Dudley’s Folly
In 1959, a Columbia admission dean tried to admit a class based purely on academic merit. Nobody liked it.
It’s difficult work, being an alumnus of a college or university. After all, your alma mater peaked at precisely the moment that you graduated. When you graduated, your school was at the peak of its prestige. The professors were prestigious but accessible. The curriculum was traditional yet progressive, rigorous yet flexible. The students—you and your classmates—were chosen wisely. You were smart but not nerdy, ambitious but not cut-throat, focused but still curious. Also, your skin was healthy and your hair was thick.
Not everyone feels this way about their college years, but a good many people do, and they are surely over-represented in the ranks of alumni now interfering in collegiate affairs. Over the past few months, watching alumni bully the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, threatening to withhold dollars, one has to imagine that something is at stake other than political difference or concern (however real) about antisemitism.
Alumni resist change, and campuses have seen a lot of change lately, even more than usual. Student bodies have grown increasingly diverse; the humanities have been de-centered, as curricula have shifted toward the hard sciences; gender identity is in flux (goodbye, single-sex a cappella groups at Yale; goodbye, the all-female identity of women’s colleges). And, as the Israel/Hamas conflict has shown, campus politics, at this moment, are both more left-wing and more activist than at any time since the late 1960s.
In short, alumni even just ten years out find their old schools unrecognizable. And they are speaking up, with their social media accounts and their checkbooks, as seldom before. But in parsing the role of alumni activism, it’s important to place it in historical context. And one good place to start is with the long forgotten “Dudley’s Folly.”
In 1959, David A. Dudley, a preppy alumnus of Andover and Harvard, became dean of undergraduate admission at Columbia University. Columbia, he knew, had a history of dubious admission practices, limiting the admission of Jews and immigrants, and while that ethnocentric tilt had already abated considerably after World War II, Dudley decided to go much further. In considering applicants for the Class of 1964, those who would enter as freshmen in Fall 1960, he went strictly meritocratic, as he saw it: no legacy preference, no prep-school preference, no particular weight to extracurriculars like sports. He wanted good grades and SATs, not good lineage or a strong lacrosse game.
What happened next was … interesting.
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