I will confess up front that this is a “yes but” story, but I would like to emphasize that the “yes” is just as strong as the “but”, if not stronger. A story in the New York Times by Stephanie Saul, Who Decides Penn’s Future: Donors or the University? gives us the backstory: the decision by UPenn, as “personified”, more or less, by university president Liz Magill, to go forward with a “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” last month, featuring more than 100 Palestinian writers, nearly all of them vituperatively anti-Israeli, followed by a statement by Magill on the horrible invasion/terror raid on Israel that was deemed insufficiently anti-Hamas by some. But, says the Times, there were already “concerns” regarding the university’s “path” prior to the “Festival”:
Even before the conference, though, tensions had been simmering at Penn over what some donors viewed as the university’s leftward shift, including a transgender athlete on the women’s swim team and the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs by the dean of the business school. They were also concerned about the declining number of Jewish students.
I’m in complete agreement with the complaints about the “Festival”. There is nothing wrong with a student group inviting “controversial” people on campus, who will push things that many people, even me, dislike—for example, the ever “popular” Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, which makes the absurd claim that Israel is the only “wicked” nation in the world. As I have said many times before, if people want to boycott a wicked nation, they should start with the U.S.
As I say, I would not object to a student group inviting a BDS speaker, though I might picket the event (I’m not Jewish). But I would object to the school inviting such a speaker, and I would particularly object to the school staging an entire conference of pious breast-beating in the name of Palestine, or any other nation. This was an exercise in fatuous “even handedness”, which of course is not even handedness at all, but rather pandering to a vicious intolerance that is considered among the young—the loudest mouthed among them, at least—as the latest thing in fashionable “virtue”.
I am also sympathetic to the other “concerns”, but I have to make a comment on the issue of the “declining number of Jewish students.” The Times article quotes several alumni on this point, and cites information supplied by the university’s Hillel society to the effect that Jewish enrollment in Penn has declined from about one third of the student body to 16%. Nobody seems to notice that both these figures represent a massive overrepresentation of Jews at UPenn. According to the Pew Research Center, about 2.4% of the U.S. population is Jewish. Of course, Jews know intellectually that this is true, that Jews are heavily concentrated in a few large urban areas around the country, but knowing things intellectually versus emotionally are two different things. The Times article says that “Some Jewish groups and publications have attributed that decline partly to the push at universities for more diverse classes.” The Times links to this article in “Tablet” suggesting that Jews are suffering from a “post-meritocratic” regime in elite schools seeking to make room for more black (and Hispanic, who rarely get mentioned) students. But there is another way to look at it.
Anyone who follows “Ivy Issues” is familiar with the recent Supreme Court decision, Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, a suit brought on the basis of allegations that Harvard was discriminating against Asian American students in order to make room for lower-performing black and Hispanic students, although the Court cleverly sidestepped that issue and decided the case on other grounds. Surely one of the stimuli for that suit was an extensive study published by Silicon Valley boy Ron Unz in 2012, The Myth of American Meritocracy,1 arguing that the Ivies were discriminating against Asians. But the kicker was this: Unz, who is Jewish and graduated from Harvard (I did not), claimed that the Ivies were discriminating against Asian students, not to make room for underperforming black and Hispanic students but rather for less than stellar performing Jewish students! There was a time, says Unz, when Jews constituted a massive percentage of very high scoring high school students, but that day is over. It is the Asians who are, for the most part, leading the pack. As many supporters of the “Fair Admissions” suit noted, the percentage of Asians being admitted to Harvard started to increase as soon as the suit was filed. Suspicious? Perhaps.
But there’s a less “sinister” interpretation to the whole affair: according to Pew Research once more, the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population has doubled since the year 2000, now standing at about 7%, about triple the size of the Jewish population. Currently, the Asian enrollment at UPenn is about 27.5%, while the figure for black students is 7.9% and the figure for Hispanic students was 10.5%.2 Perhaps the percentage of Jews at UPenn has declined to some extent due to increased percentages of black and Hispanic students—I don’t know because I don’t have figures for 2000 enrollments for these groups—but it is, to my mind, quite likely that most of the decline is due to increases in numbers of Asian students, both because there are more Asian students in the country and because (maybe) Ivy schools are more nervous about excluding Asian students. At any rate, one can wonder if the question—if there is any one at all—is not “why are there so few Jews at UPenn these days” but rather “why were there so many Jews at UPenn 20 years ago?”
It’s impossible, pretty much, for people to be objective about “the way things were”, but we should be able to understand that there are reasons for “change” other than some sort of plot. No, the declining percentage of Jews at prestige institutions is not the result of an anti-Semitic plot, but the rise in outright anti-Semitism on American campuses, the ugly identification by the “woke folk” with the worst elements of Palestinian nationalism as the most “authentic”, the most “passionate”, when they are instead simply the most vicious, is deeply depressing. Even as a stupidly spoiled American WASP I am deeply depressed. If I were an American Jew, I would deeply depressed too, and deeply afraid. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
1. I confess that post-2012 Ron has been sounding increasingly weird.
2. The percentage of blacks in the overall U.S. population is about 12.8%, while that of Hispanics is about 19%, so both populations are underrepresented at UPenn. While the percentage of blacks in the U.S. has remained virtually static for many years, in 1980, Hispanics accounted for about 7% of the population.
