Jewish Groups Ask N. Y. State to Enforce Anti-bias Law in Colleges

The State of New York was asked today by the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to enforce its anti-discrimination law in institutions of higher education in order to prevent discriminatory admission practices the existence of which was reported this week-end by the New York Board of Regents following an 18-month study of the subject.

The Board of Regents report established that Jewish students who want to study medicine in New York State have less chance for admission than Catholics while Catholic students have less chance than Protestants. The figures in the report, prepared by the Carnegie Endowment for International peace, showed that in the years 1950-52 seven of nine medical schools in the state had admitted a higher proportion of Protestant applicants than those of either the Catholic or the Jewish faith.

“Top-ranking Protestant and Catholic students are more certain to be admitted than are top-ranking Jewish students,” the report said. At the other end of the scholastic scale, low-rating Jewish students are virtually excluded, while occasional low-rating Protestand and Catholic applicants are admitted. ” The Board of Regents advanced in its report an eight-point program toward elminating discrimination in admissions.

Commending the Board of Regents for its report, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League pointed out, however, in their joint statement, that the Board’s report “lays too much stress on the importance of developing and testing various criteria for admissions sometime in the future and too little stress on the necessity of seeing to it that medical schools do not discriminate against applicants here and now.”

The Board of Regents’ proposals for the elimination of bias in medical schools included: That the medical schools formally and publicly declare their position with respect to discrimination in admissions and their criteria for accepting applicants and that the Regents establish a Council on Admissions to advise the Board on such problems.