Quotas
Updated: 3 days ago
Jim Spatz
From the 19th century onwards, the rigid quota system in the universities of the eastern US states led to many students, especially in the professional faculties, going north to seek their education. The best schools in the United States were generally the most restrictive -- Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and especially Harvard. Canada was not immune; indeed, the University of Toronto and McGill had similarly restrictive policies. This was part of a historical trend in North America and Europe that went back to at least the 1800s. It was referred to as numerus clausus, closed numbers.
My name is Jim Spatz. I was born in 1949. Both my parents survived the Holocaust in eastern Poland, now the western Ukraine. They met in Munich after the war, and got married in 1947.
At the beginning of 1950 we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia to join my aunt and uncle and my two cousins, who had arrived in Halifax in 1948 from Munich. Within two years my father, who had been notably successful in the meat business both in Poland and Munich, had bought his own small grocery store in Halifax, which he expanded and turned into a thriving small business and then ran for almost 20 years. At the same time, he began buying small properties in the neighbourhood and then apartment buildings, eventually becoming a successful developer of apartments.
I went to public schools in Halifax, and then to Dalhousie University for undergraduate studies and then medical school. When I was in medical school at Dal, there was a large cohort of American Jewish students from the northeast United States, who, after graduation, almost always returned home. Knowing nothing about the quotas that limited the admission of Jewish students to professional schools, I simply assumed that Dalhousie was where they happened to have been accepted.
After I graduated, I was a general practitioner in Halifax for 5 years and then moved to Montreal to do residency training at McGill University. I became a specialist in emergency medicine, practicing and teaching at the Jewish General Hospital, a McGill University teaching hospital, for several years.
When I was close to 40, I switched careers, moving home to Halifax to join my father's now significant property development company. I had thoroughly loved working in and then running a busy emergency room. The unpredictability, challenge and excitement of calm turning to chaos in an instant suited my personality so well. It was a magnet that would have kept me had I not grown up in the house of an unusually talented and driven entrepreneur.
When I was a young boy, I would often spend time on Sundays with my father when he was cleaning his store on the day stores were not allowed to open. One day he looked up from the meat counter, which he was scrubbing, and said to me " Jimmy this is what I need to do to make a living, but you will do better than me, you will be a doctor or lawyer or an accountant."
But notwithstanding that it was a given that I would get a higher education, like almost all my friends, my father would still spend time with me on Sundays after he became a successful developer, taking me with him to tour his buildings under construction, where we would walk up the freshly poured concrete steps to the slabs at the top, open to unobstructed views. The creativity of making buildings seemed very compelling to me.
My father passed away almost 20 years ago, and my mother five years later. The family company that my father founded and that I began to run almost 35 years ago is now one of Atlantic Canada's most significant developers.
Along with having two careers that I have loved, I have always been involved in the community. The good fortune that our family enjoyed through landing in Canada compels me to give back. Of my many volunteer roles one of my favourites was when I was asked to join the Board of Dalhousie University, my alma mater. I served on the board for 13 years, the last five as Board Chair.
Dalhousie is the largest university in Atlantic Canada, and one of Canada's U7 universities, the most significant universities in the country, which teach most disciplines and all the major professions. Dal was founded in 1818 by Lord Dalhousie, the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia. It was North America's first non-denominational university. In the early 19th century, educational institutions were open only to the students who shared the Christian denominations of the schools' founders. However, Lord Dalhousie insisted that Dalhousie be open to students regardless of religion. An example of the importance of this principle of diversity in action was the many American students who studied at Dal from the 1930s to the 1960s after experiencing discrimination at home.
Only when I delved into my second chapter at Dalhousie, serving on its Board of Directors, and started to understand its history, did I begin to understand why and how all those young Jewish students from the United States had been my classmates.
Jewish students made up 11% of overall student enrolment in the early1930s, up from around 0% in the 1920s. In 1935, one fifth of the student body was Jewish, and in 1939 fourteen of 36 medical graduates were Jewish.
Leaders are so influential with how the world goes, for better or worse.
