As part of an effort to promote Jewish studies courses, a group of professors organized a host of speeches, panel discussions and presentations yesterday on the role of Jewish academics in American higher education.
Russian Professor Barry Scherr, a member the group, said that in organizing symposia like this, the group hopes to "look into the possibility of increasing the number of Jewish studies courses," at the College.
The Jewish Studies Initiatives at Dartmouth College, a group of Jewish faculty at the College, is sponsoring the symposium titled "The Jewish Experience in American Higher Education" in Alumni Hall.
The symposium brought a number of speakers together from the world of academia to discuss the various experiences of Jews in American academics.
Yesterday's half of the symposium concluded with College President James Freedman and George Washington University President Stephen Trachtenberg engaging in a panel discussion in which they spoke about their experiences in higher education as Jewish administrators.
Trachtenberg told those assembled about the time when he was applying for his first job as a university president, at the University of Hartford.
He said during his interview at the University of Hartford, a member of the search committee got up and voiced his opposition to Trachtenberg's application because he thought "the Hartford community was not ready for a Jewish president."
Despite this opposition, Trachtenberg was awarded the job and later the individual apologized to him.
Trachtenberg said the incident gave him pause because he had never thought of his Jewish background as important in his job search.
Freedman said that he, too, had never thought of his being Jewish as professionally important, and talked about his days as president of the University of Iowa.
"When I interviewed with Iowa, the issue never came up," he said.
But he said Jewish alumni of the school whom he met at various fund-raisers appreciated his Jewish background.
"When I met them on receiving lines they would squeeze my hand and say 'Shalom,'" as an indication that they supported him, he said.
Both Freedman and Trachtenberg agreed that the percentage of Jews in academia will probably decline in the next decades because as Jews become more assimilated, they enter academia in smaller and smaller numbers.
Trachtenberg described a dinner he had with several graduates of Hartford's Medical School while he was president there. He said that of the 10 students who were at the dinner, only one was Jewish while eight were Asian women.
"It's clear that the future is made up of women in positions and they're all Chinese," he joked.
Other speeches today included a discussion of the thesis Alexandra Sheppard '92 wrote her senior year.
Sheppard's thesis dealt with the role of Jewish students at the College during the years 1920-40 and concluded that during those times, despite quotas and masked anti-semitism, Dartmouth was a "good place to be Jewish."
She noted that during the 1930s, the percentage of Jewish enrollment at Dartmouth was higher than it is today. The class of 1935, she mentioned, was approximately 15-20 percent Jewish, according to an estimate made at the time by then-College President Ernest Martin Hopkins.
Today the College's Jewish enrollment hovers around 10 percent, she said.
The symposium will continue today with speeches on the experience of Jewish students at Dartmouth.
