In America, the purely practical part of science is admirably understood.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

That a privately incorporated college has an ethical or civic obligation to be transparent or even fair in admitting students may seem a hoary commonplace, but it’s a notion barely older than cable TV.

Whether rooted in Colonial New Haven, an Ohio forest clearing, or a 19th-century urban Catholic ghetto, private American colleges were born with authority to pass judgment on applicants according to standards of the institution’s choice, and with no need to explain themselves except, on occasion, to an irate alumnus whose son was deemed too dim or depraved to stand in the magnanimous embrace of Alma Mater.

Almost invariably, the standards formed along four lines: confessional, intellectual, geographic, and social—though with some twists, as in the love affair, lasting from the early 19th century until World War II, between Princeton and the South’s white aristocracy, which kept Princeton free of black students until 1945.

The system engendered the diversity of a produce aisle: each fruit snugly gathered to its own kind in its own straw-lined box. At the University of Chicago, brain power was bannered; while Harvard murmured over sherry that its work was to develop leaders (who would of course have been baptized in High Church waters). Institutions founded to educate Catholic and Low Church Protestants saw their mission as nourishing social and economic prospects in the neighborhood while at the same time securing their charges from exposure to religious error and its practitioners. And other colleges found raison d’être in enrolling men skilled in eating, drinking, and sporting. As a president of fin-de-siecle Princeton—the reigning party school of its era and probably all eras (sorry, Yalies)—reportedly told his faculty: “Gentlemen, whether we like it or not, we shall have to recognize that Princeton is a rich man’s college and that rich men do not frequently come to college to study.”

The first strong challenge to this way of being came in the 1920s, when young Jews—sons of immigrants—began crashing ivy-draped gates on the strength of entrance exam performances and high school grades. Some elite institutions enacted Jew-quotas; while others tried to preserve their meritocracies by adding such things as “geographic diversity” (i.e, students from states in which few Jews lived) to the list of desirable traits a freshman class ought to exhibit. At Harvard, the faculty rejected as louche President Abbott Lawrence Lowell’s proposed percentage quota on Jews, but settled on a refined admissions process that would call for photographs, alumni interviews with applicants, personal essays, and a place on the college application in which to list family surnames that might have been discarded at Ellis Island. Between 1925 and 1935, Jewish enrollment dropped from 25 to 15 percent, which was the percent Lowell had been after in the first place.

No such complex system was required to keep American blacks at bay. For one thing, discrimination in work, social opportunities, and education assured that few blacks could meet academic entry standards. But even among African-Americans who could, the fact that they were nonetheless unwelcome was well understood, and so unless one craved side orders of anger and misery with a degree, one was better advised to look to Morehouse or Fisk. (Harvard, the most welcoming of the elite privates, admitted 165 black students between the end of the Civil War and 1941, an average of two per year in classes averaging 1,000 in number.)

In the end, as Jerome Karabel shows in his singular study The Chosen (2005) it wasn’t Brown v. Board (1954) or the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–6) or violence at Little Rock Central (1957) that stirred a change. In 1960, in fact, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton enrolled 15 blacks among 3,000 freshmen.

Rather, two things compelled the redevelopment of admission programs: the determination of those enrolled blacks—tutored by King, Malcolm, and Huey Newton—not to be guests but a vanguard; and the urban riots of the mid 1960s, beginning with Watts in 1965, followed by Detroit and Newark and some 70 other conflagrations in the summer of 1967. When the so-called Kerner Commission, whose true and more ominous title was “National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders,” reported to President Lyndon Johnson in March 1968 that “Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American,” few private college leaders could ignore the fact that their meritocracies—which had been drawn every which and necessary way, as a matter of practical urgency, to accommodate old customers and retain old business—now had to be redrawn, as a matter of practical urgency, to accommodate new customers and new ways of doing business.

Our story on Boston College’s first concerted effort to enroll black as well as white Americans begins here.