A Host at Last

Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1976. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Fair. 24 cm. ix, [3], 308, [2] pages. Illustrations. Index. Inscribed by the author. Abram Leon Sachar (February 15, 1899 - July 24, 1993) was an American historian and founding president of Brandeis University, the first privately funded Jewish-sponsored liberal arts university in the United States. From 1920 to 1923 he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, England, where he received his doctorate in history for his thesis on the Victorian House of Lords. Upon his return to the United States, Sachar joined the faculty of the history department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, teaching Modern European and English History. He remained at this position for the next 24 years. Sachar published his first book in 1927; this was followed by several other books in quick succession. He also lectured across the country from the 1920s to the 1990s, and appeared in a weekly educational television lecture show, The Course of Our Times; his analyses of problems in contemporary history were later published in the book of the same title. Sachar remained a working educator, historian, lecturer, and author until his death. In 1948 trustees of the newly formed, Jewish-sponsored, nonsectarian Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts asked Sachar, who had displayed his scholarly credentials and devotion to the Jewish people through previous leadership of the Hillel organization at Illinois University, and through his 1930 work, History of the Jews. During his 20-year tenure, Sachar's leadership and fund-raising skills were largely credited for building Brandeis into a major research institution. Abram Sachar provides an invaluable look at the growing pains of this one of a kind institution. Brandeis University is a private research university in Waltham, Massachusetts. Founded in 1948 as a non-sectarian, coeducational institution sponsored by the Jewish community, Brandeis was established on the site of the former Middlesex University. The university is named after Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Justice of the US Supreme Court. Alumni and affiliates of the university include former first lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt, Nobel Prize laureate Roderick MacKinnon and Fields Medalist Edward Witten, as well as foreign heads of state, congressmen, governors, diplomats, and recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Academy Award, Emmy Award, and MacArthur Fellowship. On April 26, 1948, Brandeis University announced that Abram L. Sachar, chairman of the National Hillel Commission, had been chosen as Brandeis' first president. Sachar promised that Brandeis University would follow Louis Brandeis' principles of academic integrity and service. He also promised that students and faculty would never be chosen based on quotas of "genetic or ethnic or economic distribution" because choices based on quotas "are based on the assumption that there are standard population strains, on the belief that the ideal American must look and act like an eighteenth-century Puritan, that the melting pot of America must mold all who all who live here into such a pattern." Students who applied to the school were not asked their race, religion, or ancestry. Brandeis decided its undergraduate instruction would not be organized with traditional departments or divisions, and instead it would have four schools, namely the School of General Studies, the School of Social Studies, the School of Humanities, and the School of Science. On October 14, 1948, Brandeis University received its first freshman class of 107 students. They were taught by thirteen instructors in eight buildings on a 100-acre (40-hectare) campus. Students came from 28 states and six foreign countries. Historians Elinor and Robert Slater later called the opening of Brandeis one of the great moments in Jewish history.