It is the deep and widespread social dominance of WASP cultural values, and in particular an ascendant faith in the importance of personalistic judgments as a balance to the fearsome new mechanism of test scores, that accounts for the power of the new approaches to “merit-based” selection across early twentieth century American society. The widespread nature of these values and this selection system also explains why, as I discussed in my first post, Stanford independently moved to introduce highly personalistic admissions procedures in the 1910s and 1920s, even though the university had next to no Jewish applicants. As my research over the past year has uncovered, the personalistic methods of student assessment that became widespread in the 1920s — not just at elite institutions but in more than two-thirds of US colleges and universities4 — find their proximate origins not in anti-Semitism but in the personnel movement in business, the vocational education movement in high schools, the new industrial psychology, and the World War I–era US military.
The deeper source of these personalistic methods was the rise across the Global North of large-scale corporations and managerial staffs, and the concomitant emergence of a new personal quality that officials across civil society, in an effort to manage these new behemoths, sought to identify and cultivate — “leadership.” This, not diversity, was the crucial term of discussion in university admissions offices at the advent of modern college admissions, and the top buzzword across the wider world of business and education from the 1900s to the 1930s.
“Diversity,” by contrast, only emerged as a significant term of art in higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. This chronology should not come as a surprise. In the United States, the 1920s, the era of the second Ku Klux Klan, immigration restriction, and widespread anti-Catholic bigotry against presidential candidate Al Smith, was the absolute nadir of diversity's intellectual wellspring, cultural pluralism. By contrast, the 1950s and 1960s, the era of the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” the end of WASP preferences in immigration, widespread admiration for the nation’s first Catholic president, not to mention the enormous successes of the Black Freedom Movement, saw cultural pluralism at its height. Invented to integrate Jews and other immigrants from eastern and southern Europe into the benefits of whiteness, cultural pluralism was rapidly repurposed throughout this period for much wider racial inclusion.