In the years following World War II, MIT’s economics department became one of the most important in the world, pioneering the field now known as macroeconomics. Theories of how MIT came to play this role abound; according to one, the university’s openness to Jews had something to do with it, as David Warsh writes:
[T]he rise of MIT stemmed [in part] from its willingness to appoint Jewish economists to senior positions, starting with [Paul] Samuelson himself [who became a professor there in 1940 and helped recruit many other influential faculty members]. Anti-Semitism was common in American universities on the eve of World War II, and while most of the best universities had one Jew or even two on their faculties of arts and sciences, to demonstrate that they were free of prejudice, none showed any willingness to appoint significant numbers until the flood of European émigrés after World War II began to open their doors. MIT was able to recruit its charter faculty—Maurice Adelman, Max Millikan, Walt Rostow, Paul Rosenstein-Rodin, [Robert] Solow, Evsey Domar, and Franco Modigliani were Jews—“not only because of Samuelson’s growing renown,” writes [the economist E. Roy] Weintraub, “but because the department and university were remarkably open to the hiring of Jewish faculty at a time when such hiring was just beginning to be possible at Ivy League Universities.”
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