It's just affirmative action. This sort of thing happens in every multicultural country, especially when one group apparently does better financially than the others.
The Russians came up with an unusually crass method for this, but guess what? Jews and other whites and East Asians all are, to some degree, kept from elite institutions today because of our more subtle system.
"Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans."
In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.
If elite American universities didn't penalize Asians, they would almost literally have no non-Asian students. This is because Asian-Americans optimize the entire lives of their youth around maximizing their admissions chances to elite universities. There's racism here, but there's also just Goodhart's Law, normal old American anti-intellectualism, and the proper acknowledgement that standardized exam scores show very little about a university applicant's real life prospects.
Part of turning 18 in the USA is making the transition from subservient child to independent adult, over a period of years (usually by 26 you're considered definitely adult or way behind). Part of the problem with Asian-Americans is, they don't make the transition. Striver-immigrant culture and extreme focus on family (at one time a part of Jewish-American immigrant culture too, often more an immigrant thing than a particular culture's thing) cause people to overoptimize their kids' upbringing on being good little subservient worker-bee children, often leaving them semi-crippled when required to function as independent adults.
And then let's not even get into the cultural differences in areas of authority, ego and freedom between East Asia and America, which put Asians at a severe disadvantage due to their inclination, ground in by "Chinese mothers" over periods of years, to expect being ordered around all the time.
Before anyone calls me a vicious racist, a Chinese student in a class at university once referred to me as "more Asian than the Asians". I like to look back on how completely wrong he was :-).
Or you could take a look at the long history of anti-Asian racism in America (Chinese massacre of 1871, imported Asian slave labors for building the transcontinental railroads, Chinese Exclusion Act, Asiatic Barred Zone Act, etc). Just because you want to claim they are not comparable doesn't mean they are not.
I think what he was trying to say is that this is affirmative action for gentiles. In other words, Russia made it easier for non-Jews by virtue of giving them easier entrance exams.
I still think "affirmative action" is a clumsy and not entirely correct way of describing what he's trying to articulate. But he's not trying to be as provocative as he comes across. At least I don't think (?) he is?
Just because you have a name for non-Jews doesn't make it a cohesive group and most importantly nowhere near a minority.
It's insane to say discriminating against a minority is like affirmative action for everyone else. So if I don't like Bob I could phrase it that it's not that I don't like him--I do!-- it's just that I like everyone else better (including other people I dislike). And for someone to fall for that would be ridiculous.
It sounds less like a serious attempt to understand this episode in history, and more like a way to score a quick point about 21st-century American politics.
Say you have a minority that's 1% of the population, and unhindered it would also make up 1% of enrollments.
If you don't allow that minority to enroll, you're increasing the acceptance chance of a majority group member by just over 1%, while decreasing the acceptance chance of the minority member by 100%.
The correct way to describe this is then most definitely discrimination against the minority, and not affirmative action for the majority.
Actually Jews were about 1% of Soviet Union population and 5%-10% of University students. If Jews were only 1% of student population it would not be an issue. I went to mathematical magnet school (best math school in 5M+ city) and easily 30%-50% of students had Jewish roots.
Essentially it was more difficult for Jews to get into university, neutral for Russians, easier for Tatars and some other minorities and extremely easy for what's called Northern Minorities (they had - and still have special quotas, no exams necessary)
Speaking as 1/4 Russian-Jewish, 1/4 Chuvash, 1/8 Latvian and 1/rest Russian.
The term "affirmative action" is so easy to manipulate that it could be used to cover any form of discrimination. I guess Soviets would describe their discriminatory policy as an affirmative action to increase the social and ethnic diversity of the class of intellectuals, or something between those lines.
I can't believe this troll comment is the top comment.
> Our team of the best eight Soviet students, during the month we had the problems, solved only half of them.
Those questions weren't hard. They were impossible. The point was simply to not allow any undesirables to pass. Higher standards for Asians might be bullshit but it's not the same as literally keeping all Asians out regardless of skill.
The entrance math exam in MSU is not pass/fail but graded. There are two math exams (at least in the "math department", I imagine she meant either Mech-Mat or VMK), written and oral. Written exam consists of 6 problems with the passing mark 3 and maximum 5 (you only need to solve 5 correctly, 5th and 6th problems are the hardest and usually allow a choice between an algebra and a geometry problem, giving the time limit it's hard to solve both). Oral test is administered by drawing a random "ticket" with two general questions from the school program (e.g. "What are properties of a triangle?") and the problems the person conducting the test can choose based on the answers and the result of the written test. Answering two "ticket" questions correctly gives you the passing grade (3) already. So there is no way anybody could be failed by any number of the problems given during the oral test if they managed to answer the "ticket". At the worst case one could be dropped to 3 at the oral test, giving total of 8 for the both math tests and that's a pretty good mark. Total test score of 13 (you need to get 5 for the third marked test, written Physics and pass unmarked written Russian) is guaranteed admission. 12 - is a good chance of admission and, depending on the year, even 11 can get you in.
However there is a shortcut - under some conditions (either being a subject of one of Soviet "AA" incentives or being a winner of a math Olympiad), 4 or 5 for the first test (written math) gives automatic admission. 9 for the both math tests is also automatic and unconditional admission.
So the way the hard questions in the oral test come up is usually when you get 4 for the written test. If you could not solve 5th or 6th problem in the written test you are at the average level and giving you 5 (and automatically admitting you) in the oral test would defeat the whole purpose of the shortcut rule to secure admission for the exceptional students. So you have to get 4 or, really, 3 and such a question is to ensure that.
I don't know about anti-semitism, maybe there was some yet I have seen plenty of Jews both among students and faculty so, evidentially, they have not been entirely kept out. Yet I have seen a lot of people (of all origins) complaining about entrance exam being "too hard" and them being persecuted for various reasons. The reality is that pretty much every year from 70s to late 90s there had been several candidates for each student place so some people had to fail the test.
Jews were not completely kept out. There were admitted with a census. I.e. there was a fixed small percentage that was permitted to be accepted, and the rest were to be rejected using these kind of tactics. The obviously antisemitic nature of those methods was practically government sanctioned, but nowhere officially articulated. This existed until USSR fell apart in the beginning of 1990s. Since then this discrimination is practically gone. (Now there are no oral exams altogether anyway).
Unless it's an official policy rejecting somebody using these tactics is impossible: everyone get the same written test and the "ticket" questions on the oral test are fixed and randomly chosen .
You can definitely make it less likely to be admitted for certain groups (e.g. people from out of city who would need a dorm room, there are only so many rooms) or more likely (e.g. minorities or "natzmen") but the article and comments imply the examiners had full ability to reject Jews. This was simply impossible.
Later is actually easier than former because while an unfairly low grade will have to be defended in front of several official committees an unfairly high grade will only draw attention of few students.
PS. Sorry to learn the oral test is gone. Though even during my time (91-96) the number of applications dropped dramatically and if this trend continued they probably have less applications than places by now.
I disagree. The policy was "official" in a sense of coming from above. But they attempted to wrap it around in "natural causes".
> but the article and comments imply the examiners had full ability to reject Jews. This was simply impossible.
There are multiple evidences that it was going on. I'm not familiar with exact mechanics of how those failure problems were given to undesirables (it was before my time). But it's a historic fact that it was happening on a massive scale. There were even "Jewish" institutes, like MIIT which got disproportionally big percentage of Jews, because of the census policy in MSU (Mekhmat & VMK).
> Sorry to learn the oral test is gone.
In many colleges there are no entry tests at all these days. Major ones like MSU have written exams.
Unnecessary bashing. The OP singled Jews out, which framed this discussion mostly around Jews. Prejudice against Jews is called anti semitism. There's really nothing to see here, nobody implied that there was no discrimination against other groups.
Well in the first place framing this discussion mostly around jews is precisely the problem. Don't you understand why it is offensive?
The same way it's offensive when my jewish relatives claim the Nazi genocide was the worst catastrophe in all history, conveniently forgetting the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Armenian Genocide etc etc
So I don't like the use of the word "anti-semitism" in the first place. But what really annoys me is that it is a euphemism, and a hyped one at that. To a first approximation, anti-semite means Nazi. Prejudice against jews is correctly called judeophobia instead.
shmerl managed both to commit this abuse of language
and complain about the use of stupid euphemisms at the same time.
And what he was complaining about - affirmative action to mean discrimination - is a far smaller abuse of language.
Sorry, I don't see the offense in framing a discussion around one instance of something. Don't get me wrong, if someone claims to be fighting for a general cause and then repeatedly talks about one instance, that's wrong. But I really don't see a problem with someone offering a story about one instance. At no point did the OP imply that there was no discrimination against other groups.
Claiming that the Holocaust (I'm guessing you don't like that word either) was the worst catastrophe in all of history is a different matter. Now you're dealing with a statement of fact that should at least in theory be either 'right' or 'wrong'. In practice though, I don't think it makes any sense to split hairs around wether it was the 'worst' catastrophe in human history. Who cares, it was pretty damn bad. It's hard to see why you would be offended - there's plenty of defensible views of the word 'catastrophe' that could make the holocaust the 'worst' catastrophe, and if by some other reasonable view of 'catastrophe' the holocaust only comes in at number 7, why would you view it as offensive if someone disagreed?
Same goes for your insistence on the right way to call 'prejudice against jews', where you also manage to find offense. Any mainstream dictionary will define anti semitism as something around discrimination or prejudice against Jews, which would make it's use in this discussion 100% legitimate.
Perhaps you could enlighten us - what exactly is the problem with Jews talking about ways in which they were hurt as a group in the past?
what exactly is the problem with Jews talking about ways in which they were hurt as a group in the past?
The problem is with shmerl saying we can't use the phrase "affirmative action".
At no point did the OP imply that there was no discrimination against other groups.
From the Frenkel article: "People of other nationalities, like Tatars and Armenians, against whom there were prejudices and persecution—though not nearly on the same scale as against the Jews"
One who thinks the Soviets hurt anyone more than the Ukrainians and Chechens is deluded.
The basic problem here is that Russia is blatantly, horrifically racist in general. I'm sharing an apartment with a Russian Jew who shows no outward signs of Jewish practice or culture, but whose father nonetheless had to live a double-life between Russia and America just because he was descended from Jewish stock. That's plainly racial antisemitism and every bit deserving of the word.
Are you clear that "anti-semitism" carries some meaning other than "prejudice against jews"? So if you use it to mean "prejudice against jews" it is a euphemism. I can give you the history of the term if you like.
It's hard to look into your head and understand what exactly anti-semitism means to you. For anti-semitism to qualify as a euphemism, we'd have to establish that:
1. It actually has some substantial meaning outside of 'prejudice/discrimination against jews'
2. It is offensive beyond the offence that one might take from being accused of prejudice/discrimination against jews
As for (1), here's some dictionary definitions:
Merriam-Webste: hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group
Collins: prejudice or hostility towards Jews
Cambridge: the strong dislike or cruel and unfair treatment of Jewish people
I'm not clear on what sort of historial narrative you could provide that would 'load' this term with substantial additional meaning and offense, but it would have to be very convincing.
No, your criteria are bogus.
We simply have to establish that it is not literal usage.
Calling someone anti-semitic when you mean prejudiced is euphemistic in exactly the same way it is euphemistic to call someone a Nazi instead when you mean prejudiced. This cannot be literal unless said person is a member of the NSDAP.
Which is almost never the case because the NSDAP hasn't existed or had any members since 1945. In fact, "anti-semite" is approximately a synonym for "Nazi", though it is in fact an older term.
The term "anti-semite" was invented by 19th century German racist theorists to describe themselves, based on their social-Darwinistic style theory of race war. (This is also why your dictionary definitions are wrong. Look it up.)
The term strictly cannot apply to anyone who does not buy into 19th century race war theory.
For example, it is strictly a nonsense to call the Spanish Inquisition (or anything else before the 19th century) "anti-semitic".
It is also highly erm, dubious, to call a Russian communist believer in Marxism an "anti-semite".
The correct term is "judeophobe".
You should call someone prejudiced against jews "judeophobic", not "anti-semitic", unless (for example) he is wearing a Gestapo uniform.
The same way you call someone prejudiced against blacks a "racist", not a "White Supremacist", unless he is wearing a Klan uniform.
It was actually shmerl and not me who was getting all hissy about euphemism; I was merely calling him (her?) on his bullshit.
I realize that common usage may be sloppier which is why I did tag my post as being pedantic. I am disinclined to continue posting on this topic.
Universities had national census not only for Jews obviously. This doesn't preclude the fact of that it was manifestation of antisemitism. If you don't get it - there is little point in explaining it to you.
Wow, that is crazy!! Even though i have 2 math degrees and am doing applied math and stats for a living, there is a very good chance I'd fail such an exam if I took it now!
Number 17 doesn't look to be extraordinary, it actually was commonly given in Moscow State University (on math and computer science departments) until recently, when oral examinations were removed altogether.
In general such discrimination against Jews in Moscow State University was commonplace until the beginning of 1990s, and is gone since then.
Incidentally, during Perestroika the society was changing at such a high rate that what was hard to imagine just three months before was becoming routine. Now looking back 20+ years it is so difficult to reconstruct the timeline.
Well, I know when Perestroika started, but I gave it a bit of a margin, since I can't say for sure when precisely it affected this discrimination. It's known to be gone for sure in the 1990s. Could be, it started in 1989.
E.g. http://www.math.msu.su/admission/MATWRITE/w2001j~1.gif
does not seem much easier than "jewish" problems; and my understanding is that math department of MSU attempts to admit brilliant people who deliberately prepare to solve problems of this kind.
Here authors also filtered problems which have relatively "simple" solution (which is hard to find). The problems used to fail students included those with extremely hard (or non existent) solutions.
Andrei Sakharov once commented, that he reviewed those kind of math problems, and was perplexed by their complexity.
Jews invented racial discrimination. Let a gentile apply to a Jewish school, even if his father is Jewish and he practices Judaism they will turn him down if his mother is not ethnically Jewish.
You actually can't see the difference between religious law being used to discriminate among applicants to a private, parochial, religious K-12 school and discrimination at a public, state-funded institution based on inescapable racial identities recorded by the government at birth?
If you've been subject to the discrimination it probably feels the same. public/private whatever you call them, they are all just groups of people, and exclusionary judgment based on a couple generations of dna, well I think THAT should be reserved for haShem only. Live by the sword die by the sword, reciprocity, lex talionis, karma, ... almost always catches up.
Guys, I studied in Moscow Institute of Pysics and technology, top technical university in the former USSR - I had in my class people who won International Olympiads in physics, math, chemistry, computer science. Those problems are average or below - you could meet them on math entrance exams to economics specialization. Problems are of the level of district\city math olympiads. I'm sure that jewish people as well as any other applicants with good math background solved them without big problems.
I see. Please take a look at a partial collection of references at
http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html -- it contains memoirs, discussions, and some bibliography.
I believe, issue was not the final numbers - % of Jewish people/Jewish population was the highest compare to other nations in the USSR. Number of Jewish professors, academics and billionaries with academic background is amazing.
I understand why USSR did that. Government sponsored education. Number of places in best universities was very limited, it was nation's genome and capital. People who supposed to develop new weapons and economy. Soviet government did not trust Jewish people - as we see from the history, Jewish people were often the first who left the country in case of problems. It was hard to imagine that they will become Soviet patriots. That's why USSR came up with artificial barriers in order to give more places in universities to more potentionally patriotic students. USSR wanted to save its intelligent capital investment and feel more save.
The problem was the rude way how artificial barrier was created by USSR. Instead of organizing super-complex writing exams for Jewish people, or making ideological interviews they tried to eliminate them with fake oral exams.
See below how US handles the same issue with asian students (reposted from user continuations).
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04....
"Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans."
In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.
Going out on a limb and guessing he means unquestioningly bending over—in this case, rather literally—for authority figures in the face of unreasonable demands.
IMO, Philip Zombardo's studies (most famously, the Stanford prison experiment[0]) suggest this is nothing new.
Actually, nothing. I just posted it because I am in shock after reading it. Feel free to downvote, or, I'll just delete it. Are you one of the "nearly one third"?
EDIT: To be fair though, it does have a Jewish connection - cattle trains?
No, I'm not of the "nearly one third". I think the privacy implications of the current TSA procedures are not anywhere near the most problematic privacy issues in our society, but an escalation of that type would be beyond what I would accept.
I am, however, Jewish, and was originally a math major in college, so I do have a particular interest in this story and would appreciate it if the conversation could stay on topic.
The "cattle train" connection is pretty contrived. One is voluntary travel, the other involuntary. One is certainly a breech of dignity, rationality, and privacy, but the other was often deadly, and is at a completely different level of dehumanization.
Well, Hitler was inspired by the american concentration camps for native americans to build his own concentration camps for Jews:
“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.” (“Adolph Hitler” by John Toland, p 202)
Plus, there were two to three times more native americans that were killed by European invaders in the US region, than Jews that died in the holocaust.
So, the US already has HAD a holocaust problem in the past.
(One would call dropping two bombs to 250,000 civilians and evaporating them, a holocaust itself, by the very definition of the term)
The US's extermination of American Indians was brilliant and cunning. If you study the historical record, one thing you become aware of is that the colonists didn't originally have the advantage. They had guns, but that wasn't so much of an edge that the Indians couldn't have wiped out the colonists with their superior numbers.
Even at the time of the American Revolution, you see treaties with the Delaware Indians that are incredibly deferential, asking for their permission to cross Indian territory to fight the British.
The exterimination proceeded slowly over almost 100 years. We would make treaties, at first deferential then increasingly aggressive, to placate the Indians while slowly moving them off desirable land. American numbers grew while Indian numbers dwindled, until we got to the state that exists now, with them isolated to tiny little pockets of land.
What happened, from what I've read, is that initial contact put enough European disease into the population that the population and society collapsed; it was thus much easier for Europeans settling here to win.
The Amazon was, allegedly, basically a garden at one point -- the natives the Spanish eventually encountered were just broken remains of a much larger civilization which had been successful and then disappeared.
What's disgusting is that the abuse continues to this very day.
First they were decimated, then they were forced into "reformation camps" to break their spirit, and then casino licenses and the like were thrown to them as a bone (and to corrupt and silence the more tempted or gullible with the easy money).
The government and various interested parties even try to take some of their supposedly "sovereign" reservation lands from them and/or poison them to get profitable minerals such as Uranium.
I met one of the creators of the movie in Chicago. One of the guys behind it, Jeff Spitz, is a very articulate advocate and has been following this story since 2000. His group followed up the movie with webisodes to update the story and use the movie to put pressure on the EPA.
http://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Around-World-Empiri...
The Russians came up with an unusually crass method for this, but guess what? Jews and other whites and East Asians all are, to some degree, kept from elite institutions today because of our more subtle system.