Blossoming Brandeis

All sorts of religious groups long ago seeded the U.S. from coast to coast with colleges and universities, but not until after World War II did American Jews get into the act. Leading them were seven Bostonians, all of them immigrants or the sons of immigrants, who sought a way to give thanks to the country where they had prospered. In 1946 the seven launched a campaign to found Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. -- the nation's first Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian liberal arts university.* Seldom has a major U.S. campus blossomed so fast and so rewardingly.

When it opened 14 years ago, the school that bore one of U.S. Jewry's most honored names (the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis) had 107 freshmen and a faculty of 13. Its plant was the defunct Middlesex University, a few old buildings dominated by a fake castle that Architect Eero Saarinen described as "Mexican-Ivanhoe." But in naming a president, the founders made the happy choice of Historian Abram Leon Sachar, chairman of the National Hillel Commission, who exuberantly diagnosed himself as suffering from an "edifice complex."

People, Not Courses. Genial, chunky Abe Sachar, 63, found his ailment matched by Jews across the country. Brandeis was too new to have alumni, but generous gifts flowed in from "foster alumni." They ranged from Crooner Eddie Fisher, who set up two music scholarships, to Broadway Producer David Merrick, who gave Brandeis a slice of Gypsy. Today Brandeis is a $24 million complex of more than 50 handsome buildings, including a 750,000-volume library and three ultramodern chapels for Jews, Roman Catholics and Protestants.

On its spacious, 260-acre campus along the Charles River, ten miles west of Boston, Brandeis now has 1,740 male and female students, 80% of them Jewish. From the start, it set admission standards at Ivy League level. With seven applicants for every place, it can boast that 66% of its freshmen come from the top 10% of U.S. high school seniors.

Sachar's call for teachers brought a flood of lively volunteers. Trustee Eleanor Roosevelt still teaches a course on the U.N., bringing the immediacy of what "Franklin"hoped for it in 1945 or what U Thant said at tea last week. With his usual furious energy, Conductor Leonard Bernstein developed the music department. Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden and e. e. cummings have lectured on modern poetry. Arthur Miller taught drama, and Columnist Max Lerner commutes from Manhattan to give a course on American civilization. Says Dean Clarence Berger: "We keep telling students they're taking people, not courses."

To recruit its regular faculty of 240 (three-quarters with Ph.D.s), Brandeis scoured the U.S. for bright young scholars on the brink of recognition. It paid well; full professors now get salaries as high as $16,000 a year, and 39 endowed chairs are even better upholstered.

Scyllaberg & Charybditsky. Proud as they are of their university, U.S. Jews are still unsure of what Brandeis is fundamentally supposed to be in the religious sense. When first broached, the idea of a secular Jewish school caused headshaking among Jewry's three basic factions. "For the Orthodox, we weren't Jewish enough," recalls Dean Berger. "For the Reformed, we were too Jewish. Just to get the support of the Conservatives, we had to steer a course between Scyllaberg and Charybditsky."

President Sachar opts for a secular school "no more Jewish than Princeton is Presbyterian." He well knows that his students "bring a bias with them. It's not exactly anti-God. It's anticlerical." In fact, the Hillel Foundation at Brandeis has only 50 or 60 members, and only the Catholic chapel gets much attendance. Says one senior: "Most students feel that religion is--well, somehow beneath them."

Nonetheless, says Sachar, "it is the responsibility of this school to make kids show the credentials for their assumptions." The same goes for religion: "Here at Brandeis you must not only prove an affirmative conviction but also a rejection." To keep religious debate alive. Sachar has continually plunged into "our intellectual Gulf Stream" such diverse theologians as Martin Buber, Jacques Maritain and Paul Tillich.

The Challenge Habit. In the intellectual sense, Brandeis knows just what it is: "the challenge habit of mind" makes its classrooms crackle. Delighted with his students' "seriousness," one former Princeton professor hardly misses "the elaborate military deference found at Princeton, where the men would address you as 'sir' with an undertone of contempt." Engagement with issues in turn makes the students eager for social action and dissent. In the 21-campus Boston area, it often seems that every peace march or civil rights rally is led by Brandeis students. The student paper, The Justice, is perhaps the most caustically anti-administration campus newspaper in the country. "It's hard not to censor them," sighs Sachar. "But we don't want to run the risk of closing their minds. We practice an affectionate kind of fratricide." What Brandeis has in fact produced is a mirror of the liberal, learned, humane tone of Justice Brandeis himself. For just this reason, it is likely to go on being a kettle of highly individualistic fish. Says Sachar: "You've heard about the two castaway Jews on a desert island? When they're rescued, they're asked why they built three temples. It's because every Jew must have one temple he wouldn't be caught dead in."

* Manhattan's Yeshiva University was founded (1886) to train rabbis, now also offers liberal arts.

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