University with a Mission

On the first night of the adult education series, silver-haired Poet E. E. Cummings gazed out over the audience in the new science hall of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. and announced that he was "terrified." He had expected about 30 people, but 600 had come. "I don't see why so many people would come to a poetry lecture unless they had to," said he. "I wouldn't." Last week, it was the turn of Poet W. H. Auden to be astonished at a poetry audience of hundreds.

Actually the turnout was a compliment not only to Poets Cummings and Auden, but to year-old Brandeis (named for the late great Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis) as well. Each week, people had been coming from Harvard and Wellesley, from Boston and other nearby towns, to attend Brandeis' new Institute of Adult Education. For so new a university, ambitious little Brandeis was attracting more than its share of attention.

"Two years ago," says President Abram Sachar, "we had nothing but a blueprint and a prayer." The blueprint was the work of a group of wealthy U.S. Jews who raised an initial $1,500,000 to set up a university that was to be sponsored by Jews but was to be nonsectarian in faculty and student body. The founders* took over the 100-acre campus of defunct Middlesex University, hired 50-year-old Historian Sachar, former national director of the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundations, as president, and opened Brandeis' doors with 107 freshmen in 1948.

Though the present student body is almost entirely Jewish, Sachar asks no questions about creed, welcomes students strictly on their merits. It is a university with a mission--"Not just another little school," says Sachar, "but a symbol of what the Jewish people want to contribute in the intellectual world."

For Brandeis' 247 freshmen and sophomores (the school will not graduate a class until 1952), there are broad basic courses labeled social science, natural science, and humanities, as well as a growing menu of electives, e.g., oral communication, Hebrew, a survey of style and structure in music. To teach his courses, President Sachar has assembled a faculty of 30 this year (up from 14 in 1948), including such lights as Novelist-Critic Ludwig Lewisohn and column-writing Political Scientist Max Lerner. Says Sachar: "We want to make certain of having some star in each area. I tell students, 'Don't take courses--take people.' "

The Brandeis blueprint also calls for a streamlining of its old parklike campus overlooking the Charles River. The dissecting room of the Middlesex medical school has been made over into a cafeteria, a stable into a library and an animal hospital into a speech clinic. Last week, while it was finishing its new $500,000 science building, Brandeis was also making plans for a new $250,000 library and a $200,000 dormitory.

To President Sachar, such projects are only the beginning. By 1952 he hopes to have at least 750 students, might even make a start toward a $20 million medical school. "We're committed to a program," says he. "We have got to show what we can do."

* Among them, Boston Attorney George Alpert, Fall River Box Manufacturer Meyer Jaffe, Boston Clothing Manufacturer Morris S. Shapiro

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