Originally published in the American Thinker
Once again anti-Semitism has roiled Wellesley College. The recent abrupt firingof the Hillel director and chaplain, and the relentless denigration of Israel by Muslim students and supportive faculty, have triggered concern about festering prejudice at the elite women’s college nestled within a sedate Boston suburb.
Postings by Students for Justice in Palestine have invited equations of Zionism with “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “murder.” Jewish students feel under assault, without support from indifferent college administrators or inept Hillel staff. So it was that a student with an Israeli contact provided Haaretz with an opportunity to break the story, which the Boston Globe, the Forward, and The Jewish Advocatehave amplified.
Wellesley College opened in 1875 to educate young women “for the glory of God and the service of the Lord Jesus Christ.” In the sylvan setting of Henry Fowle Durant’s sprawling estate fifteen miles west of Boston, students learned that “Christian character” was “the most radiant crown of womanhood.” There they engaged in “the war of Christ . . . against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Wellesley women were encouraged to live their lives “in humble imitation of Him who ’came not to be ministered unto, but to minister’” (Matthew 20:28).
Like its Big Brothers -- Harvard, Yale, and Princeton -- and other Seven Sister colleges, Wellesley designed its admission policy to cultivate and perpetuate a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. This challenge became all the more imperative after World War I, when hordes of socially undesirable candidates with academically superior credentials -- in a word, Jews -- threatened to inundate the academic citadels of privilege. Just as Congress enacted immigration laws to curtail the entry of undesirables from Southern and Eastern Europe, so colleges imposed quotas to exclude Jews.