A Letter to Twelve Jewish Students

The charge of discrimination against Jewish students in American schools has again been resurrected. The occasion this time has been a letter sent by Dr. James L. McConaughy, president of Wesleyan University, to twelve Jewish students taking pre-medical courses in the university apprising them of the difficulties which they will encounter when they will come to seek admission to a medical school. Dr. McConaughy advises these Jewish students “that the opportunity to study medicine is definitely limited by the medical schools of this and other lands.” More than twice as many students apply for admission than are actually admitted.

“While the racial question does enter somewhat into the selection of students, it does not enter as much as some claim. The Association of Medical Colleges reports that 17 per cent of the freshman students in medical schools are Jews. It is pointed out that in this country out of a population of more than 120,000,000 there are probably between 5,000,00 and 6,000,000 Jews. They, in round numbers, make up not more than five per cent of the entire population. It has further been reported that over fifty per cent of the aplications for entrance to the medical schools in 1933 were of Jewish ancestry. The above facts explain why it is difficult for Wesleyan to place her graduates of the Jewish race in medical schools.”

This letter makes unpleasant reading—as does so much of Jewish news today. Our first reaction to it is one of bitter resentment. In free America, why should a young man be forced to turn aside from the path of his chosen career by the fact that other young men of the same racial stock have chosen, in numbers beyond their population quota, to enter the same profession? Neither the basic law of the land nor the classic tradition of American democracy recognizes any such race groupings or prerequisites. Why should one single race—the Jewish—be placed in one scale of the balance while all the other races in this country — Anglo-Saxon, Teuton, Slav, Celt, Latin, etc.—are bunched together and placed in the other scale of the balance?

If quotas are to be established in professional schools on the basis of race, then every race in these United States should be submitted to the same restriction and should be assigned a fixed quota. Again, if this single-race quota system in the field of higher education is accepted as just and as being in complete consonance with the American principle of the individual’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (which, if it means anything at all, means the right of every individual to follow the career which he has chosen, unhampered by any legal restrictions based on race, religion or color), then we shall have to acknowledge that the Nazis were justified in carrying out this principle, in their country, to its logical conclusion, and in applying it rigorously and mathematically in all fields of human endeavor.

The Nazis merely added insult to injury…. In this country those guilty of perpetrating the injury are too urbane to stoop to banal race libels to justify the injury. Here they are rather decent about it. They attempt to save appearances all around by making fictitious personality and psychological tests do the dirty work of discrimination….

This is our first reaction. On second thought, however, and after we had relieved ourselves of our feeling of indignation, Professor Morris R. Cohen’s comment on President McConaughy’s letter seemed to be quite valid: “The president happens to be a very courageous person. He is facing the situation and telling the truth.”

For it is true that medical schools are limiting Jewish students. A few years ago Dr. Frank Gavin wrote that “Jewish college graduates of New York who desire to enter medicine have applied to as many as #orty colleges before securing admission.” It has been argued by Dr. Harold Rypins that “the case of Jewish students in New York City seeking admission to the study of medicine presents a special problem deserving special consideration, the solution of which will be hindered rather than advanced by unfounded claims of racial or religious prejudices.”

Other Jewish physicians have stoutly denied that discrimination exists in American medical schools. Dr. A. J. Rongy wrote not so long ago: “We must not overlook the essential fact that every Jewish student of proper competence and talent can eventually succeed in entering the doors of almost any medical school in this country….Undeniably, Jewish applicants must exert greater effort and perseverance than the non-Jewish. Still, in a country where the Jewish population aggregates three and one-half per cent of the total, Jews are represented by six times their ratio percentage among the medical student body. With this score, can we intelligently impugn the liberal attitude of the admission boards?”

But whether American medical schools are anti-Semitic or not, the cold, hard fact remains that nearly all of them are trying in one way or another to restrict the number of Jewish students while at the same time the number of Jewish applicants is mounting steadily every year. If Dr. McConaughy’s figures are correct that over fifty per cent of the applicants for entrance in the medical schools in 1933 were Jews (if this figure is not the result of the large number of “multiple” applications which Jewish students are forced to make), then we are confronted by a very startling and serious situation. About fourteen thousand students apply annually to American medical schools. Of these over seven thousand are Jews, and only a little over six thousand, all told, Jews and non-Jews, can be admitted! …

What is the answer? Shall we build special Jewish medical schools to make room for those who cannot be admitted in existing schools? We do not recoil from the idea of a Jewish medical college out of any fear of imputed segregation. Such schools may some day be necessary. But at present, with the percentage of Jewish students already very high in our medical schols, another additional school or schools would simply increase the number of Jewish doctors in this country, whose number seems already to be excessive, especially in the large metropolitan centers of our country.

Do we not owe a responsibility to our Jewish youth, in deference to their own future, to apprise them early of the facts as they exist today in this profession and in others? Ought we not to face the situation realistically, putting aside for the moment the polemical element involved in it? Why wait until such information is imparted to them by a non-Jewish president of a university, or dean of a medical college? We shall refuse to accept the principle of race quotas in our educational institutions, and we shall vigorously oppose it with all the means at our disposal and at every turn. But we should nevertheless protect our Jewish youth against future heartaches and disillusionments by advising them before they commit themselves to a professional or commercial career, of what its true aspects are. We should give them helpful, intelligent, accurate vocational guidance.

More than a year ago, we suggested in this editorial column that a program of national economic planning on the part of the Jewish group in this country is becoming imperative. We ought not to permit ourselves to wait until a drastic economic reconstruction program is forced upon us by hostile forces from without. Much can be accomplished by careful fact-finding, planning, and education from within.

Joachim Heinrich Biesenthal, nineteenth century German missionary, received the degree of doctor of theology from the University of Gies##