Brandeis Is The 'Bedroom College'

Boston is a city of over 40 Universities They vary from the world famous Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to many lesser known colleges. One of the latter group which has the reputation of being among the top ten academic colleges in the United Stales is 20 year old Brandeis University where our group spent a week's campus stay in February.

This liberal Jewish College has some 2,500 students who inhabit more than 200 acres of campus. There are over 50 separate buildings all showing the influence of modern architecture and attractively spread out over the campus. Every building and many rooms are individually named after those who have made financial contributions. The names vary from the Bernstein-Marcus Administration Centre to the Goldman-Schwartz Fine Arts Centre and the Wolfson-Rosenweig Biochemistry Building.

Brandeis has been called the "bedroom college" partly because so many of its students actually live on campus in dormitories which would be called hostels in New Zealand Several of these dormitories are designed on the corridor principle which is not conducive to any sort or peaceful existence as, I am told, anyone who has lived in Weir House will know.

It has been interesting to observe at each University we have visited the number of students who attend a college away from their home-town even though there is an equally good college near their home. In most cases there has been a desire to leave the "tensions" of the family and to make it on one's own, but a Brandeis there is the additional factor of parental pressure to attend a Jewish college.

Established as a private Jewish supported, non-sectarian institution, Brandeis today has an enrolment of 70% Jewish students Several told us that politically Brandeis students begin on the left and then move further left. Part of this assertion is based on the conclusion that opposition to the Vietnam war. which is strong, automatically puts a student on the left of the political spectrum. Some evidence for this may be deduced from the fact that one of the reasons for their student government's recent withdrawal from membership of the U.S. National Students Association was that the latter was not voicing sufficient opposition to the war.

The structure of student government at Brandeis, following other colleges we visited is modelled on the U.S. Constitution with the establishment and separation of executive legislative and judical organs. The court with elected student judges who have certain powers or discipline over students came as something of a surprise During our stay I took the opportunity to attend the "trial" of a student who was accused of sitting-in at the 1967 Dow Chemical protest.

This article was written by the president of the Student*' Association, Doug White, who has recently returned from a student leader study trip In America.

This protest took place in the Administration Building when a representative from Dow Chemical Company, the napalm manufacturer, arrived to interview prospective employees. The prosecutor at the trill was a member of the University Administration who was also the chief witness for his":side". The student called a considerable number of witnesses in defence who swore on oath that at no stage did he in fact sit-in In the end the five member student jury had no trouble in pronouncing the accused "not quilty" to the sound of much applause from the assembled onlookers. The prosecutor told me afterwards that while still believing the student guilty he thought justice had been done!