.@Harvard President Lowell set quotas for Jews in the 1920s. The difference then is that there was a national uproar against antisemitism in response. That led to the development of today’s admission policies, which consider a much broader array of factors than just academic merit. While I am supportive of considering a broad array of factors in selecting candidates for admission, we have likely gone too far away from merit based selection. The pendulum has swung too far in large part due to the ideology of the DEI movement. Candidates deemed ‘oppressed’ are massively advantaged in the process versus those deemed the ‘oppressors.’ This is a crazy rubric as it advantages the daughter of the billionaire of color who went to Exeter over a poor white boy from Mississippi from a single parent family who was educated in a single-room school house and scored 1,600 on his SATs.