Stanford Apologizes for Limiting Jewish Admissions in the 1950s

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/us/stanford-apology-jewish-students.html

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Stanford University apologized on Wednesday for its efforts to suppress Jewish student admissions in the 1950s and for denying it had done so in the years that followed.

Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, apologized on behalf of the university for “this appalling antisemitic activity” in a public letter after the release of a 75-page report documenting that activity.

“These actions were wrong,” Dr. Tessier-Lavigne wrote. “They were damaging. And they were unacknowledged for too long.”

Several colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth, limited Jewish enrollment in the 1920s through the 1960s, but Stanford had long denied rumors that it had used similar practices.

In January, Stanford created a task force to examine what it called at the time “assertions” that the university had quotas to limit how many Jewish students it admitted in the 1950s, and to recommend ways to improve life for Jewish students on campus.

The 13-member task force included trustees, alumni, students and members of the university’s faculty and staff and was led by Ari Y. Kelman, a professor of education and Jewish studies.

The task force said its two key findings were evidence that Stanford had tried to limit the number of Jewish students it admitted in the 1950s and that administrators “regularly misled” parents, alumni, outside investigators and trustees who raised concerns in the 1950s and 1960s about the possibility that the university had engaged in such practices.

The report cited a memo from February 1953 that said that Rixford Snyder, Stanford’s director of admissions at the time, was concerned about how many Jewish students were being admitted.

The memo was written by Frederic Glover, who was the assistant to the university president, Wallace Sterling, and said that Mr. Snyder had identified two Southern California high schools with student bodies that were “95 to 98 percent Jewish.” Accepting “a few Jewish applicants” from those schools would invite “a flood of Jewish applications,” the memo said.

“Rix feels that this problem is loaded with dynamite and he wanted you [Sterling] to know about it, as he says that the situation forces him to disregard our stated policy of paying no attention to the race or religion of applicants,” the memo said. Mr. Glover wrote that he approved of the decision.

Stanford’s report said that there was a “sharp drop” in enrollment in the fall of 1953 from the two high schools cited by name in the memo, Beverly Hills High School and Fairfax High School. “No other schools experienced such a sharp reduction in students enrolling at Stanford at that time,” the document said.

Mr. Glover’s memo was first revealed by Charles Petersen, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, who wrote about it in August 2021 in his Substack newsletter, Making History. Dr. Petersen had found the memo and other documents, including admission files with the word “Jews” written across them, in the university’s archives while researching a book he is writing about the history of meritocracy.

“I’m happy to see Stanford took my Substack so seriously,” Dr. Petersen said in an interview after the report was published.

He said that the university chose to focus its investigation narrowly on antisemitism in admissions, but that he would have liked for it to also examine how the practice connected more broadly with racial inequality at the school.

“Stanford really wanted to maintain the university as a safe space for white Anglo Saxons,” he said. “If it had been any other group, if it had been Black applicants, Latinx applicants, Asian applicants, once the numbers reached a certain point, the university would have done the same thing.”

The task force also provided recommendations for improving campus life for Jewish students, including the creation of a standing advisory committee to address their present-day needs. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne wrote that the university had accepted the recommendations and that the “historical anti-Jewish bias documented by the task force” was not part of the school’s admissions process today.

Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, executive director of Hillel at Stanford, a Jewish student group, said that the university’s apology and the commitment to future action made the moment especially meaningful.

“This feels like what we would call teshuvah, or atonement: recognizing a wrong, apologizing for having done it, a commitment to what change in the future is going to look like and following through with that,” she said.

Rabbi Kirschner said that since she came to Stanford six years ago, she had heard stories from alumni who were frustrated about the quotas and that the existence of these practices had been denied. She said the actions announced on Wednesday were validating for the school’s Jewish community.

“I think this is a reflection of how they want everyone to feel at Stanford,” she said. “And I hope that this is a model for how other communities who may have similar stories and concerns can also be addressed.”