When Brandeis University inaugurates Evelyn Hondker as its fifth president October 9 at Boston’s historic Symphony Hall, it will also be celebrating another university milestone — its 35th anniversary.
“You know, most people are amazed when you remind them that Brandeis is so very young,” said Dr. Abram Sachar, Brandeis’ founding president who was inaugurated at Symphony Hall October 7, 1948. “It is as if they cannot believe we have come so far, so fast.”
The university is named for Louis Dembitz Brandeis, “the people’s lawyer” and the first Jew to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation’s only Jewish-founded, nonsectarian liberal arts institution of higher learning, Brandeis today is widely recognized by leading educators as one of the country’s finest private liberal arts universities.
Although it has no medical school, Brandeis students consistently are accepted at medical schools at a rate that far exceeds the national average. Although it has no law school, Brandeis students have historically been sought after by the best law schools in the nation.
And although it is a small university –enrolling about 2,750 undergraduates and 700 graduate students — Brandeis combines the breadth and range of academic programs usually found at much larger universities with the intimate educational atmosphere of an undergraduate college. The student-faculty ratio is approximately 10:1.
SUCCESS BORN OF FAILURE
The Brandeis success story is one that, ironically was bom of failure — the dissolution of a medical and veterinary college, Middlesex University in Waltham, Massachusetts, that previously occupied the Brandeis site. Fortuitously, at the same time insolvency loomed for Middlesex, a committee of public-spirited Jews in New York City was seeking a campus for their plan to establish a Jewish-founded university.
After hearing about the plight of Middlesex, and following a series of negotiations between the two parties, the campus and the charter passed to the committee with no purchase investment.
Although the group had to assume many of Middlesex’s outstanding obligations, Jews in America could be “a host at last” to gifted young men and women scholars. But the committee — there were eight founding trustees — had no money, no constituency, and no educational objectives except the conviction that the school represented a gift from the Jewish people to American higher education.
“In the past 35 years, the precious gift has been sustained by Jews and non-Jews alike,” said Sachar, who served for 20 years as president and for many years thereafter as chancellor.
A QUEST FOR THE BEST
In order to represent a lasting bequest to America by the “people of the book,” Brandeis felt it had to epitomize the best. It had to strike boldly for the top rank immediately, using as models the Harvards, the Princetons, the Stanfords and others of the traditional elite. “That was a conscious decision by the eight founders,” explained Sachar. “They wanted the best students, the most distinguished faculty, and the most adequate facilities. They were not about to accept anything less.” Brandeis’ first entering class in 1948 — the same year Israel was founded — consisted of 107 intrepid young men and women and 13 equally adventurous faculty. Today the nearly 3,500 undergraduate and graduate students — scholarly legatees of the 1948 pioneers — freely choose an energetic intellectual atmosphere, a distinguished and internationally known faculty, and an institution that has, from its inception, maintained the highest academic standards.
Brandeis’ commitment to excellence was swiftly recognized by Phi Beta Kappa, the national honor society, which granted recognition to Brandeis just 13 years after the University was founded — the youngest institution so honored in over 100 years. Recently, Brandeis was one of only 12 universities in America ranked among the top 10 in the country in three or more of six undergraduate disciplines surveyed.
Similarly, several of Brandeis’ graduate departments have been rated among the nation’s best, and the most recent survey of professional school deans ranked its Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare fourth in the country among schools of social work.
The university’s multi-million dollar Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, built in 1973, enhanced Brandeis’ growing reputation in the physical sciences and attracted leading researchers to probe areas in the bio-medical field.
900 COURSES IN 32 FIELDS
The four schools in the undergraduate college at Brandeis –Science, Social Science, Humanities and Creative Arts — offer about 900 courses in 32 fields of concentration and several specialized programs. Brandeis undergraduates — men and women of diverse ethnic, religious and racial backgrounds — come from virtually every state in the union and over 40 foreign countries. They are able to participate in research normally offered only in graduate programs at other leading colleges and universities.
In addition, undergraduates receive part of their training from senior faculty members. From the beginning, Brandeis felt that its academic “stars” –which have included such giants as historian Henry Steele Commager, composer Leonard Bernstein, psychologist Abraham Maslow, and Judaic scholar Nahum Glatzer–should enrich the undergraduate experience.
At a time when many colleges and universities have abandoned or cut back their commitment to liberal arts in favor of technical training, Brandeis has actually strengthened its traditional commitment to the liberal arts. “As our society becomes more complicated and increasingly technologically oriented, ” said one Brandeis administrator, “the ability to learm how to learn and apply knowledge — both hallmarks of a liberal arts training — will become even more valuable in the future.”
For the overwhelming majority of the nearly 17,000 men and women who are Brandeis alumni, such a philosophy has equipped them for leadership positions in business, medicine, the law, the arts, and nearly every other professional endeavor.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
