Numerus clausus ("closed number" in Latin) is one of many methods used to limit the number of students who may study at a university. In many cases, the goal of the numerus clausus is simply to limit the number of students to the maximum feasible in some particularly sought-after areas of studies with an intent to keep a constant supply of qualified workforce and thus limit competition. In historical terms however, in some countries, numerus clausus policies were intentional religious or racial quotas.
Countries legislating limitations on the admission of Jewish students, at various times, have included: Austria, Canada, Hungary, Imperial Russia, Iraq, Latvia (from 1934 under the Kārlis Ulmanis regime), Netherlands, Poland, Romania, the United Kingdom, United States, Vichy France, and Yugoslavia.Freidenreich, Harriet Pass (1979) The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. "On Oct 5, 1940 the Royal Government in Serbia issued Two anti-Jewish decrees restricting them from producing or distributing food; and the other a numerous clausus law restricting enrollment in universities and high schools."
Historical examples
Germany
A whole series of resolutions demanding numerus clausus were put forward by students' organizations in 1929, based on race, place of origin, or religion.JTA Bulletin (1931-3-17), Berlin: The growing numerus clausus peril in Germany. Page 4. On 25 April 1933, the Nazi government introduced a 1.5 percent quota for new admissions of German non-Aryans, essentially of German Jews enrolling to German high schools and universities.Gesetz gegen die Überfüllung deutscher Schulen und Hochschulen (RGBl 1933 I, S. 225) (original German text of the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities, introduced in 1933). Erste Verordnung zur Durchführung des Gesetzes gegen die Überfüllung deutscher Schulen und Hochschulen (RGBl 1933 I, S. 226) (original German text of the First Regulation for the Implementation of the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities, introduced in 1933).
Hungary
The Hungarian numerus clausus was introduced in 1920. The law formally placed limits on the number of minority students at universities and legalized corporal punishment. Though the text did not use the term Jew, it was nearly the only group overrepresented in higher education. The policy is often seen as the first anti-Jewish act of twentieth century Europe.Péter Tibor Nagy, The "numerus clausus" policy of antisemitism or policy of higher education, in The social and political history of Hungarian education
Its aim was to restrict the proportion of Jewish students to 6 percent, which was their proportion in Hungary at that time; the rate of Jewish students was approximately 15% in the 1910s.Miklos Molnar, A Concise History of Hungary, CUP, 2001 In 1928, stating minority-protection obligations under the postwar peace settlement and acknowledging complaints from Hungarian Jews, the act was modified and the passage of the ethnicity quota was eliminated. From 1938 to 1945 the anti-Jewish acts were revitalised and eventually much worsened, partly due to German Nazi pressure and in the hope of revising the Treaty of Trianon with the help of Germany.
Poland
Polish universities were a hotbed of the radical far-right National Democracy and from Poland's independence in 1918 right-wing students promoted the return of the Russian numerus clausus system. Attempts by the University of Lwów to implement numerus clausus in 1922-3 were ruled unconstitutional. In the early 1930s, Camp of Great Poland advocated numerus nullus – a complete exclusion of Jews. In 1931, the All-Polish Youth demonstrated against Jewish medical students operating on Christian cadavers. The medical faculties caved in, and Jewish students were supplied with Jewish cadavers. Polish radicals then demanded segregation of Jewish students, first asking for "voluntary" segregation and when this was refused attacking Jewish students. Following violent demonstrations by Polish radicals, in 1937-8 most Polish universities introduced segregation. By 1939, most Polish institutes of higher learning implemented a numerus clausus system.Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Volume 1, Richard S. Levy, ACB CLIO, page 275Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, University of Nebraska Press, Joanna B. Michlic, page 112-113
United Kingdom
While not strictly a quota, most universities in the United Kingdom required students, faculty, and fellows to be members of the Church of England, excluding all others, until the Universities Tests Act 1871 was passed.
USSR
Certain scientific and educational institutions in the USSR, such as the MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics implemented anti-Jewish restrictions in the second half of the twentieth century under the guise of numerus clausus. Officially claimed to help promote enrollment of applicants belonging to ethnic minorities underrepresented in Soviet science, such as Yakuts, this policy was effectively used to discriminate Jewish applicants. According to Edward Frenkel, this led to a creation of a strong mathematical community in the advanced mathematics department of Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas, which as a consequence was composed to a significant degree of Jewish students denied entry to the Moscow State University.
North America
Between 1918 and the 1950s a number of private universities and medical schools in the United States introduced numerus clausus policies limiting admissions of students based on their religion or race to certain percentages within the college population. Many minority groups were negatively impacted by these policies; one of the groups affected was Jewish applicants, whose admission to some New England- and New York City-area liberal arts colleges fell significantly between the late 1910s and the mid-1930s.Getting In: the social logic of Ivy League admissions by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 10 October 2005 For instance, the admission to Harvard University during that period fell from 27.6% to 17.1% and in Columbia University from 32.7% to 14.6%. Corresponding quotas were introduced in the medical and dental schools resulting during the 1930s in the decline of Jewish students: e.g. in Cornell University School of Medicine from 40% in 1918–22 to 3.57% in 1940–41, in Boston University Medical School from 48.4% in 1929–30 to 12.5% in 1934–35. At Yale University, Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions to the admissions office regarding ethnic quotas were very specific: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all." During this period, a notable exception among U. S. medical schools was the medical school of Middlesex University, which had no quotas and many Jewish faculty members and students; school officials believed that antisemitism played a role in the school's failure to secure AMA accreditation., pp. 42–3: founder's son C. Ruggles Smith quoted: "From its inception, Middlesex was ruthlessly attacked by the American Medical Association, which at that time was dedicated to restricting the production of physicians, and to maintaining an inflexible policy of discrimination in the admission of medical students. Middlesex, alone among medical schools, selected its students on the basis of merit, and refused to establish any racial quotas"
The most common method, employed by 90% of American universities and colleges at the time to identify the "desirable" (native-born, white, Protestant) applicants, was the application form questions about their religious preference, race, and nationality. Other more subtle methods included restrictions on scholarships, rejection of transfer students, and preferences for alumni sons and daughters.
Legacy preference for university admissions was devised in 1925 at Yale University, where the proportional number of Jews in the student body was growing at a rate that became alarming to the school's administrators. Prior to that year, Yale had begun to incorporate such amorphous criteria as 'character' and 'solidity', as well as 'physical characteristics', into its admissions process as an excuse for screening out Jewish students; but nothing was as effective as legacy preference, which allowed the admissions board to summarily pass over Jews in favor of 'Yale sons of good character and reasonably good record', as a 1929 memo phrased it. Other schools, including Harvard, soon began to pursue similar policies for similar reasons, and Jewish students in the Ivy League schools were maintained at a steady 10% through the 1950s. Such policies were gradually discarded during the early 1960s, with Yale being one of the last of the major schools to eliminate the last vestige with the class of 1970 (entering in 1966).The Birth of a New Institution Geoffrey Kabaservice, Yale Alumni Magazine, December 1999 While legacy admissions as a way of screening out Jewish students may have ceased, the practice of giving preference to legacies has continued to the present day. In the 1998 book The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, authors William G. Bowen, former Princeton University president, and Derek Bok, former Harvard University president, found "the overall admission rate for legacies was almost twice that for all other candidates".
The religion preference question was eventually dropped from the admission application forms and noticeable evidence of informal numerus clausus policies in the American private universities and medical schools decreased by the 1950s.
Certain Canadian universities had longstanding quotas on the number of Jews admitted to the respective universities. McGill University's strict quota was the longest, being officially adopted in 1920 up until the late 1960s.Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada's Jews: A People's Journey, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, pp. 132-133, 319-321, 410.
Modern examples
The numerus clausus is used in countries and universities where the number of applicants greatly exceeds the number of available places for students. This is the case in many countries of continental Europe. Students in much of Europe choose their field of specialization when they begin university study, unlike students in North America, who specialize later. Fields such as medicine, law, biology, dentistry, pharmacy, psychology and business administration are particularly popular and therefore harder to gain admittance to study.
Brazil
In November 2002 the Brazilian government passed Federal Law 10.558/2002, known as the "Quota Law". The law allowed for the establishment of racial quotas at public universities. In 2012 the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil unanimously upheld the law.Brazil's Supreme Court upholds affirmative action in universities, KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO Special to the AmNews | 5/16/2012, 6:04 p.m., Amsterdam News, http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2012/may/16/brazils-supreme-court-upholds-affirmative-action/
Germany