Brandeis University was founded in 1948 and has continued to rank near the top of academic life in the United States. In 1985 Brandeis was elected to membership in the Association of American Universities, an elite organization of the nation's 59 research universities. Controlling for size and judged according to faculty publications and citations, Brandeis was ranked ninth in 1997 among research universities. Over 3,000 undergraduates were enrolled at the beginning of the 21st century, plus another 1,300 graduate students. As of 2004, the campus consisted of 96 buildings, located on 235 suburban acres nine miles west of Boston. Brandeis University is especially renowned for its programs in the physical and natural sciences, in history, and in Jewish studies.
Its founding president, Abram L. *Sachar, was a scholar of Jewish history; in 1968 he retired after two decades, and became chancellor and then chancellor emeritus. (He died in 1993, at the age of 94.) Sachar's successor was an attorney, Morris B. Abram, who had served as president of the American Jewish Committee. Amid considerable political turmoil on campus, he remained as president for only two years, and was briefly replaced by Charles Schottland, the former commissioner of the Social Security Administration and the founding dean of the Florence Heller Graduate School for Social Policy and Management (established at Brandeis in 1959). By 1972, when Schottland resigned in favor of Marver H. Bernstein, the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Research Center was completed, as was the Feldberg Computer Center.
At the dawn of the 21st century, the university's endowment was about $400 million; and over 300 full-time professors and instructors served on the faculty, providing an official student-faculty ratio of 9:1. The teaching staff belonged to 24 autonomous departments and 22 interdisciplinary programs, offering three dozen majors. Degrees in nearly two dozen disciplines were also offered in the graduate programs. Probably the most famous faculty member was Morris Schwartz, the subject of a memoir by his former student, Mitch Albom, 1979, entitled Tuesdays with Morrie (1997), which ranked first on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list for four straight years. MacArthur Foundation Fellowships (or "genius" grants) were bestowed on three faculty members: Bernadette Brooten of the Lown School of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, a specialist in the social history of early Christianity; historian Jacqueline Jones, whose expertise combines the history of American women, labor, and African-Americans; and biologist Gina Turrigiano, who works on activity-dependent regulation of neuronal properties. Washington's Crossing (2004), by David Hackett Fischer of the Department of History, was also a finalist for the National Book Award. The faculty in the early decades of the university had been heavily stocked with Jewish refugees, some of whom had academically unconventional careers or even limited formal education. The origins of the faculty in later decades were far more likely to resemble the pattern of other elite institutions. The shift to native-born scholars was evident in Jewish studies. Brandeis was the first secular university in North America to create such a department; and its faculty has been especially distinguished, including Bible scholars Nahum *Sarna and Michael *Fishbane, sociologist Marshall *Sklare, historians Ben *Halpern andJonathan D. *Sarna, and such scholars of Judaic thought as Nahum *Glatzer, Alexander *Altmann, Marvin *Fox, and Arthur *Green.
Because the university is neither a religious seminary nor a sectarian institution, the Jewishness of its origins and character has instigated a considerable effort to negotiate and define; and press accounts timed to honor both the 40th and 50th anniversaries of the founding of the institution referred to an "identity crisis" from which Brandeis University was reportedly suffering. That dilemma has persisted. Beginning in the 1970s and gathering momentum in succeeding decades, Brandeis has been sensitive to the celebration of diversity as a desideratum in public life and especially on the nation's campuses. About 16% of the student body is classified as "minority"; 101 foreign countries are also represented among the undergraduates and graduate students. The effort to ensure that both the student body and the personnel of the faculty and administration would reflect the ethos of multiculturalism was bound to generate some friction with a yearning to keep intact the heritage of Jewish distinctiveness, with the continuing effort of both undergraduates and institutional leaders to articulate the meaning of the Jewish legacy of Brandeis University, and with imperatives of its Jewish communal sponsorship and auspices.
