In 1927, Brown president William Faunce, noting an “obvious change” in the “racial and cultural environment of American college students,” wrote to the Brown trustees that “the American college is solemnly bound by legal and moral obligation to preserve its own identity, to be loyal to the ideas of its founders, and to receive at any one time only so many students of alien tradition as it can properly assimilate and guide.”
Afraid of alien, Jewish influence, Ivy administrators invented new admission criteria. These included geographical diversity (since most Jewish applicants came from large Eastern cities, recruiting students from more regions would reduce the Jewish population), in-person interviews, legacy preference, limits on scholarships, psychological tests, and greater recruitment at private and boarding schools. In Brown admission files, the strategy behind these policies was called “limitation of numbers,” because overall application numbers were rising, but the screening devices were specifically designed to limit Jews.
Soon, high school principals had to answer questions about Brown applicants’ neatness, punctuality, leadership, popularity, cheerfulness, and health. Questions on reference forms included, “Is the applicant attractive and well-bred in appearance and deportment?” and “Is the applicant the kind of man whom you yourself would welcome as a classmate in college?”
Things were only a little better for Jewish women at Brown’s Women’s College, founded in 1891 and re-named Pembroke in 1928. As at Brown, the application initially required little: name, address, parents’ names, and high school grades. In-person interviews were not required.
The architects of antisemitism at Pembroke advocated for women’s education as a tool of empowerment but worked to squelch Jewish entry. They were Margaret Shove Morriss—nicknamed “Peggy Push”—who was Pembroke dean from 1921–1950 (and rumored to be the girlfriend of Rhode Island senator T.F. Green) and Eva Mooar, who became Pembroke director of admission and personnel in 1927. A Baltimore-born Quaker with a doctorate from Bryn Mawr, Morriss put Pembroke on the national stage. “Miss Morriss did not inherit the modern Pembroke,” Brown president Henry Wriston, who became president in 1937, once said. “She created it.”
Under Morriss and Mooar, the Pembroke application form was amended so that applicants had to report citizenship, religion, parents’ citizenship, religion, education, occupation, and birthplace. In interviews during the 1930s, as historian Karen Lamoree has written, Mooar evaluated applicants’ “personal appearance, family background, mental equipment, traits, financial, activities, interests, goal.” Here is a sampling of her comments, as compiled by Lamoree:
About an applicant to the Class of 1933: “Can’t tell whether Jewish or not.”
About an applicant to the Class of 1936: “Father has wavy hair, few front teeth and a marked accent. Says they speak German at home? Germans or Jews? Are blonde, so probably the former.”