By Steve Sailer
10/14/2022
Not much interests me more than ethnic social history as seen through statistics, so of course I was fascinated by this from the Washington Post:
Stanford apologizes for limiting admissions of Jewish students in 1950s
By Bryan Pietsch
Updated October 13, 2022 at 4:47 p.m. EDT|Published October 13, 2022 at 4:16 a.m. EDTStanford University apologized on Wednesday after an internal task force confirmed the school had limited the admission of Jewish students during the 1950s and then “regularly misled” those who inquired about it afterward.
The university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, called the restrictions “appalling anti-Semitic activity,” in a university-wide note, adding that “this ugly component of Stanford’s history, confirmed by this new report, is saddening and deeply troubling.”
… Petersen found a 1953 letter to J.E. Wallace Sterling, then the president of Stanford, from the assistant of the admissions director, Rixford Snyder, in which it was noted that the incoming freshman class would have a “high percentage of Jewish boys.” Snyder, the assistant wrote, “thought that you should know about this problem, since it has very touchy implications.”
One high school was Beverly Hills H.S., which likely had the most economically privileged student body of any public school in the country in 1953. (According to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, in the 1960 Census Beverly Hills had the highest average income of any community in the country, 25% more than runner-up Chevy Chase outside of DC.)
(Contra Weezer, the Playboy Mansion was not in Beverly Hills, but just west, on the 13th hole of the Los Angeles Country Club — which never in the expected lifespan of the galaxy would have admitted Hugh Hefner as a member. But I’m getting off my topic.)
The other was nearby Fairfax H.S. in Los Angeles on posh Melrose Blvd., just north of what’s now Rick Caruso’s The Grove shopping mall .
Back then, Jews tended to send their kids to public school as testimony to their patriotic assimilation. Jewish kids I played baseball with in the 1960s tended to view my going to a Catholic school as un-American. But when racial busing came to Los Angeles schools in the late 1970s, there was a rapid flight of Jews into private schools or outlying school districts.
Today, Fairfax H.S. is 7% white and 18% Asian. On the other hand, Beverly Hills H.S., which is in its own school district and never suffered busing, much less imposed it on itself the way Berkeley H.S. buses in Oakland kids, is still 70% white and 12% Asian. (I don’t know whether Beverly Hills’ many Persian Jews identify as white or Asian on forms.)
It’s curious that the wealth of Jewish parents was not mentioned in the Stanford memo. The question of donations to colleges is one of the murkiest ones I know. Presumably, Stanford administrators discussed amongst themselves whether the denizens of Beverly Hills could be squeezed for donations, but maybe that interesting topic never made it into type.
… from 1949 to 1952, Stanford enrolled 87 students from the two schools, Beverly Hills High School and Fairfax High School. From 1952 to 1955, however, only 14 students were enrolled from those schools.
On the other hand, the report by Stanford faculty finds no evidence that Stanford cut admissions from other schools with high percentages of Jewish students, such as New Trier north of Chicago.
To the credit of the Washington Post, unlike the New York Times article on the subject, Mr. Pietsch brings up the obvious analogy to elite colleges discriminating against Asians today:
Arguments in a case over modern-day quotas at an elite institution are set to be heard at the Supreme Court this month. A group of Asian Americans is suing Harvard — which also limited its admissions of Jewish students early in the 20th century — alleging that the university unfairly discriminated against them by capping admissions as a sort of “racial balancing” of its students. Harvard denies the allegations. The plaintiffs have cited Harvard’s past quotas on Jewish students as evidence in their case.
It would be fascinating to know about the kind of discussions that go on among admissions staffers today regarding Asians, especially whether they view their high SAT/ACT test scores as legit.
But Stanford is not going to publish that. At least not for another 69 years.
From the Stanford report:
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when alumni, the AntiDefamation League, and at least one trustee raised concerns to Glover, Sterling, or Snyder, they were met with dismissals and denials. Glover’s and Snyder’s written responses took advantage of the literal definition of “quota” and the discretion built into Stanford’s admissions policies to misrepresent what they knew to be otherwise true: that they collaborated to suppress the number of Jewish students enrolling at Stanford.
It’s not as if the entire legal justification for today’s affirmative action system going back to the 1978 Bakke Supreme Court decision is founded on insisting on a hyper-strict literal definition of “quota.”
Also from the Stanford report:
We do not know how long Snyder acted against these two schools or if he acted against other schools or individual students. But the effect was felt particularly keenly among Jews in Southern California among whom developed a widespread understanding that Stanford had a “quota” on Jewish students.
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a lady who worked at Beverly Hills H.S. in about 1974 during a debate tournament at BHHS. (My debate coach’s wife was the debate coach at BHHS, so we spent a lot of time on the Beverly Hills campus.) She was either a teacher or a staffer at Beverly Hills, and she informed me, somewhat vehemently, that 170 BHHS students had applied to Stanford and 17 were accepted. I was astonished that 170 students at one high school had applied because only two at my perfectly nice Catholic high school had applied to Stanford. But now, reading this, I suspect she was emphasizing to me that only 17 BHHS students got in.
Appendix A: The Glover Memo
February 4, 1953
Dear Wally:… Rix is concerned that more than one quarter of the applications from men are from Jewish boys. Last year we had 150 Jewish applicants, of whom we accepted 50. This condition appears to apply one [sic: only] to men; there does not seem to be any increase in applications from Jewish girls.
As things look to Rix now, he will be able to pick 500 men, equal in caliber to last year’s fresh class, but there will be a high percentage of Jewish boys in the 300 freshmen who will be at Stanford village.
Rix said that he thought that you should know about this problem, since it has very touchy implications. He pointed out that the University of Virginia has become largely a Jewish institution, and that Cornell also has a very heavy Jewish enrollment. Harvard and Yale stick strictly to a quota system. Rix has been following a policy of picking the outstanding Jewish boys while endeavoring to keep a normal balance of Jewish men and women in the class.
There are, he said, a number of high schools in Los Angeles — Beverly Hills and Fairfax are examples — ]whose studentbody [sic] runs from 95 to 98% Jewish. If we accept a few Jewish applicants from these schools, the following year we get a flood of Jewish applications. Rix says that apparently the information as to who is accepting or rejecting Jewish students travels fast though [sic] the underground. Rix also has had trouble on this score in Portland, where at one high school he met with a group of students and parents interested in Stanford and found that the whole group was Jewish.
Rix feels that this problem is loaded with dynamite and he wanted you 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. I told him that I thought his current policy made sense, that it was a matter requiring the utmost discretion, and that I would relay these highlights of our conversation to you and let Rix know if you had different views.
FG
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