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.