When I learned about Ivy League and other elite colleges actively discriminating against Jews in the past, I always thought of it as something that started in the 1920s and largely went away after the horrors against Jews in World War 2.
But today, there is an article in the Washington Post that Stanford was actively discriminating against Jews in the 1950s. Investigators found a smoking gun in the archives where the director of admissions wanted Stanford’s President to know that “if Stanford were to accept ‘a few’ applicants from two heavily Jewish high schools in Los Angeles, ‘the following year we would get a flood of Jewish applicants’”. The result of this letter was a subsequent high rate of rejections from those two schools, in order to avoid the problem that Cornell and University of Virginia had having too many Jews on their campus.
While this article was disturbing, there is some good news in that it was Stanford itself that initiated the investigation, and was apparently open in sharing the results of the investigation. For that, they should be applauded.
There is a podcast called “Gatecrashers” you might find to be interesting. Each episode is about how each Ivy discriminated against Jews (I think all so far have been post-WWII), and how our modern admissions practices are a product of that discrimination.
Local lore is that UW Madison did not discriminate against Jews at least in the 1960s, unlike east coast schools, which is how the school came to have a large number of Jews during that period. I didn’t find anything to corroborate this in a casual google search.
My dad told me that even if you did get into a school like Stanford, you would then face the problem that you could not participate in associations on campus such as social clubs, sports groups, fraternities, etc. He said that there was nothing stopping any student group from having a rule that excluded Jews, and for the most part they excluded them. This was in the 1950s.
That a large number of Asian Americans are attending elite schools has also been cited as “proof” that these schools don’t discriminate against Asian Americans…
The antisemitic quotas that most of the Ivies, seven sisters, and Stanford applied from the 20’s through the '50’s, most definitely were NOT rescinded after the Holocaust. They faded away in the early '60s. I kind of wonder whether it was at least in part a result of population dynamics, leading to a decrease in the number of men applying. The GI bill bulge was long gone, there had been a dip in the birth rate during the depression and then during WWII, and the baby boom (figure beginning to be born in '46) wouldn’t yet reach college age until the mid '60s.
Still waiting for Harvard, where the policy originated, to address its antisemitic history in a meaningful way. A good start would be to remove Lowell’s name from the campus (he was president of Harvard from 1909 to 1933, and was the originator of the policy), and to put a stop to the continual, non-stop antisemitic (oops, forgive me, I forgot to say antizionist) onslaught on campus.
According to the podcast “Gatekeepers: The Hidden History of Jews and the Ivy League,” the tipping point was Sputnik. American elites were terrified of the USSR establishing a military foothold in space and decided that the elite schools needed to open up to all the best and brightest, which meant no more Jewish quotas.
Well, that is mostly Israeli - Palestinian politics. Israeli - Palestinian politics on US college campuses pretty much always becomes a cesspool of bigotry, as the noisy bigots drive away everyone else.
That may be some of it, but as I live among that demographic of UW students who stayed in town, can’t say I have met anyone Jewish from Milwaukee originally, and have oodles of Jewish friends who came here from Long Island for college. I can’t find any corroborating information with a quick google, however.
