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ATLANTA (CNN) -- Sixteen years after Susan Shulman Tessel lost her father, she sat on a Southern college campus Wednesday night and couldn't stop thinking about him. Surrounded by hundreds in a packed ballroom, she cried because he was missing. He should have been there with her and her mother. He deserved to be.
The late Irving Shulman was the only Jewish man to enter Emory University's School of Dentistry in 1948. That was the same year someone else came to the school: the newly appointed dean, John E. Buhler.
After one academic year, Shulman flunked out. Buhler stayed on for 13 years, leading what some Jewish students would refer to as a "reign of terror." Between 1948 and 1961, when Buhler left, 65 percent of Jewish students either failed out or were forced to repeat up to two years of coursework in the four-year program.
Those who lasted often paid. There were insults from professors such as "dirty Jew," accusations by faculty of cheating and questions from the dean like, "Why do you Jews want to be dentists? You don't have it in your hands."
Tessel's dad earned the distinction of being the first who failed.
His daughter, who lives in New York, heard him tell stories about the constant reminders of how awful he was. His molds of teeth -- which he was so proud of -- would either get crushed by hands or grades. Convinced he wasn't being treated fairly, a non-Jewish classmate agreed to turn in one of Shulman's molds under his name. Shulman's handiwork earned that student an A-minus.
"At least he knew he didn't make it up," Tessel said.
Her late father gave up his dentistry dream and moved on to pharmacy school. But, she said, being at Emory last week would have helped him make sense of what had transpired. That's when 19 former Jewish dental students who had experienced that era came together and finally received the apology and recognition they had never thought possible.
"He didn't have the benefit of knowing he wasn't alone."
'A Fraternity of Silence'
Three years after Shulman was dubbed a failure at the end of his first academic year, Perry Brickman got his surprise letter from the dean telling him the same. Unlike Shulman, though, he had never been told he wasn't doing well.
Stunned. Embarrassed. Brickman was both. But he wasn't beaten down enough to give up on dentistry and was accepted to the dental school at the University of Tennessee, where he graduated fourth in his class. He would go on to have a 43-year career as a respected oral surgeon in Atlanta. He knew he was no failure. He also knew he wasn't alone. He was one of four Jewish men who entered the school in 1951; two years later they were all gone.
Brickman, 79, wasn't one to bring up the past. In 2000, he went to a reunion of his Jewish fraternity brothers from their Emory undergrad days. It turned out eight of the men in the room had been scarred by the same dental program, but it's not something they talked about. Brickman's wife, Shirley, would later start calling the former dental students "a fraternity of silence."
It would be years before that would change.
In 2006, Emory University celebrated its 30th anniversary of Jewish studies. Eric Goldstein, a Jewish history professor, set up the exhibit to coincide with the event. He called it, "Jews of Emory: Faces of a Changing University."
Most of the exhibit was a celebration of the campus' Jewish life, Goldstein said, but a small section jumped out at Brickman.
He stared at statistics, a bar graph that illustrated what happened at the dental school between 1948 and 1961. The image had been featured in a chapter of "Some of My Best Friends...," a book published by the Anti-Defamation League in the early 1960s. Like a skyscraper among short buildings, he said, the bar showing the numbers of Jews who failed out of the school or repeated coursework towered above all others. He couldn't believe what he was seeing.
The visual highlighted what Brickman always suspected about the dental school leadership and how that period was handled at Emory: "I wasn't a failure. They were a failure."
He knew there were stories behind those numbers -- not just of those who hadn't made it but also of those who did. Between the statistics and a conversation with a still-burdened classmate, Brickman set out on a path to find them all.
Making Waves
A month before one man got his degree, he was forced to stand before the dean and assembled faculty for an hourlong dressing down. Later, one of the professors pulled the student aside and apologized, saying he had a wife and children to think about and had no choice but to play along.
Another said the day he got his diploma he felt like he'd been released from prison. A third repeated what a professor used to call him, "my little black sheep," and then, bothered by the memory, muttered under his breath, "son of a bitch."
These men said they were the "lucky" ones; the ones who actually made it through to earn degrees from the school. The 39 Jews who Brickman said enrolled during the Buhler era were all men; few women attended the school back then. Of that bunch, a dozen flunked out. Only three of those 12 became dentists. At least 15 of the Jewish dental students who lasted were forced to repeat coursework -- and in some cases a year or two of study.
Art Burns, 80, of Jacksonville, Fla., flunked out in 1953 but went on to be first in his class at Temple University's dental school. The retired orthodontist recalled later bumping into the Emory dean in an Army base dental lab. Buhler looked at him and said, "Burns, I'd recognize that nose anywhere."
Another who didn't fail -- but who Buhler insisted didn't have the hands for dentistry -- found himself being asked to treat dental school faculty throughout his senior year. Crowns, restorations, fillings. You name it, Ronald Goldstein did it.
"I must have had good enough hands for them," said Goldstein, 78, of Atlanta, who lectures around the world, is considered a pioneer in his field and wrote the first comprehensive textbook on cosmetic dentistry.
The men were accepted to the school because admissions were handled by the broader university and not the dental school alone, said history professor Goldstein (no relation to Ronald). While quotas worked against Jews in many institutions at the time, the Emory dental school story was unique in that these students faced discrimination after they arrived.
The issues were talked about in small circles, but they weren't discussed loudly.
What student would announce he'd flunked? What parents would talk about such news, especially in a community that put such emphasis on academic achievement? And this was Emory, a hometown liberal arts jewel many local Jews attended; who would criticize -- or believe criticism about -- such a place?
Beyond these hangups was the worry about backlash that permeated Atlanta's Jewish community. It was rooted in fears born of history and reality -- Atlanta's infamous lynching of Leo Frank in 1913, the ongoing activity of the Ku Klux Klan, the 1958 bombing of the city's most prominent synagogue. Israel was still a fledgling nation. This was also the immediate post-Holocaust era, a time when Jewish people in America were just starting to understand the magnitude of what had happened abroad, said Deborah Lauter, the Anti-Defamation League's civil rights director.
"It was a real period of insecurity for the Jewish community, and that didn't really shift 'til 1967," after the Six-Day War between Israel and its neighbors, she said. "With a war victory came a newfound confidence of Jewish people."
But a small handful of Atlanta Jews refused to let go of what was happening at the dental school. Art Levin, 95, paid attention to every snippet. Then the Southeast regional director of the ADL, Levin was determined to make Emory own up to and deal with the dental school's anti-Jewish bias. He collected graduation programs, which included lists of students in all four years, and studied how the Jewish surnames disappeared or were held back while their classmates moved ahead. He nurtured contacts who helped get him inside information from the registrar's office to back up his calculations. He wanted to make the case not by outing any victims but by presenting irrefutable facts.
When the local Jewish Community Relations Council wanted to tone down pressure on the university, Levin's response, as he stated in an Emory-commissioned documentary that premiered Wednesday evening: "Screw that. This guy has been torturing students for 10 years."
Levin, at the time, was "villified" by segments of the Jewish community for making waves, said ADL's Lauter, a former Atlanta resident who, like Levin, did a stint as the organization's Southeast regional director. "But that's why we're here for people who face discrimination. Sometimes ADL has to be the tough guy. We take no prisoners in the fight against anti-Semitism."
While Levin takes great satisfaction in knowing the story is finally getting public acknowledgement, Lauter said it's "bittersweet" for him. "He did feel stung by the whole experience." In 1962, after nine years in his position, he left the world of Jewish community work.
Levin, who now lives in Florida and is hard of hearing, was not able to be interviewed for this story.
A form devised by Buhler, which at the top asked students to check a box -- Caucasian, Jewish or other (Emory was not racially integrated at the time) -- ended up being his downfall, many say. The university president, S. Walter Martin, had been dismissive of the concerns Levin and some others raised. So when Martin was out of town, Levin brought a copy of the form to Judson "Jake" Ward, the dean of faculty, and Ward grew incensed. He marched down to see Buhler, who resigned soon after.
Emory's president still refused to acknowledge what had been going on and wrote off Buhler's resignation as coincidental. Martin even insisted to local press, Goldstein said, that Buhler could have stayed at the dental school as long as he wanted.
With the dean gone, Atlanta's Jewish community essentially closed the book and put it away.
Not the Man He Knew
That book only recently opened for the former dean's son.
A sister-in-law sent John E. Buhler Jr., 65, a copy of a recent story in the The New York Times about the episode. What he read "caught me completely off guard," he said. "I was completely unaware of that situation."
He was a kid when his father landed at Emory and always believed politics in academia prompted his departure, nothing more. Everything he ever knew about his father, who died on Easter Sunday in 1976, belied what is being discussed now.
The younger Buhler, a retired oral surgeon living in Huntington, Ind., said he grew up with a man who cared about "helping kids stay in school and not throwing them out of school." When he got into the field himself, he proudly watched how former students sought out his father at conferences, showering him with gratitude. One even boasted that he had named his child after Buhler.
"It just sort of blows me away. ... He did so many positive things for dentistry and students," the younger Buhler said. "It's hard to believe."
Trying to make sense of it all, Buhler Jr.'s daughter sent her father an article that appeared in The Spartanburg Herald in South Carolina in 1964. It was written soon after the older Buhler assumed the dean's post at the new dental school of what was then known as the Medical College of South Carolina -- and after the Jewish community there weighed in with concerns about past anti-Semitism, demanding his appointment be rescinded.
The 1964 article quoted the chairman of the Medical College's board of trustees defending Buhler, saying he was recommended for the new position after a committee concluded the Emory charges were "not as serious as painted at one time."
The former dean's namesake doesn't remember his father ever saying a derogatory word about Jewish people. In fact, he's quick to point out that when the family lived in Atlanta, some of his parents' closest friends were Jewish.
These sorts of claims get former students like Brickman, who led the charge to humanize the dental school's history, riled up. He has collected too many stories and seen too many documents, including incriminating notes written by Buhler himself, to call the former dean anything but an anti-Semite.
But for Buhler Jr., none of this adds up. Really, how can it?
"If this situation did exist, it was certainly out of character of the man I knew," he wrote CNN the morning after the Emory event. "If indeed these events did occur, I feel badly for the individuals involved. Last night's event might have made them feel better but didn't compensate for their injury."
'I am Sorry. We are Sorry.'
Facing its history is something Emory isn't afraid to do.
In 2011, it issued a statement of regret for the school's involvement with slavery. The Southern institution once had slave laborers on campus and faculty members who owned slaves.
Earlier this year, Emory fessed up to fudging data to boost its ranking.
Meantime, the university boasts a Center for Ethics, campus dialogues on matters like race, sexuality and gender, and has long-proven its support for Jewish studies and community. It has 20 full-time faculty members dedicated to the field, including world-renowned Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt.
The school seemed ripe for the resurfacing of the dental school's history, which is why Goldstein, the Jewish history professor, placed a call last spring to Gary Hauk, Emory's vice president and deputy to the president. He said he had a friend Hauk needed to meet.
With testimonies he had recorded with his Flip camera, Brickman showed Hauk videos of men in their 70s and 80s, their negative Emory dental school experience still etched in their faces and emotions. Hauk didn't need convincing that something needed to be done.
A documentary incorporating Brickman's footage was commissioned, resulting in "From Silence to Recognition: Confronting Discrimination in Emory's Dental School History." A plan was developed to invite the former students, their families and their widows to come together on campus for an apology that was half a century overdue.
What had happened to them at the dental school, which closed in the early 1990s for unrelated reasons, had never been formally acknowledged. It was time.
Blue ribbons were strung along aisles to reserve seats for the special guests, who first met privately with Emory President James W. Wagner. The men, some of whom hadn't returned to Emory since the day they left, arrived with family members from all over the country. Many went on to become great successes in dentistry. Those who gave up that dream excelled as physicians, lawyers, CPAs and computer experts. One man who flunked out tried his hand at painting, wanting to prove he had the manual skills the dean said he lacked; he won art show awards.
The experience had been a guarded secret for some -- a chapter in life they hid from parents, friends, future spouses and their children. One woman in attendance said she had only learned the day before that her father failed out of Emory. For other former students, their time at Emory haunted them. One of their daughters -- who refused even years later to apply to Emory when she went to dental school -- dubbed herself and others like her "children of survivors," a term often linked to the Holocaust. An 18-year-old man, who is gay and faced plenty of bullying, realized he could relate to the grandfather sitting next to him in new ways.
Widows and children of deceased former students showed up for those who didn't live long enough to see this day. One man, who was young when his father died, came to hear stories no one else in his life could tell.
All around them, as they took their seats, the ballroom filled. A standing-room-only crowd of hundreds came out to recognize them. Here, any shame from the past was lifted. Instead, these men were the picture of courage and worthy of respect -- and that long-awaited apology.
"Institutions -- universities -- are as fallible as the human beings who populate them, and like individuals, universities need to remind themselves frequently of the principles they want to live by," President Wagner said. "The discrimination against Jewish dental students undermined the academic integrity of the dental school and ultimately of Emory. ... I am sorry. We are sorry."
The night, which would end with a special dinner for this no-longer-silent fraternity, included a tribute to Brickman, who was called to the stage.
His wife, surrounded by family, clung to a tissue and dabbed her eyes. A daughter clutched her mother's hand. A son looked up at his dad and beamed.
Brickman never did this for the Emory History Maker medal Wagner strung around his neck. Nor did he do this for the citation read to honor his work.
For him, this was a journey of discovery - one he took with the faces behind the numbers. With him that night were these men and their families, as well as the university he still loved.
Throughout the evening, and long after dinner ended, he saw tears, camaraderie, even laughter from some of the very men he feared were no longer capable of smiling.
All of this, he hoped, signaled what mattered most: Healing.
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