From the inception of higher education in America with the founding of Harvard College in 1636, Jews were cast as outsiders beyond the realm of normal college life. Before the founding of such institutions as the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in New York, which is affiliated with Yeshiva University, Hebrew Union College in Ohio, and Brandeis University in Massachusetts, the higher education of Jews was severely hindered. The full integration of Jewish students into American society, as participants in a democratic educational system, was handicapped by both lasting social injustices and ignorance. Comparatively, this injustice was much more prevalent in the Northeast and its respective Ivy League schools as opposed to Houston and the Rice Institute. At the turn of the twentieth century, student quotas limited Jews’ matriculation and forced them to compete against one another for the few spots elite colleges had reserved for Jewish students. These elite private colleges didn't particularly welcome Jews. Jewish educational quotas were enacted through either state-wide law, or unofficial adoption in certain institutions, often informally. This prejudice took the form of total prohibition of Jewish students, or limitations on the number of Jewish students. At certain universities , the Jewish quota placed a limit on growth rather than set a fixed level of participation to be achieved. The dean of Yale’s instructions was remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all” (Oshinsky 98). Jews who wanted an education used various ways to overcome this discrimination. These devices included bribing the authorities, changing their religion, or traveling to countries without such limitations. One American who fell victim to the Jewish quota was late physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman, who was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s. This injustice was also not limited to the undergraduate level of education. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in” (Oshinksy 98). Jews were disqualified as eligible candidates for admission, based not on their abilities to succeed academically, but merely because of what was perceived as their religious conflicts with an institution’s Christian values. Yale College’s Congregationalist affiliation helped perpetuate a highly Christianized climate fearful and wary of Judaism, but nevertheless accepting and teaching the Hebrew language. The first Jews at Yale graduated in 1777 and were actually three half-Jewish brothers who did not practice the religion. According to Yale historian Dan Oren, the first “bona fide Jewish student” was Moses Simons, who graduated from the institution in 1809 (Oren 6). Little is known about his education there. Seventeen years later, a Jew named Judah P. Benjamin attended Yale College, only to drop out and later become a United States senator and, eventually, Secretary of State to President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy (Canby, 1936; Horowitz, 1987). Moreover, Yale also forbade the organization of any non-Christian religious societies on campus (Oren 19). Extracurricular activities were further limited for the few Jewish students as participation and eligibility was regulated by the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Protestant paradigm that banned Jewish students from joining any traditionally Christian fraternities. This institutionalized anti-Semitism was even evident in the staff and faculty of these institutions. The first Jewish instructor of Hebrew at Harvard, was converted to Christianity, one of the first Jews to do so in the new world, in March 1722 after his methods of teaching were found “so tedious as to be discouraging” (Morison 57-58). It is unclear as to whether his pedagogy was disliked because of his style or because of the religious beliefs that may have been connected to his lessons. The first known Jew to teach at Yale came from New Haven’s Ashkenazi community, a local immigrant hired directly by the students to tutor them in the new sciences brought to America from Europe. Soon after, Harvard’s president Charles William Eliot abolished compulsory chapel attendance in 1886 to continue the introduction of secularism into his school. His open-mindedness allowed non-Protestants to start their own organizations. The Menorah Society at