1940s Yale Had Quotas of 13% Jewish and 13% Catholic

Why no mention of the Catholic quota?

I’m slowly working my way through Sam Tanenhaus’s giant biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., Buckley, and I was struck by a line on p. 114: When the ultra-Catholic WFB was at Yale in the late 1940s, “Admission quotas on Catholics and Jews were both set at 13 percent …”

Of course, it’s extremely well-known that Ivy League colleges placed a quota on Jewish admissions from the early 1920s onward, then lifted them during the Cold War, in the mid-fifties at Harvard and in 1965 Yale.

My late friend, Jim Chapin (brother of folk singer Harry Chapin), taught history at Yale in the mid-1960s.

In the fall of 1965, the quota on Jews was lifted. Jim said it instantly changed the climate on campus. Yale became much more intellectual and much more radical. The late 1960s campus protests tended to be a Jewish Woodstock.

But WASPs tended to deny that demographic change was behind their discomfort. For example, Jim noted, George W. Bush found Yale in 1965 much less comfortable than Yale in 1964. But GWB blamed his liberal distant WASP kinsman Strobe Talbott for the change rather than swelling number of Jews on campus.

But, what I’d never heard before is that Yale also had a Catholic quota. Catholic quotas are, apparently, less interesting to all concerned.

Why?

Paywall here.