Sense or Nonsense?

The first rule of most clubs, colleges and societies that apply "quotas" to restrict Jews is to deny that they would do any such thing. Dartmouth's longtime President Ernest Martin Hopkins, having frankly admitted to using the quota system at Dartmouth, last week found himself roundly damned.

New York's minority-conscious Post, belatedly learning of Hopkins' views, skimped space from the war to bannerline on Page 1: "DARTMOUTH BARS JEWS 'TO END ANTI-SEMITISM,' SAYS PREXY." Next day PM, the Post's rival tabloid, took it up, running Hopkins' picture side by side with Nazi Jew-baiter Alfred Rosenberg. PM accused President Hopkins of "spouting the Hitler-Rosenberg line," or at best-talking "well-meaning but witless" nonsense.

"Sympathetic." What started it all was a round-robin wire sent to 300 educators last January by the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, asking educators to speak out against restricting Jewish enrollment in schools. From Dartmouth's Hopkins came a surprising wire: "UNDERSTAND COMPLEXITY OF PROBLEM AND AM SYMPATHETIC WITH PURPOSES YOU HAVE IN MIND. CANNOT JOIN WITH YOU HOWEVER. . . ."

He amplified these views three months later in a letter to Broadway Producer Herman Shumlin (The Male Animal, The Searching Wind), a director of the Independent Citizens Committee. Wrote Hopkins: "The fact cannot safely be ignored that some things cannot be done by violence but require persuasion. Those who do ignore it are killing the thing they love. . . .

"I would not for anything forgo the representation of Jewish boys that enroll year by year at Dartmouth," he added. "Some of our outstanding alumni are Jews, as are some of the foremost benefactors of the college. . . . However . . . Dartmouth . . . would lose its racial tolerance, which it is desperately anxious not to lose, were we to accept unexamined the great blocks of Jewish applications which come in. . . ."

To this Shumlin replied: "I am filled with anger against you and shame. . . . It is fantastic to me that a man in your position can, at this date, make use of the very allegations which were used by Hitler and his accomplices. . . ."

Not Displeased. President of Dartmouth since 1916, 67-year-old Dr. Hopkins has been outspoken in his opinions before. In 1930 he was one of the first U.S. college presidents to decry Prohibition, and was strongly interventionist before Pearl Harbor.

He was surprised at the hue & cry over his latest statement which, he said, was never intended for publication; but he was "not displeased that the problem is now in the open." He still defended his course as the right one for Dartmouth: "Any college of restricted enrollment must depend on quotas in everything--as to East and West, public and private schools, urban and agricultural areas, and racial groups as well."

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