The president of Stanford University apologized to the Jewish community Wednesday after a university task force report detailed that the institution suppressed admissions from Jewish applicants in the 1950s.
Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne condemned the “appalling anti-semitic activity” Wednesday and acknowledged the university had denied for years that it suppressed Jewish admissions.
“On behalf of Stanford University, I wish to apologize to the Jewish community, and to our entire university community, both for the actions documented in this report to suppress the admission of Jewish students in the 1950s and for the university’s denials of those actions in the period that followed,” Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement.
The main focus of the report was a 1953 memo written by Fred Glover, the assistant to then-university President Wallace Sterling, that outlined concerns from Rix Snyder, director of admissions at the time, that too many Jewish students were being admitted to the prestigious California university. The following school year the university substantially decreased the number of students admitted from two high schools with an overwhelmingly Jewish student body.
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In the memo, Glover said that Snyder noted schools like the University of Virginia had become “largely a Jewish institution” and that he wanted to avoid the same situation at Stanford.
The memo says that Snyder “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” and that the situation “forces him to disregard our stated policy of paying no attention to the race or religion of applicants.”
Tessier-Lavigne said he had accepted the task force’s recommendations on several steps that the university could take to address the needs of Jewish students on campus, and added that the university’s actions in the 1950s were “wrong,” “damaging,” and had gone “unacknowledged for too long.”
“Today, we must work to do better, not only to atone for the wrongs of the past, but to ensure the supportive and bias-free experience for members of our Jewish community that we seek for all members of our Stanford community,” he said.
Among the recommendations the president said would be implemented are the establishment of a “standing Jewish advisory committee,” new anti-bias training that addresses anti-semitism, and re-orienting the academic calendar to ensure terms do not begin during Jewish holidays.
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The university president said the institution was “confident” that the anti-semitic bias in admissions did not persist in the university in the present day, and said the university seeks to “support a thriving Jewish community at Stanford as part of our diverse community of students and scholars from all backgrounds.”
