Does discriminating against Asian-Americans advance equality? The US Supreme Court decides

DURING the 1920s and 1930s, the Ivy League universities, most notably Harvard, discriminated against Jewish applicants and placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to their institutions.

Hence the medical schools at Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania and Yale had rigid quotas in place. Yale University medical school, for example, accepted in 1935 applicants from a pool of some 500. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in.

According to historian David Oshinsky, the dean of the Yale medical school Milton Winternitz’s instructions were clear: “Never admit more than five Jews, and take no blacks at all.”