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The Vicissitudes of Tolerance
Jewish Faculty and Students at Clark University

SHELLY TENENBAUM


CLARK UNIVERSITY, a small private liberal arts college situated in central Massachusetts, significantly differs from the schools that typically appear in studies of the history of Jews within American higher education. Most of our knowledge about Jews and the academy derives from examinations of the Big Three: Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.1 Unlike these academically and financially elite institutions, Clark's undergraduate college deliberately began as a place to educate local working-class and immigrant boys. Furthermore, Clark has never been more than a poor cousin in relationship to its wealthy Ivy League relatives. Chronic financial woes made it impossible for Clark to follow in the footsteps of well-endowed universities when they implemented quotas against Jewish students during the post–World War I period. Precisely because Clark deviates from the documented master pattern, it is an alternative site for expanding our understanding of Jews and higher education. An examination of Clark over the course of a century provides the opportunity to explore how a series of college presidents responded to shifting ideologies about American Jews. 1


 
Figure 1
    Clark Hall, 1890s
    All photographs in this essay are courtesy of Clark University Archives.
 


 
      On October 2, 1889, Clark University opened its doors in Worcester, Massachusetts. This new institution of higher learning made an impression on the American academic map as a pioneering member of the "new university movement," a movement characterized by an emphasis on the ideals of scientific research. At the time it was "the first and only important all-graduate institution in the United States."2 To fulfill its high academic aspirations, Clark's president, Granville Stanley Hall, insisted on selective excellence over disciplinary breadth. As a result, all of the eighteen professors and thirty-four graduate students (many of whom Hall had lured away from Johns Hopkins University, his previous academic home) present on opening day came to Clark as part of doctoral programs in just five areas: biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and psychology. This inaugural group of professors constituted "one of the strongest scientific faculties in the United States."3 2


 
Figure 2
    Granville Stanley Hall
 


 
      Clark University's origins as a graduate institution reflected Hall's educational vision. Hall, a distinguished psychologist who innovated the field of child study in America and founded the American Journal of Psychology and the American Psychological Association, was only one of two key players in the school's formative history. The other person, Jonas Clark, conceived the plan to create a university in Worcester and provided the initial funding for this academic venture. In 1881, he began purchasing property to house the institution, and in 1887 he pledged "One Million Dollars, and probably more" for Clark University.4 At the time, Clark lived in retirement in Worcester; a native of the nearby small town of Hubbardston, he had earned his fortune through various business enterprises in California. 3
      Conflict between president and benefactor surfaced early in Clark University's history. Their divergent views of the centrality of undergraduate versus graduate education emerged as a key source of tension. Unlike Hall, who was committed to building an institution devoted exclusively to graduate education and research, Clark envisioned an affordable college for low-income Worcester boys as a central part of the school. While negotiating Hall's contract, the two men compromised by agreeing to focus initially on graduate students and to postpone the admittance of undergraduates until the fall of 1892. When the deadline came around, however, Hall and the trustees reneged on the promise to open a college. Disillusioned, the founder terminated his financial support at the conclusion of the1892–1893 academic year. 4
      Despite their terminal disagreements over Clark University's educational mission, Clark and Hall had some fundamental similarities. Both men were educational entrepreneurs determined to build an influential American university. In addition, they shared a religious liberalism that fostered commitment to religious and social tolerance. These values shaped Hall's hiring practices during his tenure as president as well as his relationship with Jewish graduate students. Dorothy Ross, Hall's biographer, suggests that Hall's liberal attitudes towards Jews emerged during the two years he spent in New York tutoring the sons of Jesse Seligman, the German Jewish banker.5 Whatever their origins, these commitments had a decided impact on the institution he led and, consequently, the lives of many scholars and students. 5
   

Clark under Hall, 1889–1920

 
At a time when most academic institutions did not include Jews on their staff, except as teachers of Semitic studies, Hall hired three Jews among his original eighteen appointments: Albert A. Michelson in physics, Morris Loeb in chemistry, and Franz Boas in anthropology. As head of the physics department from 1889 to 1892, Michelson was one of five full professors and Clark's highest paid faculty member. Born in Poland, Michelson received his training in Germany and France and prior to his Clark appointment served as a physics instructor at the Case School of Applied Sciences in Cleveland. After leaving Clark, Michelson went on to receive the Nobel Prize in 1907 for his pioneering work in the measurement of light waves. Loeb and Boas both began their Clark careers as docents, academic positions based on models from German universities that lacked faculty status but included lecturing and supervisory responsibilities. Loeb, of the prestigious American Jewish banking family, earned his Ph.D. in Berlin and taught at Harvard before arriving at Clark in 1889. During the course of his life, Loeb assumed leadership positions within Jewish philanthropic circles such as president of the Hebrew Technical Institute, director of the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, trustee of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and founder of both the American Jewish Committee and the Educational Alliance. Born and educated in Germany, Boas was the geography editor for Science magazine when he met Hall at the Cleveland meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1888. With promises for a first-rate laboratory and library, Hall recruited Boas for his university even though leaving the world of journalism entailed a severe pay cut for the young anthropologist. When he accepted the Clark position, Boas became the first person to receive an academic appointment in anthropology in the United States. 6


 
Figure 3
 


 


 
Figure 4
    Above: Morris Loeb
    Above left: Albert A. Michelson
 


 


 
Figure 5
    Franz Boas
 


 
      In a series of slanderous articles on the new university, Austin P. Cristy, editor of the Worcester Daily Telegram, singled out Boas's research on anthropometric measurements of school children. From early March through late May 1891, Cristy criticized Boas's attempts to plot the height-weight curves of Worcester students. Describing Clark professors as the "scum of German universities," Cristy asked Worcester parents if they really wanted Boas, who had "scars on his face and head that would make a jailbird turn green with envy," touching their children's "heads and bodies over."6 By turning public opinion against the university, the newspaper's negative campaign hurt Clark's fundraising efforts within the local community. 7
      With assurances of strong research support and first-class facilities, Hall attracted an excellent faculty, including many professors from German and other European universities, and from Johns Hopkins, the country's foremost research university. But by the fall of 1891, when Hall could not live up to his commitments, relations between the president and his faculty began to deteriorate. Hall had made many extravagant promises, and a serious shortage of funds only ensured his inability to keep them. Increasingly, the professors saw Hall as evasive and arbitrary, and the president's attempts to thwart discussion about faculty governance only fueled their suspicions. Aware of the faculty's disillusionment, William Rainey Harper, president of the new University of Chicago, took advantage of Clark's internal dissent by raiding the Worcester institution during the spring of 1892. In the end, most of Clark's faculty resigned and about half of the defectors, including Michelson, accepted offers from the University of Chicago. Boas became assistant to Frederick Putnam of the Department of Anthropology at the Chicago World Columbian Expositions. Loeb, who had left in 1891, joined the faculty of New York University. 8
      During the next decade, Hall lost much of the momentum with which he had started. Between Jonas Clark's decision to cease monetary support, a lack of funds from other donors, and the mass faculty exodus, Hall was left to run a university with just ten professors and, after the closing of the chemistry department in 1894, only four departments. Not until 1902, two years after Jonas Clark died, did new funds materialize with the settlement of his estate. The will increased the graduate school's endowment and provided funds for a three-year undergraduate men's college with its own president and faculty. After Mrs. Clark's death in 1904, additional revenue became available, making it possible for Hall to hire new faculty for the graduate school. 9


 
Figure 6
    Jonas Clark
 


 
      In 1907, Hall appointed Martin A. Rosanoff to direct a reestablished doctoral program in chemistry. Rosanoff, a Russian Jewish immigrant who had worked with Thomas Edison in New Jersey and who had taught at New York University, remained in Worcester until 1914, when he accepted a position at the University of Pittsburgh. Two years before Rosanoff's exit, Samuel Weiller Fernberger joined the Clark faculty. Hired as an instructor in 1912 and promoted to the rank of assistant professor two years later, Fernberger taught experimental psychology until 1920. As editor of the Psychological Bulletin and associate editor of the American Journal of Psychology, Fernberger contributed actively to his discipline. After leaving Clark, Fernberger moved to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania. He also joined Congregation Rodeph Shalom and became active within the city's Jewish community, chairing the Committee on Report and Research of the Bureau of Jewish Children. During this period, Hall invited Sigmund Freud to deliver his famous "Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis" as part of the Clark University's twentieth anniversary celebration in 1909. During his visit, Freud received an honorary degree, his only such academic honor. 10


 
Figure 7
    Clark University Psychoanalytic Congress.
    Left to right, standing: A. A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi; seated: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl G. Jung    .
 


 
      Hall's liberal impulses about diversity extended beyond hiring faculty to student recruitment. Among the predominately white, Christian, American-born, and male student body, the president admitted Theodate Louise Smith in 1895, despite the trustees' prohibition against women; several international students including Hikozo Kakise from Tokyo university in 1906; and Louis C. Tyree, an African American student, in 1909.7 Over the next few years, Hall fostered a relationship with Howard University through which he recruited African American students. One of these young scholars, E. Franklin Frazier, entered the masters program in sociology in 1917 and later continued his education at the University of Chicago under the direction of Robert Ezra Park. Frazier became a distinguished sociologist best known for his 1957 classic study Black Bourgeoisie.8 11
      During Hall's tenure, Clark also attracted Jewish graduate students. Solomon Lefschetz, one of the most renowned and influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, still ranks today among Clark's most accomplished graduates. Lefschetz began a 1970 autobiographical portrait by crediting his alma mater for providing him with his start in mathematics and with opportunities for independent exploration: "There were great advantages for me at Clark.... I soon obtained a research topic from Professor Story.... At Clark there was fortunately a first rate librarian, Dr. L.N. Wilson, and a well-kept mathematical library. Just two of us enjoyed it–my fellow graduate student in mathematics and future wife, and myself."9 In 1924, thirteen years after receiving his Clark Ph.D., Lefschetz accepted a position at Princeton University. At Princeton, he was the center of the topology group, published seven books, and edited the Annals of Mathematics, which, under Lefschetz's direction, evolved into a leading journal in the field. 12
      Josiah Moses, a Jewish graduate student in psychology, entered Clark in 1899 to study with Hall. Despite teaching experience and publications, Moses failed to find employment after he graduated. In January 1907, two and a half years after he completed his doctorate, Moses expressed his exasperation about his lack of employment in a letter to Hall: "I have done nothing but wait, wait, wait.... It is written, 'Ask and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you.' I have asked until my tongue is swollen, I have knocked until my knuckles are bare and still no answer. Are the gods asleep ...? But God has always been cruel to his chosen ones."10 13
      Because Moses believed that his Jewish name posed a serious liability on the job market, he changed his name from Moses to Morse. By June 1907, when he still could not find an academic position, Morse wrote again to his mentor. After telling Hall that "I shall never regret the years I spent under you, for they have made me a very much better person, if perhaps, a financially poorer man than I could otherwise be," Morse's tone became bitter. "My birth-right and soul for a mess of pottage! Happy outlook, isn't it? You cannot imagine how sorry I am there is no God. I feel the need of one in my adversity. I should very much like to tell him what I think of him and his creatures. But one can't rail at abstract Law.... Very sincerely, Josiah Morse" (underline in original text).11 14
      Hall tried to locate a position for his student. In a 1907 letter of recommendation, Hall described Morse as "one of the ablest men we have ever had here" and "a man I should like to attach permanently to this institution if we had the means."12 It is absolutely clear from Hall's letters that he thought highly of the young man's abilities and believed that Morse merited an academic position. Nonetheless, Hall felt compelled to reveal Morse's religion and birth name to prospective employers, thus undermining his student's attempts to disguise his ethnicity. Trying to minimize the damage that this information might cause, Hall assured his colleagues that Morse "has none of the objectional Jewish traits. He is sandy-haired, has no Jewish features, is genial, popular with students and colleagues, knows his place and keeps it and is extremely loyal to his superiors." Hall ended his letter of recommendation with the following pleas: "I very much want to see this man have a career. I know it will be a creditable and useful one. Can't you give him some kind of an opening? Can't you at least take him a year and look him over?"13 15
      These two efforts–Morse's to hide his Jewish identity and Hall's to reveal and defend his student's religion–point to the influence that anti-Semitism had in early-twentieth-century university life. Even Hall, who represented the epitome of liberal tolerance during his time, recommended Morse on the grounds that he was an exception to his race; he neither acted nor looked Jewish. At a time when race science had considerable credibility, Hall, like most Americans, viewed Jews as a racial group with distinct physical and mental traits. According to the racial worldview, Jews not only possessed common facial features, but they also shared innate moral and psychological behaviors, such as ostentation and a lack of civility. The language Hall used in his letters of recommendation suggests that his support for his student depended on Morse's acceptable degree of assimilation.14 16
      Four years after receiving his Ph.D., Morse finally obtained an offer from the Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville. He remained in Nashville for three years until he secured a new position as professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of South Carolina in 1911. Over the years, Morse and Hall continued a regular correspondence. Their letters reflected deep personal affection as well as mutual intellectual admiration. Sometimes Morse related anecdotes with Jewish themes. In 1922, Morse had probably described an anti-Semitic incident in one of his letters since Hall responded, "I thought this damnable prejudice against Jews was dead."15 Three months before he died, Hall asked Morse to serve as his literary executor.16 17
      While no statistics are available on the number of Jewish graduate students during Hall's tenure as president, data on the number of Jewish undergraduates enrolled in Clark College do exist. There was one Jew among the forty-three students in the inaugural class of 1905. Two years later, the three Jewish students in the class of 1907 comprised over 17 percent of that group. On average, the classes of 1905 through 1914 were 3.4 percent Jewish. Since Jews represented approximately 1 percent of Worcester residents in 1905, even this low percentage of Clark students exceeded the proportion of Jews in Worcester. Within a decade of the college's opening, the numbers of Jewish students dramatically increased; the classes of 1915 through 1922 were on average 13.7 percent Jewish, at a time when Jews had grown to about 5 percent of the Worcester general population.17 Playwright S. N. Behrman, born in a tenement on Providence Street in Worcester's immigrant Jewish neighborhood, was among the Jewish students who attended Clark during this early period. Behrman spent two years at Clark College before transferring to Harvard in 1915. 18
      Jonas Clark's will had stipulated that the college open its doors "to all classes and persons whatsoever may be their religious faith or political sympathies," and the school's reputation for religious tolerance must certainly have attracted Jewish applicants.18 Economic policy augmented the effect of social policy: the low tuition fees made it possible for Jewish applicants from the East Side, the immigrant and working-class section of Worcester, to enroll. Clark College opened as a three-year commuter school with tuition free in the first year, $25 in the second year, and $50 in the third year. Joshua Morrison, a Worcester resident, typified the young Jewish men who studied at Clark: he enrolled in 1918 because of its three-year program and inexpensive costs.19 19
      Many urban schools throughout the Northeast duplicated Clark's disproportionate Jewish representation. During the 1918–1919 academic year, Jews comprised over three-quarters of City College of New York students, nearly half of New York University students, and over one-fifth of Columbia students. That same year, outside of New York City, Jewish enrollments approached the 20 percent level at Tufts College and 15 percent at Johns Hopkins. In contrast, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Williams attracted far fewer Jews–1.9, 2.8, and 1.5 percent, respectively–at least partially because so few lived near the schools' small-town locations.20 Most Jews who attended college during this period remained at home because they did not have the financial resources to pay for dormitory expenses. 20
      In 1913, Clark's Jewish students formed a chapter of the Menorah Society, a national collegiate organization dedicated to fostering knowledge about Jewish history and culture. On at least two occasions, Hall addressed the Menorah Society membership at its annual banquet. In a 1915 speech titled "Yankee and Jew," Hall highlighted the similarities between Yankees and Jews and urged Jewish students to take pride in Jesus as "an extremely representative man of your race."21 Although Hall believed that Jesus provided a worthy model for all young men, he did not advocate assimilation. In "A Suggestion for a Jewish University," a 1917 talk, Clark's president voiced skepticism about assimilation because "if it goes too far something is in danger of being lost." His concerns about the costs of assimilation led Hall to argue in favor of a Jewish university that would "be a monument of the Jewish race, of its past and future, a repository of its learning, and a conservator of its loftiest spirit."22 21
      Clark College remained an independent institution until its merger with the graduate school in 1920. Wallace W. Atwood, the second president of Clark University, created a single faculty by combining graduate and undergraduate departments. Where previously there had been dual departments, after the consolidation they joined into one entity. Two years later, Clark expanded its undergraduate program from three to four years, and in 1942, when the number of male students declined precipitously due to military conscription, the school began to admit women. 22
   

Clark under Atwood, 1920–1946

 
Atwood did not share his predecessor's commitment to liberalism. A geographer by training, Atwood came to Clark in 1920 from Harvard University. Less than two years into his presidency, Atwood revealed his political colors during a guest lecture by socialist Scott Nearing. Angry over one of Nearing's comments, Atwood ordered that the lecture end; when the audience (which included former president Hall) did not respond quickly enough, he instructed the janitor to flicker the lights. Since Clark's motto is "Fiat Lux" (let there be light), the irony of turning off lights to censure a speaker was not lost on the Clark community. This incident came to symbolize Atwood's lack of commitment to free inquiry. 23
      Atwood also did not embrace Hall's willingness to hire Jews. Not a single Jewish professor with regular faculty status joined Clark University during Atwood's twenty-six-year tenure as president. Saul Rosenzweig and Gregory Pincus, the only two Jews to teach at Clark during the Atwood era, never received regular appointments. Rosenzweig, a psychologist with a full-time position at Worcester State Hospital, had the equivalent of a courtesy appointment when he served as a special lecturer in 1938 and affiliate assistant professor in abnormal psychology in 1940. After leaving Clark, Rosenzweig became chief psychologist at Pittsburgh's Western State Psychiatric Institute and Clinic and then associate professor of psychology and neuropsychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Gregory Pincus, a pioneer in the field of oral contraceptives, arrived at Clark in the early 1940s as a visiting professor of experimental biology. His salary, however, did not come out of Clark funds. Gifts from a New York businessman and from Lord Rothschild of Cambridge University covered Pincus's salary and research expenses. In 1944, Pincus founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology with Hudson Hoagland, chairperson of Clark's biology department. 24
      In a reference letter to the United States Navy during World War II, Atwood commented negatively on Pincus's ethnicity: "I assume you know that Dr. Pincus is Jewish, and that you are not thinking of him as an officer to go into active service."23 Atwood's anti-Semitism, however, did not interfere with his positive assessment of Pincus's research talents. In that same letter, Atwood wrote: "We consider him [Pincus] an outstanding scientific research worker, a man of unusual ability and intelligence, who is doing work of very great importance." Despite the president's laudatory evaluation, Pincus never rose above the rank of visiting professor at Clark. 25


 
Figure 8
    Wallace W. Atwood
 


 
      Some documents dating from Atwood's presidency demonstrate the risk a non-Jewish job candidate ran if circumstances might make him "appear" Jewish. In those instances, faculty and administrators provided clarification. When Atwood tried to convince the Board of Trustees to approve a two-year appointment for a refugee scholar in 1941, he pointed out that the applicant "is a Belgian, not Jewish."24 One year earlier, a department chairperson believed that Atwood opposed his first choice for a one-year position because the candidate had "the misfortune to be an Armenian and to look like a Jew, which he is not." The department head thought it might help his candidate's chances if the president knew that this Armenian scholar had a white Anglo-Saxon wife who was "an attractive, intelligent girl."25 In the end, Atwood agreed to this temporary appointment. 26
      In 1925, Harvard University's Appointment Office sent a typed memo to Clark with a list of five available candidates with masters degrees in mathematics. The chairperson of Harvard's mathematics department initialed the document, which he labeled "confidential," and wrote comments at the bottom of the page about two of the candidates. About one masters student he wrote "Jewish–not very clean cut personally," and about the other "Lame–not very clean cut personally as I remember him."26 Only these two candidates had X marks written over their names. It is unclear whether the chair from Harvard or someone from Clark made these marks. 27
      Atwood was not the only president to exclude Jews systematically from the academy. As of 1929, for example, Yale College did not have a single Jewish or Catholic full professor and did not grant tenure to a Jew until after World War II. Similarly, none of the 330 black Americans holding doctorates in 1940 held a faculty appointment at a predominately white university.27 These discriminatory policies, like the practices of many employers and landlords who advertised that Jews and Negroes need not apply, reflected a xenophobia that plagued America during the post–World War I era. Henry Ford's publication of the notoriously anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tract accusing Jews of waging an international conspiracy for world domination, contributed to a political climate that influenced Congress to pass its 1924 legislation curtailing immigration of racially "inferior" people, including Eastern European Jews. While some historians of higher education minimize the impact of anti-Semitism during the early part of the twentieth century, no one disputes the prominence of anti-Jewish sentiment during the interwar years, an era characterized by the most pernicious anti-Semitism to date.28 28
      In addition to discriminating against Jewish professors, colleges also mimicked American nativism by excluding Jewish students. Many East Coast college presidents implemented exclusionary measures out of fear that increasing numbers of Jewish students would overwhelm their schools and threaten an institution's reputation. Pres. A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard advocated a quota system when the proportion of Jewish students at his school tripled from 7 percent in 1900 to 21.5 percent in 1922. Similarly, Yale's Pres. James Rowland Angell supported his dean's recommendation to limit the number of Jewish students when they grew from 2 percent in 1901–1902 to more than 13 percent of the class of 1925.29 Once one school introduced quotas, a chain reaction emerged since "none wanted to become a dumping ground for unwanted Jews."30 While Columbia and New York University, two of the first schools to implement quotas, used character tests, the Big Three–Harvard, Princeton, and Yale–developed exclusionary tactics such as requiring applicants to include photographs with their applications, provide information about religion and race, and complete personal interviews. As a result of these strategies, the proportion of Jewish students in Yale's class of 1934 decreased to 8.2 percent while the proportion in Harvard's class of 1930 fell to approximately 10–16 percent. Meanwhile Princeton cut its number of successful Jewish candidates by almost half, ensuring that the Jewish proportion of the student body would not exceed 3 percent, the percentage of Jews in the national population.31 29
      Growing percentages of Jewish students at Clark also became a source of concern for the Atwood administration. While Jewish students comprised 17 percent of the senior class in 1927–1928, they made up one-third of the first year cohort. During this period, a Clark administrator compiled a statistical report–"Jewish Students at Clark"–that compared Jewish and non-Jewish students in every class from 1905 to 1926.32 The data focused on enrollment figures, achieved academic honors, advanced degrees earned, and post-Clark employment. For the Jewish students, the document also included information on whether they came from Worcester and about their extracurricular activities. 30
      Unfortunately, no supplementary materials in the Clark University Archives explain the origins or purpose of this report. A similar study prepared by Dean Frederick Jones at Yale, however, may shed light on the Clark administrator's intent. In 1922, when members of the Yale Corporation did not immediately embrace proposals from the chair of the University Admissions Board for limiting the number of Jewish students, Jones prepared a detailed report of Yale College classes of 1911 through 1926. Based on the enrollment figures, he advocated policies to restrain the numbers of Jewish students. Nonetheless, when the numbers also revealed that Jewish students earned better grades and more academic honors than their non-Jewish counterparts, Jones, "a dean who disliked Jews," concluded that "they are ambitious and industrious, and distinctly worth educating."33 Similarly, the Clark statistical evidence indicated a growing Jewish student population and that Jewish undergraduates earned a disproportionate share of the school's academic awards. Since the Clark and Yale findings were nearly identical, Clark administrators may have made similar interpretations about the need to limit the number of Jewish students despite recognizing their academic achievements. 31
      Other documents from this same period testify to the general air of concern about Jewish enrollment at Clark. In a 1932 memo to the chancellor of Syracuse University, Frank Bryant, director of admissions at Syracuse University, summarized a conversation that he had had with a member of Clark's Admission Committee about restricting the number of Jewish students at Clark. "The institution authorized him to proceed this year with the understanding that the Jewish percentage was to be cut very considerably," Bryant wrote. "His conviction is that, when the percentage exceeds five or six percent, it becomes a handicap to the institution in securing students."34 During a vacation in Yosemite National Park in July 1930, Atwood received an update from Dean Homer P. Little about the enrollment situation for the coming academic year. Little wrote: "We have, at present, admitted fifty two to the freshman class.... Apparently it will be considerably smaller than last year's class however. This could easily be remedied if I chose to encourage certain people to come. I think that you and I both agree that this is unfavorable beyond a certain point."35 Atwood responded with support for Little's exclusionary strategy. He fully agreed that numbers were not as important as the need for "a carefully selected group in order to build up a good spirit in the undergraduate college."36 Similarly, in his "Limitation of Numbers" proposal to the Yale Corporation, President Angell advocated for smaller enrollments over admitting more Jewish students. The strategy to limit enrollments served as a code for restriction of Jews.37 32
      Dean Little's attempts to downsize the student body quickly proved untenable for Clark. Dependent on student tuition for its financial survival, Clark could not afford to lower its enrollments. In the academic year 1930–1931, Clark enrolled 254 students in the college. While enrollments dipped the following year to 236, they rose over the next three years to 270, 294, and 304, respectively.38 And as the Clark undergraduate population grew, the number of Jewish students rose as well. According to Bryant, the Syracuse University admissions director, his Clark colleague complained "that 40% of the entering class last year were Jewish and that there was the greatest difficulty in securing any other type of student."39 Sustained discrimination against Jewish students, then, may have been a luxury that only elite institutions could afford. 33
      Atwood's anti-Semitism was invisible, or at least irrelevant, to the Jewish students who enrolled during his tenure as president. Yetta Silverman Ferdinand, who studied for her masters in psychology in the late 1920s, was neither aware of any anti-Semitism nor "subjected to discrimination."40 From alumnus Samuel Sleeper's vantage point, Clark was an institution free of prejudice. "You never felt uneasy," he explained. "You never felt a little tension.... Your Jewishness just didn't matter.... The question of nationality or religion never entered the picture, at least when I was there."41 Thelma Lockwood, who entered Clark in 1942, the first year that Clark opened its doors to undergraduate women, also had no memories of anti-Semitism.42 In his book The Making of an American Psychologist, Seymour Sarason, class of 1942, wrote that "in my three years at Clark, I cannot recall a single instance where I felt discriminated against because I was Jewish. At the same time, I was aware of several things: there was not a recognizably Jewish name under any of the pictures on that seminar wall; there were very few Jewish names in departments of psychology anywhere in the country.... But there were a lot of Jews who were psychologists several miles away at Worcester State Hospital."43 Irving Sigel, class of 1943, knew about Atwood's anti-Semitism but, "since it was not a new phenomenon for most of us, we could endure it and get out of school what we set out to do. That Atwood and his cronies were bad guys did not have the negative effect on me as far as my education was concerned. His antisemitism was primarily directed at the faculty."44 Despite Atwood's bias, Clark University provided a hospitable environment for Jewish students. 34
      For Sigel, the benefits of a Clark education outweighed the costs of Atwood's bigotry. Working-class Jewish young men from Worcester enrolled at Clark during Atwood's reign for the same reasons that they had chosen the school when Hall was at the helm; the relatively low tuition fees combined with the ability to live at home made Clark their only option for obtaining a college education. Samuel Sleeper, class of 1930, explained that he could not afford most colleges because "it meant living in a dormitory and that was expensive. And so quite a few of the Jewish kids like myself who were first generation Americans, whose parents weren't in the upper, upper middle class, could go to college for $150 year without any board and room because we could commute."45 When Burte Guterman decided to attend Clark in the mid 1930s, "It wasn't a matter of selection. It was the only place I could afford to go."46 35
   

Clark under Jefferson, 1946–1967

 
In contrast to the anti-Semitism that marked the Atwood era, the number of Jewish professors increased dramatically under the next president, Howard Bonar Jefferson. Jefferson, an ordained Baptist minister, assumed the Clark presidency in 1946 and continued in that position until 1967. During those two decades, Jefferson hired scores of Jewish professors, including geographer Saul Cohen and psychologist Seymour Wapner. In addition to geography and psychology, Jews came to work in the departments of chemistry, English, government, fine arts, history, mathematics, and physics. Similarly, religious barriers crumbled at other universities during the postwar period. At Yale, in 1946 philosopher Paul Weiss became the first Jew to hold the rank of full professor; at roughly the same time, Jews also penetrated the departments of history, botany, chemistry, linguistics and even English, a notoriously anti-Jewish enclave.47 Historian Marcia Graham Synnott traced this new spirit of inclusion to World War II, which led to an overall decline in anti-Semitic sentiment and to a strengthening of democratic values.48 36


 
Figure 9
    Howard Bonar Jefferson
 


 
      Liberal sentiment would have counted for little, however, if academic positions had not been available. The expansion of higher education after the war worked to the advantage of Jewish scholars seeking entry into the academy. As a maturing American economy created demand for a more educated labor force, universities innovated programs in science, vocational training, and professional education. In addition, enrollments doubled between 1938 and 1948, partially because of the GI Bill. Two million veterans enrolled in institutions of higher education, and by 1947, the number of veterans studying in colleges nearly equaled the total number of students just a decade before.49 American universities, desperately in need of more faculty, could no longer afford policies of religious discrimination. At Clark, the influx of Jewish scholars corresponded to a general faculty expansion. During Jefferson's twenty-one-year tenure as president, the faculty increased from 40 members to 108 full-time and 30 part-time members.50 37
      Jewish students continued to enroll at Clark, and beginning in 1942 admissions included women as well as men. Under Jefferson, Clark shifted from a commuter to a residential college and this change had a profound impact on the social class composition of the entire student body, including the Jewish students. When Jefferson first assumed the presidency in 1946, 70 percent of Clark students commuted from home to school. Ten years later, the figure dropped to 50 percent. Of 1,380 undergraduate students in 1967, nearly half came from Massachusetts while the remaining half arrived from New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.51 Former dean of students William Topkin remembers that when he enrolled as a Clark student in 1956, "the majority were commuters, but that changed very quickly. Even by the time I got to be a senior, the majority was residential students."52 As Clark, like many small, coeducational New England colleges, gained popularity among students from New York City during the 1950s, Jonas Clark's vision of an affordable college for Worcester boys slipped away into university history. 38
      During this period of transition, a split existed between commuting and residential students. Commuters, who were typically of a lower socioeconomic class than the residential students, attended Clark for the same reason their predecessors had: affordability. Morton Sigel, class of 1951, echoed the comments of students from an earlier generation:
Well, I didn't have a great deal of choice in a way. I was a Worcester born native. I had to work and pay my own tuition so I really had very little if any outside financial help. The best thing for me to do was be a day student and work in the afternoon or evening and live at home. So my choices were Worcester Polytech, Holy Cross, and Clark. I wasn't an engineer and Holy Cross wasn't ready for me, and therefore I went to Clark.53
 Reflecting upon her undergraduate years, Elizabeth Cohen, class of 1953, noticed that the young women who came from New York "were really coming from very different social backgrounds than the average Clark student."54 Morris Cohen, who arrived at Clark as an assistant professor of government and who helped launch a Hillel chapter in 1953, also highlighted the class differences between the two groups. Jewish students who came from New York "had more money than the local kids. They had enough money to come and live away from home.... There was some feeling on the part of the local Jews that these New York Jews were a different group of people and were acting as if they were superior."55 William Topkin corroborated Professor Cohen's observations when he described how "some commuting students tended to stick together. They would have lunch together. There wasn't as much intermixing as perhaps everyone wished there could have been."56		 39
      While the shift to a residential college changed the school's social class character, it did not have an adverse effect on Jewish enrollments. Under Jefferson, Clark became the school of choice for many Jewish students in the Northeast, and their numbers peaked during the late 1960s. In 1969, 38 percent of first-year students indicated "Jewish" as their religious preference while 54 percent responded that they had a Jewish background.57 A constellation of factors contributed to this high proportion of Jewish students. As American Jews moved up the economic ladder and could increasingly afford to send their children to a private residential college, Clark's geographic proximity to areas of Jewish concentration combined with its legacy of welcoming Jewish students made it an attractive choice. Clark's reputation for religious tolerance was enhanced when, in 1959, the Board of Trustees took an official stand against fraternities that had exclusionary policies.58 In addition, the persistence of biased admission practices within higher education limited Jewish students' college options and in all likelihood contributed to Jewish concentrations in particular schools such as Clark. Yale's Admissions Committee, for example, deliberately employed a policy of "conscious self-restraint" vis-à-vis Jewish enrollment into the 1960s.59 40
      Jews continued to comprise a high percentage of the Clark student body through the 1980s. One-third of students who entered Clark in 1989 identified as Jewish.60 During the 1990s, however, these numbers declined. As quotas against Jews had become historical relics and as large numbers of schools, including ones once considered inhospitable to Jewish students, had gained positive reputations for their inclusive and welcoming campus climates, Clark lost its Jewish niche. Hillel chapters and Jewish studies programs (Clark's began in 1973) became so widespread that college-bound Jews and their parents could even find them in Christian-affiliated schools.61 Clark, a university that had once stood out for its receptivity towards Jewish students, became just one of many options. As a result, by the close of the millennium, only 13 percent of Clark's first-year students identified as Jewish.62

 41
The Clark case both substantiates and challenges patterns highlighted by historians of Jews within higher education. In terms of its Jewish faculty, Clark mainly followed the general trend. Except for a brief three-year period beginning with the university's founding in 1889, Jews comprised but a small percentage of the Clark faculty prior to World War I. While there is no evidence of exclusionary hiring practices during this early period, the situation changed during the interwar period. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Clark, like many other schools, implemented a discriminatory employment policy. Not until the post–World War II era, a period marked by declining anti-Semitism and an expansion of higher education, did Clark open its doors to Jewish academics. 42
      Clark differs from the documented master pattern in its recruitment of students. Unlike the Big Three, Clark began as a school for low-income students. As a result, working-class children of Jewish immigrants were never outsiders at Clark, where many of the students were sons of recent immigrants living on Worcester's East Side. During the interwar period, President Atwood shared his counterparts' intent to limit Jewish enrollments, but he was unable to act on these anti-Semitic impulses. Clark, a school plagued by financial insecurity since its inception, could not afford to lose tuition revenue, the consequence of an exclusionary policy. Despite Atwood's prejudices, Jonas Clark's vision of a university that would be open to students from all classes "whatsoever may be their religious faith" prevailed.63 43


SHELLY TENENBAUM is associate professor of sociology and director of the holocaust and gender studies concentration at Clark University. She is the author of A Credit to Their Community: Jewish Loan Societies in the United States, 1880–1945 (1993) and co-editor of Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies (1996).


NOTES

I am grateful to the following Clark students who provided research assistance for this paper: Ronit Climan, Amy Feldman, Karen Feldman, Alan Goldman, Susan Green, Marla Maritzer, Jeffrey Milgroom, Judith Reiser, Jared Seltzer, and Jessica Sutin. William Koelsch, former Clark University Historian, and Stuart Campbell, former Clark University Archivist, guided this project by pointing out crucial documents and answering many questions about the school's history. Mott Linn provided archival assistance in the final stages of this project. I also thank Lynn Davidman, Roger Geiger, Ondine Le Blanc, Amy Richter, Donald Yacovone, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.

1. Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900–1970 (Westport, Conn., 1979); Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, 1985); Nitza Rosovsky, The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Marianne Sanua, "Stages in the Development of Jewish Life at Princeton," American Jewish History 76 (1987): 391–415.

2. Laurence R. Veysey, The E Frgence of the American University (Chicago, 1965), 166.

3. Lester F. Goodchild, "G. Sta Hall and the Study of Higher Education," The Review of Higher Education 20 (1996): 74; Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 165–173; William A. Koelsch, Clark University, 1887–1987: A Narrative History (Worcester, Mass., 1987).

4. "The Petition," in Early Poceedings of the Board of Trustees (1901), Box A 10–5, Clark University Archives (hereafter CUA).

5. Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago, 1972), 42, 415.

6. "Docents Made Life a Burden," Worcester Sunday Telegram, May 24, 1891, p. 7; "Wave of Public Censure," Worcester Daily Telegram, Mar. 5, 1891, p. 9; "Begin on Woodland Street," Worcester Daily Telegram, Mar. 6, 1891, p. 4.

7. Goodchild, "G. Stanley Hall and the Study of Higher Education," 89.

8. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (1957; New York, 1962).

9. Solomon Lefschetz, "Reminiscences of a Mathematical Immigrant in the United States," American Mathematical Monthly 77 (1970): 344.

10. Josiah Moses to G. Stanley Hall, Jan. 25, 1907, G. Stanley Hall Papers, CUA.

11. Josiah Morse to G. Stanley Hall, June 28, 1907, G. Stanley Hall Papers, CUA. Also see letters from Morse to Hall, Jan. 7, 1907, and Jan. 25, 1907.

12. G. Stanley Hall to Allen Whitney, June 4, 1907, G. Stanley Hall Papers, CUA.

13. Hall to Whitney, June 4, 1907, G. Stanley Hall Papers, CUA. Also see Hall's letters to Henry D. Sheldon, Apr. 30, 1907, and to Edward J. Pierce, Nov. 24, 1903.

14. John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York, 1974); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

15. G. Stanley Hall to Josiah Morse, Nov. 1, 1922, G. Stanley Hall Papers, CUA.

16. G. Stanley Hall to Josiah Morse, Jan. 11, 1924, G. Stanley Hall Papers, CUA.

17. "Jewish Students at Clark, 1905–1926," Records of the General Office, 1922–1973, CUA. The percentages of Jews within Worcester's population were calculated from data presented in the following two different studies: Joseph Talamo, "Social Survey of he Jewish Population of Worcester, 1915," unpublished paper, Worcester Historical Museum; "Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of Worcester, Massachusetts for the Year Ending December 31, 1905," in Worcester City Documents, Number 60, Year Ending November 30, 1905 (Worcester, 1906); and "Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of Worcester, Massachusetts for the Year Ending December 31, 1915," in Worcester City Documents, Number 69, Year Ending November 30, 1915 (Worcester, 1916). According to Talamo's survey, there were 1,000 Jews living in Worcester in 1905 and 8,000 in 1915. The Annual Reports of the Board of Health provide the following Worcester population figures for 1905 and 1915, respectively: 132,550 and 169,599.

18. "Will of Jonas Clark," in Early Proceedings of the Board of Trustees (1901), Box A 10–5, CUA.

19. Joshua Morrison, letter to author, Apr. 17, 1990.

20. Synnott, The Half-Opened Doo , 16–19.

21. G. Stanley Hall, "Yankee and Jew," The Menorah Journal 1 (1915): 89.

22. G. Stanley Hall, "A Suggestion for a Jewish University," The Menorah Journal 3 (1917): 100–101.

23. Wallace Atwood to John L. Neilson, Apr. 29, 1941, Atwood Papers, CUA.

24. Wallace Atwood to Alexander H. Budlock and George Mirick, June 6, 1941, Atwood Papers, CUA.

25. Hudson Hoagland to Wallace Atwood, Apr. 1, 1940, Atwood Papers, CUA.

26. Memo from Appointment Office of Harvard University, 1925, Atwood Papers, CUA.

27. Oren, Joining the Club, 119.

28. Oren, Joining the Club, 116. For a history of anti-Semitism, see Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York and Oxford, 1994).

29. Synnott, The Half-Opened Door, 19.

30. Oren, Joining the Club, 40.

31. Synnott, The Half-Opened Door, 20. For other histories of discrimination against Jews within higher education, see Oren, Joining the Club; Rosovsky, The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe; Sanua, "Stages in the Development of Jewish Life at Princeton"; Harvey Strum, "Discrimination at Syracuse University," History of Higher Education 4 (1984): 101–122; and Harold S. Wechsler, The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America (New York, 1977).

32. "Jewish Students at Clark, 1905–1926," Records of the General Office, 1922–1973, CUA.

33. Oren, Joining the Club, 50–51.

34. Frank Bryant to Charles W. Flint, Nov. 22, 1932, Admissions 1931–1932 File, Box 1, Flint-Graham Papers, Records of the Chancellor's Office, Record Group 1, Syracuse University Archives.

35. Homer P. Little to Wallace Atwood, July 29, 1930, Atwood Papers, CUA.

36. Wallace Atwood to Homer Little, Aug. 12, 1930, Atwood Papers, CUA.

37. Oren, Joining the Club, 51.

38. Administrative Report 1920–1945, prepared by Wallace W. Atwood, May 1945, CUA.

39. Frank Bryant to Charles W. Flint, Nov. 22, 1932, Records of the Chancellor's Office, Syracuse University Archives.

40. Yetta Silverman Ferdinand, letter to author, July 28, 1990.

41. Samuel Sleeper, interview by Amy Feldman and Susan Green, Mar. 26, 1989, transcript in possession of the author.

42. Thelma Lockwood, interview by Amy Feldman and Jeffrey Milgroom, Oct. 12, 1989, transcript in possession of the author.

43. Seymour B. Sarason, The Making of an American Psychologist: An Autobiography (San Francisco, 1988), 126.

44. Irving Sigel, letter to author, May 13, 1990.

45. Sleeper, interview.

46. Burte Guterman, interview by Amy Feldman and Judith Reiser, Sept. 25, 1989, transcript in possession of the author.

47. Oren, Joining the Club, 259–261.

48. Synnott, The Half-Opened Door, 201.

49. Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York, 1993), 40–41.

50. Synnott, The Half-Opened Door, 201; Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston, 1989), 136; Koelsch, Clark University, 169.

51. Koelsch, Clark University, 184, 209.

52. William Topkin, interview by Jeffrey Milgroom and Judith Reiser, Dec. 18, 1989, transcript in possession of the author.

53. Morton Sigel, interview by Amy Feldman and Susan Green, Mar. 28, 1989, transcript in possession of the author.

54. Elizabeth Cohen, interview by Amy Feldman and Jeffrey Milgroom, May 9, 1990, transcript in possession of the author.

55. Morris Cohen, interview by Amy Feldman, Susan Green, and Shelly Tenenbaum, Apr. 27, 1989, transcript in possession of the author.

56. Topkin, interview.

57. Cooperative Institutional Research Program (hereafter CIRP), Freshman Survey, 1969, Office of Institutional Studies and Student Records, Clark University.

58. Henry C. Borger to O. W. Macy, May 2, 1960, Records of the General Office, 1914–1974, CUA. Also see Frederick Killian to Richard Hall, Apr. 8, 1957, Records of the General Office, 1914–1974, CUA.

59. Oren, Joining the Club, 194.

60. CIRP, Freshman Survey, 1989, Office of Institutional Studies and Student Records, Clark University.

61. Daniel Goldern, "In Effort to Lift Their Rankings, Colleges Recruit Jewish Students," The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 29, 2002.

62. CIRP, Freshman Survey, 1997 and 1999, Office of Institutional Studies and Student Records, Clark University.

63. "Will of Jonas Clark," in Early Proceedings of the Board of Trustees (1901), Box A 10–5, CUA.

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