MIT’s Openness to Jewish Economists

From a new paper by E. Roy Weintraub:

MIT emerged from “nowhere” in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred. In this paper the author argues that the immediate postwar period saw a collapse – in some places slower, in some places faster – of the barriers to the hiring of Jewish faculty in American colleges and universities. And more than any other elite private or public university, particularly Ivy League universities, MIT welcomed Jewish economists.

From page 9:

If one takes into account the fact that Samuelson was not encouraged to remain at Harvard, his account of MIT’s hiring is startling. Adelman, Milliken, Rostow, Rosenstein-Rodan, Solow, Domar, and Modigliani were all, like him, Jewish. Freeman’s department was able to recruit so well, and so quickly, not only because of Samuelson’s growing renown (he was the first Clark Medalist, in 1947) but because the department and university were remarkably open to the hiring of Jewish faculty at a time when such hiring was just beginning to be possible at Ivy League universities.