This happened at a lot of schools back in the day. At least Stanford is admitting it.
John S. Rosenberg writes at Minding the Campus:
Affirmative Action at Stanford, Then and NowStanford University has just apologized for its past discrimination … against Jews.As summarized in Stanford Magazine, a presidential task force made up of faculty, students, staff (including a rabbi), an alumnus, and a university trustee released a 75-page report in September, “A Matter Requiring the Utmost Discretion”, whose research was thorough and conclusion unsparing. Their “extensive investigation uncovered two key findings. First, … evidence of actions taken to suppress the number of Jewish students admitted to Stanford during the early 1950s. Second, … that members of the Stanford administration regularly misled parents and friends of applicants, alumni, outside investigators, and trustees who raised concerns about those actions throughout the 1950s and 1960s.” Misled is a euphemism; they lied.Stanford today is regarded as, in effect, an Ivy League school in a warm climate (graduates often refer to Harvard as “the Stanford of the East”), but that was far from true in the 1950s. Until 1952, admission was not selective; virtually all males who applied were accepted. That changed in 1953, when Stanford first turned to selective admissions—this, not by coincidence, is when it began restricting the number of Jewish students. However, unlike the Ivy League’s restriction of Jewish admissions in the 1920s, Stanford administrators in 1953 had no clear picture of the ideal “Stanford man,” but they knew that too many Jews would distort it.Unlike the Ivy League, Stanford was always co-ed, but a cap on the number of women had been imposed by Jane Stanford. The task force found no evidence of discrimination against Jewish women applicants (which, of course, does not mean it did not exist, especially since Stanford ceased recruiting from some high schools in Los Angeles with heavily Jewish populations).
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