Unwelcome Guests: A History of Access to American Higher Education by Harold S. Weschler and Steven J. Diner (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unwelcome Guests: A History of Access to American Higher Education by Harold S. Weschler and Steven J. Diner Shira Kohn (bio) Unwelcome Guests: A History of Access to American Higher Education. By Harold S. Weschler and Steven J. Diner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. xi + 211 pp. In 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that, globally, Jews were the most educated religious community when it came to years of formal schooling. Certainly in the United States, American Jews have demonstrated long-term investment in both secular and religious educational institutions, and scholars in fields ranging from history to sociology to religious studies have published extensively on the priority generations of American Jews placed on participating in the country's increasingly diverse educational landscape. This engagement is perhaps both most notable and fraught when it comes to higher education, given that more than half of America's Jews claim undergraduate degrees, double the national average as of the publication of the Pew study. This recent volume by the late Harold Weschler, co-written by his friend and colleague Steven Diner after Weschler's untimely passing in 2017, helps contextualize the Pew results and places American Jewish engagement with higher education within the broader realm of nineteenth and twentieth-century access to the country's colleges and universities, ultimately providing an incredibly useful reference for both scholars and lay readers curious about how Jews came to be visible minorities on campuses and the ways in which their experiences mirrored and diverged from other ethnic and religious minorities at the time. To be clear, this book does not focus on the Jewish admissions experience, but rather on how different ethnic and religious communities in America approached that process and how exclusion and access functioned in shaping subsequent waves of entering classes of undergraduates. Yet it becomes apparent early on that Jews often served as a litmus test for the level of tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity at various types of higher education institutions, whether parochial, private, or public, reflecting administrative debates over whom would be able to best exhibit the academic aptitude and, frequently, presumed social behaviors with which a given school wanted to be associated. Other than the first chapter of the volume, which examines the African American experience in the admissions process throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to underscore the ways in which race functioned as the foundational category for deciding enrollment criteria, Jews appear consistently throughout the study as aspiring applicants to a variety of institutions, from land grant public universities to the country's multiple urban commuter campuses. Because so many institutions rejected Black applicants outright or admitted minimal candidates regardless [End Page 420] of their credentials, Jews became a, if not the, visible minority seeking socioeconomic mobility through undergraduate education in regions throughout the country, though unsurprisingly concentrated in areas and institutions in which the very debates and decisions around access were hotly contested. Weschler and Diner provide invaluable statistics about enrollment throughout the volume, highlighting the degree to which young Jews applied to college in numbers far surpassing their proportional presence in the American population. The book traces, though does not explicitly draw connections to, how intertwined Jewish migration and residency patterns mirrored the proliferation of institutions of higher education. Those spatial realities shaped application volume, albeit not acceptance rates, at private colleges and universities (most prominently Harvard and Columbia) which at times limited Jewish enrollment in the interwar decades of the twentieth century into the postwar era due to concerns over Jewish "over-enrollment" on their campuses. While most other minorities, whether white Catholics or immigrant communities like Puerto Ricans, also faced limitations on their ability to gain acceptance to institutions of higher education, their smaller application numbers seldom drew the eyes and concerns of evaluators in ways that the growing numbers of Jewish students did. In a welcome but too brief chapter on the student experience for those fortunate enough to gain admission to higher education, the authors explore how Jews and other minorities experienced continued discrimination in areas such as collegiate athletics, residence halls, and social outlets like Greek life. These expressions of prejudice continue to stem from...