Jewish students in Emory's now-shuttered dental school were failed or required to repeat courses at an unusually high rate for more than a decade. And although the troubling policy has been known for more than 50 years, only now is the university accepting the bias and apologizing for it.
That's because of the work of Dr. Perry Brickman, who interviewed dozens of former Emory dental students to document the bias between 1948 and 1961. He turned it into a 56-minute video he made on his Apple laptop, partly a cathartic way he could explore his own brush with anti-Semitism at the university.
After Brickman’s first year of Emory’s dental school in 1952, he received a letter from the dean, John Buhler, with the startling news that he had flunked out. It was devastating to Brickman, who had never failed a course in his life. But like other students targeted by the anti-Semitic policy, he kept it bottled up.
“It was like rape. Even if you told the story, people thought you must have had something to do with it. You go home and your parents asked why you didn’t work harder,” said Brickman, now 79. “You just shut up about it and never looked back. It was a fraternity of silence.”
Brickman showed the movie to Gary Hauk, an Emory vice president and the school’s unofficial historian, who was stunned by the footage. The interviews became the foundation of a documentary to be screened Wednesday evening about the dental school’s pattern of bias.
Before the event, the university is arranging for several Jewish students who were victims of the bias to have a private meeting with the school’s president, James Wagner.
“That was a different day and we are a different institution,” Hauk said. “With this kind of look back to our past, we reach out to those people who were affected and say, ‘We want you to be part of our community.’”
The film comes amid a period of reckoning for Emory. The school last year expressed regret for the campus’ role in slavery in Georgia and in August, Emory administrators admitted they intentionally submitted inflated data to boost the university up in the college rankings.
Emory, of course, has changed dramatically since the 1960s. About 20 percent of the school’s undergraduate students currently are Jewish and the Hillels of Georgia, a center for Jewish student life, recently opened a sparkling new building on campus. Its faculty includes Deborah Lipstadt, one of the world’s leading Holocaust scholars, who applauded the school’s move.
“The university has said, ‘This is a mark on our history and the only way of addressing it is by shining a light on it,’” she said.
Brickman said he was jolted into action after seeing an exhibit put together by historian Eric Goldstein that included information from a 1960s book that highlighted the bias. The book showed that 65 percent of Jewish students either flunked out or were forced to repeat classes during Buhler’s tenure.
The dean resigned in 1961 after administrators were confronted with the data, but Emory leaders at the time denied it was the result of discrimination by the dental school’s leadership. Buhler, meanwhile, later became dean of the University of South Carolina’s dental program. He died in 1976.
“I had to tell their story,” said Brickman, who later went on to graduate with honors from the University of Tennessee’s dental school. “They all were thinking they were the only ones, but they all had the same story. After keeping quiet for so long, the whole story has now been told.”
Many of the students forced out of Emory’s dental school went on to prestigious careers, but some others never got over it. For some, the interviews were the first time they told their wives or children about this history of prejudice, said Goldstein, the historian.
“He’s been able to give people closure,” said Goldstein. “He’s letting them finally break their silence.”
About the Author
