College admissions in America operate with the tools of the last century that were enacted to limit the admission of Jews. In most countries, admission to university is done on the basis of test scores, but American universities in the 20th Century moved away from that objective standard to subjective standards that allowed them to reduce their intake of Jews without overtly stating they didn’t want Jews. <\/p>\n
To increase their intake flexibility, American colleges added requirements for demographic information, personal essays, and extracurricular activities. Why? So they could exclude Jews and anyone else they didn’t want on the public basis that the university was looking for gentlemen rather than drones. What constitutes a Harvard man? This is subjective, ergo, Harvard gets to choose who it admits. <\/p>\n
Universities assumed that Jews would fall short of their moral character standards, but moral character is a fiction<\/a>. We don’t have a moral character. We have moral characters in different situations. Our traits are domain-specific. We may be honest in our marriage but not at work. We may be nice to strangers but vicious to our family. Who we are depends upon the situations we find ourselves in. The situation is frequently more determinative of how we behave than any supposedly innate character traits. Nobody is always brave. Some people are brave in certain circumstances and other people are brave in different circumstances. The person who is a hero on the football field Friday night may well be a docile lamb Sunday morning in church with his mom and then a rapist at a party that night with a stranger and then a life-saver when he stops on his drive home and rescues someone from a burning car. <\/p>\n America’s elite universities today use subjective admission criteria to limit their intake of Whites. Without these subjective standards, there would be more Whites on the best campuses and fewer of every other ethnic group<\/a>.<\/p>\n Professor Merve Emre, the author of the following essay, is a Turkish-American professor at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. <\/p>\n