We have mentioned New York University. During the controversy over Jews at Harvard, Chancellor Brown favored the press with the proud announcement that there was no discrimination against Jews at Jabbergrab; and a week or two later there was published in the “Nation” (July 12, 1922) a letter from Mr. Joseph Girdansky, who made a reputation as an athlete at this place, telling about the experience of his younger brother, also an athlete, and presumably acceptable to his fellow students, since he was elected president of the junior class. When this result was announced, the faculty of Jabbergrab rose up and called off the election. First, it appeared, the officers elected were Bolshevists; second, there had been ballot-stuffing; and third, fourth and fifth, the elections were null and void. Several Jewish boys were threatened with expulsion for having been elected to class offices!
Mr. Girdansky went on to tell about his interview with Dean Archibald Banton of Jabbergrab. This was two or three years ago, and the dean quite frankly admitted that it was a Jewish question. In the elder Girdansky’s day, said the dean, the percentage of Jews had been from two to four, while now it had got to fifty. So the university was introducing what it called an “Americanization plan.” Mr. Girdansky threatened to expose this state of affairs—right in the midst of Chancellor Brown’s advertising campaign for funds! The dean begged him to wait until the fall, promising that the class elections would be settled satisfactorily. They were settled by a great number of the Jewish students leaving, and new class officers being elected, or appointed by the faculty—all the important ones being non-Jews!
At Barnard, which is the women’s college of Columbia University, they have a committee on admissions, which in actual practice means the dean and the secretary, who decide upon the eligibility of girls who have passed the examinations. Highly competent graduates of New York high schools are left out, because they happen to be Jewesses; and in their place girls are taken from the fashionable “finishing schools,” who are so poor in scholarship that they have to be conditioned. I was told of one case of a Russian Jewish girl who had been excluded and went to Hunter College and made a brilliant record. There was some agitation about this case, and the dean sent someone to look it up, and the report was that “keeping her out was a good job.” The teacher who told me this story was interested in the matter, and went over to Hunter College herself to find out what was wrong about the girl. There were two things the matter with her: first, she was a Socialist, and second, she had expressed her opinion in favor of the recognition of Soviet Russia.
Also at the University of Pennsylvania the issue has been taken up. The endowment drive was held up because the leaders wished to engraft upon it the verbal pledge to anti-Semitic contributors that Jewish enrollment would be curtailed. One seminary course at the university during the past year was largely devoted, under cover, to sounding out the views of the graduate students in economics upon the Jew menace. It was freely stated in that course that desire to reduce the high percentage of Jews in the Wharton School was the motive prompting the “intelligence test” requirement for admission.
Needless to say, the academic pogrom extends not only to students, but to professors. You may find this situation effectively set forth in a vital criticism of America, “Up Stream,” by Ludwig Lewisohn. Mr. Lewisohn tells how he studied under the aegis of Nicholas Murray Butler, and made himself a master of English literature and English style. You do not have to take his word for this; he proves it in his book. Few indeed are the Anglo-Saxon professors in American universities who can demonstrate equal attainments! This German-Jew was poor, his family had made heavy sacrifices to give him an education; but he could get no teaching position, and for a long time the Columbia professors who had charge of his career kept from him the dark secret, that Jews are not employed to teach literature in American universities. Lewisohn was forced to do newspaper work, and not until years later did he get a chance to teach at the University of Wisconsin.
Also you ought to hear the experience of Professor Kornhauser of Denison University, at Granville, Ohio. He taught zoology, and was admitted to have one of the best departments in this Baptist institution; he was an active Y. M. C. A. worker, president of the Faculty Club, and commander of the American Legion post—it is difficult to see what more a Jew might do to take the curse off himself! He was offered an important position at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and as the price of declining this, was made a full professor at Denison, and spent three years building up his department. But last April the president of the university asked him to resign, and stated as his reason that some of the financial supporters of the university objected to the presence of a Jew on the faculty. The students protested, and in the effort to silence them the president threatened that if they published anything about the case he would refuse to recommend Professor Kornhauser for a job at any other university. The senior class, by a vote of eighty to six, passed a resolution asking for the president’s removal.
Also you should consider the experience of Professor Robert T. Kerlin, a high-minded and devoted Christian gentleman, who was dismissed from the Virginia Military Institute for having written a dignified open letter to the governor of Arkansas, protesting against the execution of some Negroes for the crime of having defended their lives against a mob. You may read his letter in the files of the “Nation,” June 15, 1921.
And then, to return to the Jews, hear the strange experience of Mr. S. S. Catell, who was an instructor in accounting at the University of Oklahoma. Mr. Catell happens to be near-sighted, and was turned out upon the pretext that he was unable to teach properly on this account. He sent a questionnaire to his students, and out of a total of forty-nine, thirty said that his work was above the average, while eighteen said it was average; one was absent and did not reply. But this did not get Mr. Catell restored, and so he investigated, and discovered that the head of his department did not like Jews. The way in which the young instructor made this discovery would seem sufficiently convincing to anyone. He met the head of his department in the hallway of the latter’s home, and the department head put to him a question: “Do you know who killed Jesus Christ?” Mr. Catell, in his letter to me, says that he contented himself with the answer: “I do not know, since it was so long ago!”
If I were a cultured Jew in America, I know what I should do. I should not flatter the race conceit of Anglo-Saxon colleges; I should make it my task to persuade wealthy Jews to establish an endowment and gather a faculty of Jewish scientists and scholars—there are enough of them to make the most wonderful faculty in the world. And then I should open the doors of this university to seekers of knowledge of all races—save that I should bar students who had anti-Semitic prejudice!