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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

> He joined a fraternity, one of the two that took in Jews.

This was a surprising reminder that things were very different in 1935.

I wonder, is there any group like this today? “One of the two that took in X” for any X seems like an interesting formula for locating outliers, whether good or bad.

A lot of nasty examples come to mind, but it’s hard to know how Jews were regarded at the time. I wonder what the official justification was for denying access to Feynman.

(I’m half Jewish on my father’s side, and I only discovered this by accident a few years ago. So I’ve been trying to research my heritage wherever I can.)

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And he only went to MIT as an undergraduate because his first choice Columbia had a "Jew quota" and they had already admitted all the Jews they wanted to for that year. Besides the antisemitism, it's also a reminder that in the 1930s MIT was seen as a good, but not particularly elite school and would be somebody's backup school.

Now that’s fascinating. Thank you. Both that Columbia was as regarded as MIT and that MIT hadn’t achieved its current fame.

It’s odd to realize that I’ve always thought of MIT as MIT, yet (obviously, now) it wasn’t always that way. I wonder what the tipping point was.

Probably WWII, with the American radar research program (not as famous as the Manhattan Project but probably equally or more important) centered there.

Gunsights too. That was how Doc Draper who later pioneered inertial navigation and whose lab designed the Apollo Guidance Computer first made his name. (Draper Labs is no longer formally affiliated with MIT as it was divested during the Vietnam War.)

But WWII was probably a major catalyst in the US to the rise in prominence of all the great science and engineering research universities. (There are actually a lot of inventors from that era like Draper who although they were also theoreticians to some degree one suspects might not fit in with a modern research university faculty.)

> But WWII was probably a major catalyst in the US to the rise in prominence of all the great science and engineering research universities.

That and several other high tech societies in the world were simultaneously set back a decade or more.

MIT was only a few decades old at the time -- having been founded about 75 years prior. Columbia was over twice as old at the time (185 years) and was well-established as a global center of physics research.

It seems to me that the prestige of a university is largely a function of it's age. It takes time to become prestigious in the eyes of the public through word of mouth. If you look now at the research universities that are only about 70 years old or less, they are not taken very seriously and are "backup schools" regardless of the quality of research or instruction going on there. Moreover, some of the prestigious "ivy" schools have fallen off their game and aren't really top tier in any academic fields anymore, yet are still highly regarded by the general public.

Makes me wonder how big a role did the "Jew Quota" or similar discriminatory practices played in holding back the likes of Columbia. Also whether we will see a similar effect over next 50 years with affirmative vs non-affirmative schools.

From an interview[0] with Charles Weiner in 1966 Feynmann reminisces about not wanting to go Princenton and rather staying at MIT after graduating, because “MIT is MIT”, but does so only after being persuaded by one of the professors from MIT. I think he made several remarks of MIT having a high status at the time.

[0] https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral...

Columbia is also in New York, so for Feynman it was one of the major universities closest to him.

I graduated from MIT undergrad a few years ago. There were certainly no restrictions on cultural background in the fraternities, though certain fraternities (and some dorm floors) did have reputations for having disproportionate of people coming from a particular ethnicity (e.g. asian) or heading towards a particular career path (e.g. finance, or medicine). FWIW I almost joined a frat that I would've been a minority in, but I never felt excluded while rushing that or any of the other frats.

There were a ton of membership organizations that, probably even quite a bit later, required one or more members to vouch for you and generally excluded people who didn't fit the generally WASPy mold. (And often male--male only organizations were quite widespread until relatively recently and AFAIK frats--as well as sororities--can be single-sex but mostly based on the fact that some level of living arrangements are OK to restrict one sex or the other.)

Surprisingly, Columbia didn’t accept women until 1983. Like Harvard and Radcliffe, it was affiliated with the all-female Barnard.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/23/nyregion/columbia-plans-t...

A lot of well-known private colleges/universities were single-sex, albeit sometimes with exchange programs/affiliates, until relatively recently and there remain significant single-sex, especially all-women, colleges today. Dartmouth, another Ivy, didn't go co-ed until 1972.

A lot of universities, especially those more focused on science and engineering, that were technically co-ed--even from their start in the 1800s--also didn't have a lot of women for a long time. The percentage of women at MIT was still under 20% in the late seventies.

More recently it would be self-professed gays. A frat might feel the gay might come on to them, or brand the entire frat as gay. The other similarity is there is at least one predominantly gay frat.

These days there is so much gay publicity, that many young people would no longer think this is an issue, as it no is with Black and Jewish members.

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