While the older, Ivy League universities of the East Coast notoriously had restrictions on Jews in the earlier part of the 20th century, Stanford—founded relatively recently, in 1885—supposedly did not. Yet when Charles Petersen began delving through the archives of Stanford’s admission department, he was shocked to find “JEWS” written by hand on one document after another. These annotations, as Petersen explains, had nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. But he eventually uncovered evidence that Stanford indeed tried to limit the proportion of its Jewish students in the 1950s—just as the older schools were shedding their discriminatory policies:
Unlike the East Coast schools . . . where the effects of the Jewish quota were far more dramatic (the proportion of Jewish students at Columbia was cut from around 40 percent to less than 20 percent), anti-Semitic exclusion at Stanford in the 1920s was a bit more subtle. And again unlike the East Coast schools, where limits on Jewish enrollment remained in effect from the 1920s through the 1950s, at Stanford the practice appears to have fallen into abeyance with the elimination of most selective practices amid the financial exigencies of the Depression.
The change that had occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as [the longtime dean of admissions Rixford] Snyder observed in his travels to Los Angeles and Portland, was the mass immigration of American Jews to the West Coast. In the 1920s, Jewish college students in the U.S. were heavily concentrated in the northeast, with seven times as many students in the mid-Atlantic as in the western states. In 1935, for instance, 53 percent of all Jewish college students in the entire United States were enrolled in New York City. (This was why Columbia had been the first institution to introduce a Jewish quota.)
In 1946, 50 percent of all Jewish college students were still in New York. By 1955, the figure had declined to 38 percent. In boomtown postwar Los Angeles, meanwhile, fully 13 percent of the 16,000 new immigrants arriving each month were Jewish. The city’s Jewish population increased from 130,000 in 1940 to 300,000 in 1951, and it kept growing. By the 1960s, Los Angeles had the third largest Jewish population in the world, behind only New York and Tel Aviv.
Read more on Making History: https://charlespetersen.substack.com/p/stanfords-secret-jewish-quota