Opinion: Antisemitism continued at Stanford into the late 1960s

A Stanford University task force, evoking headlines, recently reported what had long been known by some faculty, but probably in about the past two decades that knowledge had disappeared in much of the Stanford community: that Stanford in the 1950s had discriminated against Jewish students in undergraduate admissions.

The task force apparently did not discover that Stanford’s antisemitic admissions policies, under the admissions dean, Rixford Snyder, continued into about the late 1960s.

A special faculty committee had quietly reported on this discriminatory problem in spring 1967 to the then-newly appointed University provost, Richard Lyman, who later became the Stanford president.

The 1967 committee found, among other problems, that academically strong students in the ‘60s who were Jewish were significantly less likely to be admitted than non-Jews.

Furthermore, Snyder and his assistants, in a number of cases in their recruiting, even avoided going to high schools with large Jewish student bodies. That included avoiding New York City, whose high schools produced at least five Stanford faculty who were, or became, Nobel prize winners — in biomedicine, physics and economics. All were Jewish.

In 1967, the special faculty committee, in quiet consultation with Provost Lyman, agreed not to publicly mention Snyder’s anti-Semitic practices and policies.

Nor was there any public suggestion by the committee that Stanford President J.E. Wallace Sterling undoubtedly approved of Snyder’s anti-Semitic practices and policies.

The assumption by most, if not all, of the committee members was that Snyder had been following the policies that President Sterling himself desired.

In 1967, the behind-the-scenes arrangement, involving Provost Lyman and the committee, avoided all public charges about anti-Semitism and thus any public controversy about Stanford’s discriminatory admissions.

The off-the-record bureaucratic solution of avoiding public conflict seemed wiser, and easier, and without open controversy. That was the way, Lyman and the committee  concluded, to remove Snyder.

The undramatic pushing out of Snyder, who lingered as admissions dean into about 1969, left bruised feelings but avoided any candid discussion or any substantial public dispute. It was, simply put, a significant change of deans without troubling public friction.

In retrospect, from the perspective of more than a half century, many critics may justifiably lament that there was, by design, no public airing in 1967-69 of the basic problems involving Snyder. Hence, there was no open acknowledgment of Stanford’s anti-Semitic policies and therefore no public accountability and no apologies.

In all this, there is a final irony: Snyder, leaving admissions, quickly became an admired director of the Stanford Alumni Association. For some years, as a popular Stanfordite, Snyder, winning plaudits, shepherded Stanford alumni on cruises and travel abroad.

Beginning in about the late 1970s, the facts of earlier anti-Semitism in Stanford admissions policy were a subject in occasional class lectures or seminar sessions in history and American studies courses at Stanford and in informal out-of-class discussions with some faculty and students at the university.

But judging from its recent report, the 2022 task force seems only to have uncovered part of the rather complicated, and ugly, story stretching over about two decades, under admissions director Snyder and President Sterling.

More awaits further investigation and analysis, and possibly also a focused discussion of the university’s accountability for its past, including perhaps looking into anti-semitism for a time in faculty recruitment in some academic fields.

Barton J. Bernstein, now a Stanford emeritus history professor, was a member of the 1967 faculty committee and later taught about this subject for many years.