens to become one of our most dangerous problems, viz: the Hebrew question.” According to Pine, “You know as well as I that we are in danger of being overwhelmed by the number of Jewish students who are coming to us, and who are certain to increase in number.” He worried that Columbia might cease to be a Christian institution, as intended, but would “devolve willy-nilly into a ‘Hebrew institution.’”
Frederick Keppel, for a time Dean of the college, shared the same concerns, writing privately to Butler, “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.” He was equally blunt publicly, writing in a university publication:
One of the commonest references that one hears with regard to Columbia is that its position at the gateway of European immigration makes it socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement. The form which the inquiry takes in these days of slowly-dying race prejudice is, “Isn’t Columbia overrun with European Jews who are most unpleasant persons socially?”
To be sure, Columbia was not the only university concerned about Jewish enrollment. Indeed, for a period, Harvard would impose an express quota. However, because of its location in New York City, the concern was particularly urgent to the university, which was fighting the perception that Columbia, in Pine’s words, had become a “Jew college.”
Columbia Answers The “Hebrew Question”
Despite their sentiments concerning the influx of Jewish students, Butler and Keppel recognized that the imposition of an express quota, such as Harvard’s, would be a public relations disaster, if not a legal impossibility. Accordingly, they sought other ways to limit Jewish admissions. Pine proposed reasserting its Christian charter, emphasizing chapel and reintroducing the study of Christianity. Although “we cannot keep the Jews out…we can bring Christianity in.” Alternatively, Butler contemplated the imposition of a residential requirement on its freshman, figuring that only toney New York families could afford the bill.
Ultimately, Butler realized that only a direct alteration of the admissions process would be effective. Accordingly, he and Keppel introduced the concept of selective admission. Previously, there had been no caps on admission to Columbia. To the contrary, the university welcomed the revenue coming from a larger student body. The application process was simple: a student had only to achieve a sufficient score on one of three tests -- Columbia’s own admissions examination, that of the New York State Board of Regents, or that of the College Entrance Examination Board. Butler imposed other criteria.
First, he introduced a test developed at the Teachers College, the Thorndike test, which purported to measure natural intelligence and innate capacity to learn rather than results of exam preparation. According to Rosenthal, “Grubby immigrant overachievers, of the sort Columbia wished to find grounds to reject, would now be found out. Natural talent, rather than external achievements earned by obsessive drive, would henceforth be the hallmark of the Columbia student.”
In addition, Columbia introduced other criteria into the admissions process, criteria that were far more subjective -- information as to his father’s place of birth and occupation, his own religious affiliation, his school activities (athletics, publications, musical organizations), and his “patriotic activities, both inside and outside of school.” Applicants also had to submit photographs. To supplement this winnowing, students also had to be personally interviewed.
These changes produced the desired result. Jewish enrollment at Columbia was halved. However, the changes were still insufficient to alter Columbia’s image. Accordingly, Butler came up with another solution. Reasoning that sons of immigrants were attending college as preparation for entrance into a professional school, Butler established a two-year junior college in Brooklyn, named ironically after Butler’s predecessor at Columbia, Seth Low, who had left the Columbia board in large part due to Butler’s admission policies. Students at Seth Low Junior college could get a two-year degree and move onto a professional graduate school or attend evening classes at Columbia to achieve a “university” BS degree that differed from the BA offered to Columbia students. One of Seth Low’s most famous alumni, Isaac Asimov, who had been rejected at Columbia because he was too young, only to discover that Seth Low had the same age requirements, wrote “that the Seth Low student body was heavily Jewish, with a strong Italian minority.” It was apparent to him “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.”
Seth Low lasted less than a decade. It failed to deliver sufficient admissions to graduate schools, and a free alternative, Brooklyn College, opened in 1936. However, for a time, it served its purpose.
Butler’s prejudice was not limited to the student body. He repeatedly rejected the hiring of professors simply because they were “Hebrew.” One exception was the famed scholar Lionel Trilling. Despite his genius, Trilling faced much opposition within his department and faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieving tenure. Butler the politician saw the public relations potential of the situation, and forever claimed credit for intervening on Trilling’s behalf.
Other Manifestations of Antisemitism
Butler’s antisemitism was reflected not merely in his admissions decisions. Although skeptical about Hitler, Butler was a keen admirer of Fascism in general, and Benito Mussolini in particular. He kept cordial relations with the Italian government and, like administrations who solicit Arab donations today, he eagerly wooed Italian funds.
Like the presidents of other schools, Butler courted controversy when he sent a representative of the university to Heidelberg University to celebrate that school’s 550th anniversary. More controversially, after German students at universities across that country had famously participated in burning the books of Jewish and other forbidden authors, Columbia invited the German ambassador to speak at the university. This speech sparked riots which were forcefully put down by the New York police. Columbia also welcomed openly Nazi exchange students, and Butler even ignored calls for boycotts of German goods and services by pointedly traveling to Europe on German ships. It was only after Kristallnacht that Butler began to revisit his views.
Columbia Today
It is ironic that, while the rioting at Columbia today and calls for divestiture echo student protests of the thirties, such actions are in furtherance of antisemitism rather than against it as they were then. It is unlikely that many Columbia students today even know who Nicholas Murray Butler even was, let alone his political views. As Rosenthal writes:
Time has not been kind to Butler. Great and famous as he was acknowledged to be during his lifetime, caricature seems now to have effaced icon, and with it all traces of the man whom many of his contemporaries thought was guaranteed a distinguished and lasting place in the country’s memory.
Were Columbia students more knowledgeable about the history of their university (or about any history), they would understand that antisemitism is nothing new to Columbia, but has been an integral part of its history. They would also recognize that there is no need to “rename” university buildings in order to show common cause with Hamas extremists. One of the school’s most prominent buildings, Butler Library, already bears the name of one of the century’s most renowned antisemites.
Another excellent article.
i dont get it. whole Palestinian thing came from the brits apporting spoils. while i've had several jewish friends on the whole they're a grasping entitled people and i dont think anyone would miss them