Being honest about their history can help universities regain credibility

As Stanford faculty scientists who helped research and write the paper, we see our work as similar to recent calculations at Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton and elsewhere. Yet these isolated institutional research projects are at best only the beginning of what may be an ongoing effort by universities to grapple with their past. In this way, it may be possible for higher education to repair its eroding relationship with the American public.

Public trust in universities has plummeted in recent years. Steadily rising fees, rising student debt, shady dealings in selective admissions and growing dissent from conservatives about the left-leaning faculty are contributing to a worsening sentiment toward higher education. While there has always been a perception of a divide between the ‘ivory tower’ and the ‘real world’, our increasingly polarized society is witnessing an increase in attacks on faculty and students and a lack of trust in higher education that is unprecedented in the world the post-World War II era.

In the wake of this upheaval, colleges and universities began to attract historians and social scientists to examine their own, often deeply troubled, pasts. This is new. Universities claim to be custodians of eternal truths, but they are not so strict in telling their own stories because their real stories conflict with the sunny images the schools want to project. Yet being open and honest about the past can restore trust that universities are institutions focused on rigorous learning and discerning the truth—even when it might cast them in a bad light.

For most of the 20th century, elite northeastern universities excluded Jews. Between the two world wars, admissions officers at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and elsewhere went to great lengths to limit the number of Jewish students in classes. They required photographs, personal interviews, and “character” references, among other not-so-subtle ways to identify and screen out Jews, often referred to as “greasy men” or “Bronx science boys,” who were deemed unfit of the prevailing WASP ideals of a masculine, athletic Christianity.

The Second World War did not so much eradicate anti-Semitism as change its form. The plight of the German and European Jewish refugees strangely evoked disgust rather than sympathy. According to some accounts, anti-Semitism rose in the 1940s and reached its historical peak in 1945.

But American universities also benefited from the prestige of refugee scholars; by securing appointments at American universities, these academic émigrés helped cement the preeminence of American higher education globally. Albert Einstein’s long and illustrious appointment at Princeton and the legendary expansion of the New School for Social Research as a “University in Exile” are two prominent examples of the uneasy integration of Jews into American higher education.

Meanwhile, overt discrimination in admissions turned into a nobler type of anti-Semitism: While schools became formally religion-neutral in admissions policies, officials continued to subtly but effectively shape the presence and religious practices of Jews on campus.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Stanford rose to international prominence thanks to government subsidies and the opportunism of charismatic academic entrepreneurs. Increasing selectivity in student admissions also contributed to its rising status. Even with California’s relatively smaller Jewish population, our investigation found concern among Stanford leadership about the growing number of Jews on campus and how that might affect the institution’s growing ambitions.

In the 1950s, these concerns led one of Stanford’s most prominent admissions directors to suppress the enrollment of several public high schools based on the large proportion of Jewish students. He did this with the tacit support of the chancellor and other senior members of the administration, who never intervened to stop him, and in later years denied any such action had been taken.

The admissions exclusion was prompted by the unwelcoming culture toward Jews on campus. Like many officially nonsectarian universities at the time, Stanford had a church at its center, and until 1966 school rules required non-Christian students to either worship in the chapel or leave campus to gather and pray.

Our work at Stanford is hardly the first effort to critically revise institutional histories. Beginning with a pioneering study commissioned by former Brown University President Ruth Simmons in 2001, researchers dispelled many myths about universities as “schools on the hill” remote from American political life, and uncovered links between them and the Atlantic slave trade , land expropriation, racist science and exclusion based on race, ethnicity, gender and religion.

To mention just one example, the award-winning Land Grab investigation documented the estimated 10.7 million acres taken from nearly 250 Native American tribes in the 19th century to establish the federal “land grant” program that provided a crucial initial funding for dozens of colleges and universities across the country.

Such efforts have paved the way for countless official apologies by universities for wrongs committed under their auspices over time.

Although the findings of these projects are unpleasant, they tend to restore solidarity and goodwill because the omission of an institution’s history causes great pain to those who care for the school or whose ancestors were abused, adding the harm of invisibility to past errors.

Good faith efforts to rewrite official histories promise to repair this harm. The inclusion of multiple stakeholders in the rewriting of official history offers a sense of collective ownership of past and present, warts and all, and replaces feelings of exclusion with renewed solidarity.

This tactic can be applied to address other problems that undermine public confidence in higher education—many of which have historical roots. Take, for example, the use of race in college admissions. While the US Supreme Court debates the legality of such consideration this term, these questions are as old as higher education in America. Skin color has always been involved in discussions about who is worthy of higher education.

An additional hard truth is that both public and private universities are heavily subsidized by direct government aid and tax subsidies, even as the benefits of the education they provide extend only to a select few. These are appropriate topics for historical research that could help bring universities back in line with the values ​​that underlie their research and teaching mission.

Such endeavors would not be all doom and gloom. Universities have been important civic actors influencing the development of American society since its inception. Responsible historical reflection also recognizes the positive and the downsides of this influence.

This spring, two of us will debut a course titled “Stanford and Its Worlds,” which will cover Stanford’s many contributions to society, including its service to the U.S. war effort in World War II and its special role in seeding an economic miracle. now called Silicon Valley.

But the class will also cover the darker side of Stanford’s history, including the extent to which government research contracts have benefited a handful of elite and predominantly white universities and the sobering extent to which government investment in 20th-century military craft has set the stage for today’s global technology sector. If we succeed, our bill will be neither celebratory nor scolding. It will be history.

Jews have just celebrated Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when they engage in reflection and repentance for past wrongs in the name of promoting redemption. Although each religious tradition is different, the idea that forgiveness, mercy, grace, or redemption requires explicit acknowledgment of past wrongdoing is common among world religions. Universities have the option of adopting a version of such customs. By revisiting their past in an open, honest and balanced way, they can create a brighter future – and perhaps engender renewed public trust.