News Update

Stanford apologizes for anti-Jewish admissions practices in the 1950s

The president of Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, apologized Wednesday after a campus task force found that the university strictly limited the admission of Jewish students in the 1950s.

“This ugly component of Stanford’s history, confirmed by this new report, is saddening and deeply troubling,” Tessier-Lavigne wrote. “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. These actions were wrong. They were damaging. And they were unacknowledged for too long.”

The task force discovered that Stanford administrators in the early 1950s limited admission of Jewish students after an internal memo complained that the university was admitting too many students from two high schools in Southern California —Fairfax and Beverly Hills — whose student bodies were primarily Jewish. Before the memo, 87 students from those two schools were enrolled at Stanford. Within a few years, that number fell to 14.

The practice discouraged other Jewish students from applying to Stanford and had an overall detrimental impact on Stanford’s Jewish student population, Tessier-Lavigne said. The university later denied it had conducted the practice.

The task force recommended that Stanford take a number of steps to bolster Jewish life on campus, such as aligning the academic calendar to accommodate Jewish holidays; hosting trainings for staff and students on antisemitism; and conducting a comprehensive study of Jewish life on campus.

The university is hosting a webinar on the task force findings at noon today.