Emory Confronts Legacy of Bias Against Jews in Dental School

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Sunday, October 07, 2012

Emory Confronts Legacy of Bias Against Jews in Dental School

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Early in the summer of 1952, after his first year of dental school at Emory University in Atlanta, Perry Brickman received a letter from the dean. It informed him that he had flunked out.

Mr. Brickman was mystified. He had been a B-plus student in biology as an Emory undergraduate and had earned early admission to dental school. He had never failed a course in his life.

Over the next few weeks of that summer, Mr. Brickman found out that three of his classmates had also been failed. All of them happened to be Jewish. Yet instead of fighting back, Mr. Brickman and his friends searched for other dental schools and swallowed a shame that lasted decades.

“Your parents said, ‘Why didn’t you work harder?’ ” Mr. Brickman, 80, recalled recently. “My mother said, ‘What have you done to me?’ It was almost like being a rape victim. No one believed us. It couldn’t be this one-sided story. Emory was a great university, right? So we went off with the tail between our legs.”

Sixty years later, Mr. Brickman has helped to see belated justice done. In large part because of his personal research into the anti-Semitic record of Emory’s dental school, the university has invited many Jewish former students to a private meeting on Wednesday with its president, James W. Wagner, and that same night it will host the premiere of a documentary film about the scandal.

The evidence of bias against Jewish students in Emory’s dental school under the reign of its dean, John E. Buhler, from 1948 to 1961 has been known for decades. Until now, however, the university had neither admitted the bias nor apologized for it.

“We need to be fearless in confronting our past as individuals and an institution,” said Gary S. Hauk, Emory’s vice president. “There are often things we regret about our past, but there is the possibility of making amends and of building on the acknowledgment of those things. Part of our vision of Emory is being ethically engaged, and that means wrestling about what it means to have these warts.”

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