Just a heads up, y'all.

This episode is going to contain some salty language. So, you know, it's fitting to be some cussing. What's good, y'all? You are listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. All right, so, y'all, before we get into this episode, we need to hop in the DeLorean. We got to go back to the 1920s. So you know what I mean?

Imagine we in the car,orean. We got to go back to the 1920s.

So you know what I mean?

Imagine we in the car.

You know what I mean?

Brum, brum, boom.

Okay, so the leaders at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard,

the big three, as they call themselves,

saw trouble brewing.

Because down in New York City, it was thought that 40% of students at Columbia University,

who were all men, because it was the 1920s, and women were not allowed, right?

40% of those students were now Jewish. And the big three had seen the numbers of Jews at their universities growing too.

And so they were like, no, no, no, this cannot be. We are institutions that will help anoint the future leaders of our country, the denizens of high society. These places offer good

white Anglo-Saxon Protestant manly men, not these immigrant sons of Abraham, we will

not turn into Columbia University.

Something like that, I don't know, I wasn't there. The point is, they were big patrician

fans of anti-Semitism.

But the men who ran these universities had a dilemma since entry into those schools back then was determined almost entirely by performance on the grueling college entry examination board test, a kind of ancestor precursor to the SAT.

And since those Jewish boys were crushing that exam, they were increasingly the ones who were getting in. So first, Harvard was like, we're going to just put a straight up

quota on the number of Jews to stop this. But the outcry to outright discrimination got too

loud. So the big three had to change course and they went with something a little less

...