Even as the Israel/Gaza conflict has roiled the Middle East and raised fears of a much wider regional war, some of the political reverberations have also been felt across the American academic landscape.

With graphic images of devastated Gaza neighborhoods and dead Palestinian children so widespread on Twitter and other social media outlets, polls have revealed that a majority of younger Americans now favor Hamas and the Palestinians in their ongoing struggle with Israel. This is a shocking reversal from the views of their parents, which had been shaped by generations of overwhelmingly pro-Israel material across broadcast television, films, and print publications, and such trends are only likely to continue now that Israel is being prosecuted in the International Court of Justice by South Africa and 22 other nations, accused of committing genocide in Gaza.

As a consequence of these strong youthful sentiments, anti-Israel demonstrations have erupted at many of our universities, outraging numerous pro-Israel billionaire donors. Almost immediately, some of the latter launched a harsh retaliatory campaign, with many corporate leaders declaring that they would permanently blacklist from future employment opportunities any college students publicly supporting the Palestinian cause, underscoring these threats with a widespread “doxxing” campaign at Harvard and other elite colleges.

A few weeks ago, our uniformly pro-Israel elected officials entered the fray, calling the presidents of several of our most elite colleges—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—to testify before them regarding alleged “antisemitism” on their campuses. Members of Congress severely brow-beat these officials for permitting anti-Israel activities, even ignorantly and absurdly accusing them of allowing public calls for “Jewish genocide” on their campuses.

The responses of these college leaders emphasized their support for freedom of political speech but were deemed so unsatisfactory by pro-Israel donors and their mainstream media allies that enormous pressure was exerted to remove them. Within days, the Penn president and her supportive Board chairman had been forced to resign, and soon afterward Harvard’s first black president suffered the same fate, as pro-Israel groups released evidence of her widespread academic plagiarism to drive her from office.

I am unaware of any previous case in which the president of an elite American college had been so rapidly removed from office for ideological reasons and two successive examples within just a few weeks seems an absolutely unprecedented development, having enormous implications for academic freedom.

With pro-Israel forces having rapidly notched a pair of huge political victories, it is hardly surprising that they would seek additional lines of attack to extend their success, and late last week they announced a lawsuit against Harvard University, condemning it as a “bastion” of antisemitism and denouncing rampant discrimination against Jewish students, a story widely covered in our media, ranging from the New York Times to the local Harvard Crimson.

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Out elite universities play a crucial role in our society and Jews have been deeply involved with their history. In 2005 the eminent sociologist Jerome Karabel published The Chosen, a magisterial narrative history of the last hundred years of Jewish enrollment at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, focusing upon the secretive discriminatory admissions policies that had long been used to restrict their numbers. But in late 2012 I drew heavily upon his award-winning scholarship to produce a very long article focused upon the quiet struggle between our rising Jewish elites and the reigning white Gentile rivals they successfully displaced from power during the course of the twentieth century:

Karabel’s massive documentation—over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—establishes the remarkable fact that America’s uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare. During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition.[10] Therefore, the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level, and thereafter hold it almost constant during the decades which followed.[11] For example, the Jewish portion of Harvard’s entering class dropped from nearly 30 percent in 1925 to 15 percent the following year and remained roughly static until the period of the Second World War.[12]

As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations. For example, in the aftermath of World War II, Jewish organizations and their allies mobilized their political and media resources to pressure the universities into increasing their ethnic enrollment by modifying the weight assigned to various academic and non-academic factors, raising the importance of the former over the latter. Then a decade or two later, this exact process was repeated in the opposite direction, as the early 1960s saw black activists and their liberal political allies pressure universities to bring their racial minority enrollments into closer alignment with America’s national population by partially shifting away from their recently enshrined focus on purely academic considerations. Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968–69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.[13]

Philosophical consistency appears notably absent in many of the prominent figures involved in these admissions battles, with both liberals and conservatives sometimes favoring academic merit and sometimes non-academic factors, whichever would produce the particular ethnic student mix they desired for personal or ideological reasons. Different political blocs waged long battles for control of particular universities, and sudden large shifts in admissions rates occurred as these groups gained or lost influence within the university apparatus: Yale replaced its admissions staff in 1965 and the following year Jewish numbers nearly doubled.[14]

At times, external judicial or political forces would be summoned to override university admissions policy, often succeeding in this aim. Karabel’s own ideological leanings are hardly invisible, as he hails efforts by state legislatures to force Ivy League schools to lift their de facto Jewish quotas, but seems to regard later legislative attacks on “affirmative action” as unreasonable assaults on academic freedom.[15] The massively footnoted text of The Chosen might lead one to paraphrase Clausewitz and conclude that our elite college admissions policy often consists of ethnic warfare waged by other means, or even that it could be summarized as a simple Leninesque question of “Who, Whom?”

Although nearly all of Karabel’s study is focused on the earlier history of admissions policy at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with the developments of the last three decades being covered in just a few dozen pages, he finds complete continuity down to the present day, with the notorious opacity of the admissions process still allowing most private universities to admit whomever they want for whatever reasons they want, even if the reasons and the admissions decisions may eventually change over the years.

For more than one hundred years and especially in recent decades, our elite colleges have served as a direct pipeline to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, finance, and media, so dominating those institutions and determining their enrollment provides a considerable measure of control over our entire society. And as Karabel demonstrated in his fascinating volume, throughout the twentieth century those colleges therefore became the battleground of a silent struggle for power between white Gentiles and Jews. The former initially held the upper hand, but the latter ultimately proved victorious, and towards the end of his book the author celebrated their supposedly meritocratic triumph:

Indeed, Karabel opens the final chapter of his book by…noting the extreme irony that the WASP demographic group which had once so completely dominated America’s elite universities and “virtually all the major institutions of American life” had by 2000 become “a small and beleaguered minority at Harvard,” being actually fewer in number than the Jews whose presence they had once sought to restrict. Very similar results seem to apply all across the Ivy League, with the disproportion often being even greater than the particular example emphasized by Karabel.

However, my 2012 article challenged the widespread myth of American academic meritocracy and thereby provoked a great deal of controversy, notably including a New York Times symposium on the apparent existence of anti-Asian quotas in the Ivy League; all of this prompted a lawsuit the following year against Harvard’s allegedly discriminatory admissions policies. As that lawsuit spent a decade wending its way through the courts prior to its Supreme Court victory last year, I published a series of articles recapitulating and extending my previous analysis:

In the last of those articles, I emphasized that more than two generations of an enormous Jewish preponderance at our most elite universities had helped to produce a current American government that exhibited a quite remarkable ethnic skew:

Relatively few Americans ever consider applying to Harvard or the other elite Ivy League schools. Indeed, I suspect that much of our citizenry probably regards the composition of those student bodies as totally irrelevant, of far less significance than the identities of our top professional athletes or pop music stars. Yet as I have repeatedly emphasized, those educational institutions tend to provide the next generation of America’s ruling elites, and this applies to the world of politics as well as many other sectors.

Consider, for example, the leading figures in our current Biden Administration, who are playing a crucial role in determining the future of our own country and the rest of the world. The list of Cabinet departments has wildly proliferated since Washington’s day, but suppose we confine our attention to the half-dozen most important, led by the individuals who control national security and the economy, and then also add the names of the President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and National Security Advisor. Although “Diversity” may have become the sacred motto of the Democratic Party, the background of the handful of individuals running our country appears strikingly non-diverse, especially if we exclude the two political figureheads at the very top.

• President Joe Biden (Jewish in-laws)


• Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jewish spouse)


• Chief of Staff Jeff Zients (Jewish), replacing Ron Klain (Jewish, Harvard)


• Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Jewish, Harvard)


• Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (Jewish, Yale)


• Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III (Black)


• Attorney General Merrick Garland (Jewish, Harvard)


• National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (White Gentile, Yale)


• Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (Jewish)


• Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Jewish)

In 2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Moscow’s Jewish Center and noted in his remarks that 80-85% of the first Bolshevik government was Jewish. Although that statement was probably somewhat exaggerated, it does seem a very reasonable characterization of today’s American government, despite Jews constituting less than 2% of our population.

When a nation’s top leadership is drawn from such a narrowly insular, almost incestuous circle, in which standards of strict meritocracy have long since been replaced by shared ideological beliefs and perhaps even widespread implicit ethnic nepotism, enormous problems may develop. Our current inflation rate is now the highest in forty years, and a few days ago, prestigious Foreign Affairs, mouthpiece of the American political establishment, carried a major article discussing the looming possibility of a simultaneous war against both Russia and China and how we could successfully triumph in such a difficult conflict. Since my infancy, no American president has seriously contemplated a war with either Russia or China, but our current national leadership seems quite eager to embroil us in a global war with both of them at the same time.

Current polls indicate that many perhaps most Democrats are strongly opposed to our unwavering military support for Israel’s brutal war against Gaza, and these sentiments seem especially strong among the activists who dominate party politics. Yet despite President Biden’s dismal polling numbers in the rapidly approaching November election, none of this opposition seems to have shifted his government’s unwavering support for the Jewish State. Surely we cannot ignore the possibility that the ethnic composition of his administration is a major factor behind this strange intransigence.

Holding a dominant position at Harvard and our other elite universities provides the crucial leverage allowing a tiny Jewish minority to maintain its preponderant influence across our larger American society, now and in the future. This explains the new lawsuit challenging Harvard for its alleged climate of antisemitism and its supposed discrimination against Jewish students. But I think that lawsuit may ultimately prove extremely counter-productive if it focuses public attention on matters that have been deliberately kept hidden.

Harvard President Claudine Gay was forced to resign on January 2nd, having held office for just six months, by far the briefest tenure in Harvard history, and her interim replacement was Harvard’s Jewish provost Alan Garber. As it happens, all four of Harvard’s previous presidents stretching back to 1991 were either of Jewish ancestry or had a Jewish spouse, three of the four falling into the former category. Given that history, the current claims of longstanding antisemitism at Harvard seem quite implausible.

Meanwhile, antisemitism in other elite colleges seems equally unlikely given that five of the eight Ivy League university presidents are currently Jewish, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, and Dartmouth, as are those of other elite colleges such as Caltech and MIT. This ethnic ratio of top academic leadership has remained roughly unchanged for several decades.

A high-profile lawsuit alleging a longstanding pattern of antisemitism at Harvard and other elite schools may bring these facts to much wider public attention, with consequences not necessarily to the advantage of the aggrieved plaintiffs. Meanwhile, based upon media reports, the actual examples of “antisemitism” cited seem little more than allowing public criticism of Israel and its policies, a situation that naturally offends students who are zealously pro-Israel in their sentiments.

Moreover, a second element of the lawsuit is even more likely to backfire. According to the Times article:

The complaint goes so far as to accuse Harvard of deliberately reducing the enrollment of Jewish students, claiming there was a sharp drop over a decade “that could only evince a deliberate effort by Harvard to minimize its Jewish student population.”

A supposedly drastic drop in enrolled Jewish students at Harvard and other top colleges has indeed been noted in the last seven years. But all these figures come from Hillel, the Jewish campus organization, and according to my own analysis, the facts are actually quite different than what they appear to be.

Drawing upon Hillel’s public data, one of the most shocking but least reported conclusions in my original 2012 Meritocracy article had been the astonishing degree of Jewish over-representation at our elite colleges:

Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.

Several charts and graphs effectively presented these remarkable findings:

As I later explained:

These charts demonstrated the hidden reality that white Gentiles were heavily under-represented at elite colleges not merely with regard to their fraction of highest-performing students but even relative to their share of the college-age population. Academic administrators might publicly fret that blacks or Hispanics were not enrolled proportional to their national numbers, but the under-enrollment of non-Jewish whites was actually far more severe. To a considerable extent, the student bodies of our top colleges constitute the next generation of our national elites in embryonic form, and during recent decades white Gentiles had been increasingly excluded from that important pool.

All these meritocracy statistics were originally compiled ten years ago, but when I’ve occasionally updated them, I noticed that little had changed except that they had sometimes grown even more extreme. As mentioned, legal discovery eventually revealed that an internal Harvard study had largely confirmed my analysis of Asian discrimination but had been suppressed. Meanwhile, my much more explosive analysis of massive Jewish over-representation had never been significantly challenged despite the angry fulminations of a few agitated Jewish activists, but the topic had unsurprisingly disappeared from any public debate.

However, circumstances changed a few years later:

In 2016 I had launched a high-profile campaign to elect a slate of candidates to the Harvard Board of Overseers, with one of our central issues being greater transparency in admissions, and although our effort failed, it may have had some longer-term consequences.

Neither our own slate nor that of our bitter opponents ever raised the issue of Jewish numbers, but the front-page story in the New York Times announcing our effort must surely have reminded activist groups of the explosive contents of my original 2012 paper, and the risk that the surprising facts I had provided might eventually slip past their media blockade and reach the American public, perhaps with fateful consequences.

All my enrollment figures had been drawn from the public estimates annually provided by Hillel, the nationwide Jewish campus organization, whose numbers had been used for decades by academic researchers and media outlets. My article had noted that even slight declines in Jewish enrollment had sometimes provoked enormous public controversies and demands that they be immediately reversed. As I wrote in 2012:

Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.

The year after our unsuccessful Harvard Overseer campaign, the Hillel website reported a sudden, massive collapse in Jewish enrollment at Harvard and many other top universities, a decline of more than 50% that was totally ignored by both the national media and normally alert Jewish activist organizations, and this striking disappearance of Jews at elite colleges has continued down to the present day. However, I quickly determined that this shift seemed merely to be one of redefinition, with students apparently now only counted in that category if they declared themselves to be practitioners of the Jewish religion, a change that had an enormous impact…

For example, in 2013 Harvard Hillel had claimed a Jewish undergraduate enrollment of 25%, while one of my sharp critics noted that a Harvard Crimson survey indicated that only 9.5% of the entering freshmen of the Class of 2017 were Jewish, seemingly representing a huge discrepancy. However, that survey referred to being religiously Jewish, which is entirely different than being Jewish in the broader ethnic or ancestral sense, especially since Jews are among the most secular populations in American society and a full 42% of the Harvard students described their religious beliefs as atheist, agnostic, or “other.” Indeed, a worldwide survey found that only 38% of (ethnic) Jews follow the Jewish religion. So if the Crimson survey were correct and Harvard Jews were typical in their religiosity, this would imply that 9.5% / 0.38 = 25% of Harvard freshman were ethnically Jewish, exactly the percentage claimed by Harvard Hillel. This strongly suggests that the Hillel figures were roughly accurate.

In general, Jewish classification has a rather protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion, ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded or contracted for various reasons…

It is well known that for many decades the American Communist Party and especially its top leadership were overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a time when Jews were just 3% of the national population. But Jewish community leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious belief?

Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information. With a high-profile Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very large…

If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices, the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile population being none the wiser.

For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.

One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith. According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.

As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated, in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from Jewish organizations. The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.

This apparent shift from a classification based upon Jewish ancestry to one based upon Jewish religion seems to have successfully obscured the central issue for many journalists:

My own Meritocracy analysis was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, but such numbers represent merely a tiny sliver within the vastness of the Internet, and after a few months my explosive Jewish findings had permanently vanished from any secondary coverage or other public discussion. So although well-informed individuals interested in Jewish matters or elite college admissions must be aware of my results, the complete silence of the broader media has ensured that everyone else remained entirely ignorant.

As an example of this, a few days ago a friend of mine pointed me to a Tablet podcast series on Jews in the Ivy League entitled “Gatecrashers” and hosted by Mark Oppenheimer, an Orthodox Jewish journalist who often focuses on religious matters. Although I listened to the episode “Harvard and the End of the Jewish Ivy League,” I found Oppenheimer’s obvious lack of quantitative skills or any true understanding of the issues involved rather disheartening.

However, the podcast page did provide a link to a very helpful article in the Harvard Crimson, presenting the results of four years of Freshman surveys on a variety of lifestyle issues, including religious faith. During 2013-2016, there had been a very sharp decline in most religious affiliations, with the percentage of Catholics and Protestants together dropping from over 42% to less than 35% in just four years, and a corresponding, even stronger decline in followers of Judaism, while the combined category of Atheists, Agnostics, and “Other” grew from under 42% to nearly 53%. We can safely assume that a very substantial portion of the adherents in those latter categories are Jewish by ethnicity.

Freshmen who were religiously Jewish had dropped to just 6.3% in 2016, but during the other three years the percentage had closely clustered around 10%, which is also the figure currently reported for Harvard on the Hillel website. So if we assume that Harvard College attracts Jews who are average in their religious faith, this indicates that the ethnically Jewish fraction of the undergraduate population would be roughly 25% or perhaps a bit higher.

If this estimate of Jewish numbers is even remotely correct, the implications are quite astonishing, and we can easily understand why switching from ethnicity to religion was employed as a subterfuge to conceal that reality. Since 1980 every college and university in America has been required to report the demographic characteristics of its student body to the National Center for Education Statistics. Our own website provides this public data in a highly-convenient form, allowing easy examination of the historical trajectory of all our thousands of undergraduate academic institutions, and we can examine a table showing the changing enrollment at Harvard College since 2012:

One of the most striking facts is that during the five years 2015-2020, the percentage of black students grew from 6.3% to 11.0%, a remarkable rise of 75%, certainly the most rapid in Harvard’s history, and despite the decline in 2021, the numbers are still up by nearly 50% since 2015. This dramatic rise was driven by extremely high acceptance rates, with blacks being 14.8% of the students admitted in 2020 and a whopping 18% of the 2021 admissions. The number of Hispanic, Asian, and foreign students also rose substantially during those same years.

The Iron Law of Arithmetic demands that percentages must sum to 100, so during this same period, Harvard’s white enrollment dropped by nearly 10 percentage points, steadily falling from 45.1% in 2012 to just 35.4% in 2021. And if, as seems likely, ethnically Jewish students are in the approximate range of 25%, the unavoidable conclusion is that although white Gentiles are nearly 60% of the American population and probably at least 60% of our highest-performing students, they are now approaching a single digit presence at our most elite college. As I noted in my original 2012 article, Harvard has long enrolled American blacks at a considerably higher rate than non-Jewish whites, but the former are now probably comparable in absolute numbers even though the latter are more than four times more numerous in our society.

These shocking conclusions must be carefully hedged with a couple of caveats. It is possible that for some reason Jews at Harvard are far more religious than the Jewish population as a whole, which would impact our ethnic estimates. There also seems to be some anecdotal evidence that the lure of Affirmative Action admissions has increasingly persuaded some white students to falsely claim non-white status, and perhaps those numbers have now become large enough to significantly distort Harvard’s official statistics. But aside from these two possible factors, both quite difficult to evaluate, the shocking conclusions I have drawn seem inescapable.

These remarkable statistics suggest the near-exclusion of white Gentiles from our most elite educational institutions, and if this is the case, I suspect that the individuals behind the lawsuit claiming that there is “a deliberate effort by Harvard to minimize its Jewish student population” may come to rue the day they brought that issue to rigorous examination and widespread public debate.

The circumstances under which this very strange situation may have developed are unclear, but the closing paragraphs of my 2018 article on the Asian lawsuit against Harvard provided some intriguing speculation along those lines:

Many years ago as a young and naive undergraduate, I would usually spend my dinners discussing all sorts of political and policy issues with my fellow classmates in our Harvard dining hall.

Affirmative Action was a regular topic of our conversations, and I would occasionally note how odd America was in that regard. No other example came to mind in which an ethnic group had established a legalized system of racial discrimination against its own members, while similar sorts of systems aimed at excluding or disadvantaging rival ethnic groups were all too common in world history.

As the decades went by, I gradually noticed that the huge and continuing increase in the enrollment of non-white and foreign students at our most elite universities had caused a complete collapse in the enrollment of white American Gentiles, but oddly enough, no similar reduction in Jewish numbers. It was well-known that Jewish activists had been the primary force behind the establishment of Affirmative Action and related policies in college admissions, and I began to wonder about their true motivation, whether conscious or unconscious.

Had the goal been the stated one, of providing educational opportunities to previously excluded groups? Or had that merely been the excuse used to advance a policy that eliminated the majority of white Gentiles, their primary ethnic competitors? With the Jewish population numbering merely 2%, there was an obvious limit as to how many elite college slots they themselves could possibly fill, but if enough other groups were also brought in, then Gentile numbers could easily be reduced to low levels, despite the fact that they constituted the bulk of the national population.

Asians represented an interesting test-case. As their numbers rapidly grew, white Gentiles were consequently pushed out, and this process was celebrated across the academic community. But by the late 1980s, Asian numbers had increased to such an extent that they inevitably began to impinge upon elite Jewish enrollment as well and future increases would surely worsen the situation. And at that point, the process suddenly halted, with Asian numbers being sharply reduced and thereafter permanently capped. The implications of this situation were already in the back of my mind when I published my 1998 Wall Street Journal column describing some of these striking racial facts.

The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals.

The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved.

Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society.

Thus, the enormous public controversy regarding the Israel/Gaza conflict may be opening many doors to other very touchy issues that had long been kept tightly shut.

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