Brandeis at 75

From the outset of his presidency, Abram Sachar, H’68, wanted Brandeis to have an art museum. In 1958, a Brandeis trustee and his spouse pledged the funds to construct one. The Bertha and Edward Rose Art Museum, named for its founding donors, was dedicated in 1961. Samuel Hunter, former curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art, was its first director.

In 1962, New York art collector Leon Mnuchin gave the Rose $50,000 to use as seed money for a contemporary art collection. Hunter; Mnuchin; and Robert Scull, a prominent Pop Art collector, began prowling New York galleries, spending no more than $5,000 on any individual artwork. With a discerning eye, Hunter turned the young Rose into a contemporary-art powerhouse by acquiring early and important works by Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, as well as this piece — “Forget It! Forget Me!” (1962) — by Roy Lichtenstein.

In 1947, students applying to be part of Brandeis’ inaugural class were asked to state their marital status, parents’ occupations, jobs held, and military service completed. They identified their favorite extracurricular activities, choosing from a list that included “Boy Scouts,” “year book,” “needlework,” and “poultry.” They were reminded to “give adequate thought” to their written response to this question: “What sort of person are you?”

What’s most notable is what’s not on this application. Unlike many U.S. colleges, which followed subtly or openly antisemitic admissions policies, Brandeis did not inquire about an applicant’s religious affiliation. Although the university was founded by and for the Jewish community, from Day One it was a place open to all.

The clean, functional modernist style that characterizes the Brandeis campus is a far cry from the farm structures and small, oddly shaped buildings the founders inherited when they acquired Middlesex University in 1946.

The “young university in a hurry,” as it was referred to in a 1961 Saturday Review article, needed buildings to house its fast-expanding student body and academic programming. Finnish father-and-son team Eliel and Eero Saarinen, who produced the university’s first master plan, designed Ridgewood Quad, Sherman Hall, and Shapiro Residence Hall.

But Brandeis really owes its look to architect Max Abramovitz, who, starting in the mid-1950s, oversaw campus planning for 30 years. His architectural drawings (one of which is shown here) depict the outlines of the modern campus. Abramovitz went on to design many of the university’s buildings, including the Rose Art Museum, the Slosberg Music Center, and the award-winning trio of chapels.

This Palestinian bag jar — a vessel used from the 1st through the 7th century C.E. to carry olive oil and wine — is part of Brandeis’ Classical Studies Artifact Research Collection, which includes more than 800 artifacts from ancient Mediterranean civilizations.

The collection serves as an invaluable research resource for undergraduate and graduate students, allowing them to engage directly with antiquities, and deepening their understanding of the humanities as both age-old and evolving.

Brandeis was conceived of as a gift from American Jewry, at a time when Jews and others faced discrimination in higher education. Though secular, the university would embody the search for truth, the reverence for learning, and the sense of duty to improve the world that define Jewish tradition.

Today, Brandeis scholars share knowledge about Israel and the Middle East. They work to fight antisemitism. They advance the field of Jewish educational scholarship and the study of contemporary Jewish life. They investigate the history, religion, and culture of the ancient Near East, and Jewish, Arabic, and Islamic civilizations.

They do so by engaging with Jews and non-Jews alike.

In the basement of the Rabb Graduate Center, a massive motorized chair tests how humans react to changes in motion and orientation. The custom-built Multi-Axis Rotation System device rotates along the same axes as an airplane. It’s useful for evaluating a person’s perception of the gravitational vertical at extreme body orientations — in other words, it tests whether you would know which end is up if you were spinning through the sky in an F-15 Eagle. It also measures how the human body orients itself in zero gravity.

The chair is part of the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory, one of only two labs in the U.S. capable of investigating sensory motor adaptation, motion sickness, and the effects of various force environments on the body. The lab, which opened in 1982, contains more than 20 major pieces of equipment, including a 22-foot-diameter rotating room, the only U.S. facility that can create artificial gravity.

In 2018, the university opened the state-of-the-art Skyline Residence Hall, one of the most energy-efficient buildings on campus and one of the greenest dorms in the Boston area.

Four years later, the university kicked off its Year of Climate Action, designed to deepen Brandeisians’ understanding of climate change as a social justice issue. University officials have also launched a study that will inform a Decarbonization Action Plan, transforming energy use on campus, reducing emissions, and setting Brandeis on a path to carbon neutrality.

The Nobel Prize medallion is made of 18-carat gold, measures 2.6 inches in diameter, and weighs about a third of a pound. Michael Rosbash, the Peter Gruber Endowed Chair in Neuroscience, and Jeffrey Hall, professor emeritus of biology, were each handed one in October 2017.

Along with Michael Young of The Rockefeller University, Rosbash and Hall received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their breakthroughs in understanding the molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms, the inner biological clock that regulates almost all life on the planet, from humans to fungi.

A device Rosbash and Hall built in the 1980s while doing their award-winning research at Brandeis is now housed at the Nobel Prize Museum, in Stockholm. Their homemade fruit-fly activity monitor allowed them to compare — simply yet effectively — the sleep habits of normal and genetically mutated fruit flies.

Though universal on college campuses in the 1950s and ’60s, the rules governing socializing between the sexes in dorms — known as “parietals,” from the Latin word for “wall” — have gone the way of the typewriter.

Yet parietals were firmly in place during Brandeis’ first decades. Socializing between men and women in dorms was limited to a few hours daily in the common rooms of Smith Hall, Founders Hall, and the Ridgewood Cottages. Smoking, on the other hand, was permitted almost everywhere on campus.

By the early ’60s, men and women were allowed to visit each other in their residence-hall rooms. That victory was partially rolled back in March 1964 when President Sachar “decreed that henceforth, when students entertained members of the opposite sex in their rooms, the doors must be ajar,” as The Justice reported. Students responded by organizing a strike that canceled classes for several days.

Time marched on. By 1991, the annual Screw Your Roommate dance was encouraging students to arrange blind dates for their roommates.

Today, Brandeis allows men and women to share floors, rooms, bathrooms, and beds. Couples can room together. Most campus housing is gender-neutral. Single-sex dorms have given way to a few scattered single-sex floors. And smoking is prohibited everywhere.

Over the years, countless admissions volunteers have worn pins like these as they explained the benefits of a Brandeis education on campus tours.

The numbers prove how successfully they do their job. With more than 1,000 students, the Class of 2027 is 10 times the size of the Class of 1952. The current student body comes from around the globe, hailing from 39 U.S. states and 29 countries. One-third are students of color, and almost a fifth are first-generation college students. Twenty percent of the student body are international students, who speak a total of 55 languages.