Brandeis Magazine

While Brandeis celebrates its 75th anniversary, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — the university’s oldest and largest graduate school — is toasting its 70th year of conferring master’s, doctoral, and post-baccalaureate degrees.

GSAS launched in 1953 with 38 students, five programs, four departments, and $1,400 PhD stipends. Today, it boasts more than 10,000 alumni (who live in 74 countries) and has more than 950 students enrolled in more than 40 master’s, doctoral, and post-baccalaureate programs. Its largest degree-granting programs are the MS in computer science, the PhD in neuroscience, the MS in computational linguistics, the PhD in physics, and the PhD in molecular and cell biology.

Its graduates have gone on to win the highest accolades in their fields, including the Abel Prize in mathematics, the A.M. Turing Award in computing, the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur “genius” grant, and the National Book Award.

“GSAS prepares scientists, social scientists, humanists, and experts in the creative arts to work in a broad range of settings across the country and around the world,” says Wendy Cadge, the school’s dean. “Our small size and the opportunity to collaborate closely with faculty and student colleagues across disciplines prepares our students to lead in all walks of life.”

Since January, to mark the 70th anniversary, nearly 600 faculty, students, and alumni have gathered over Zoom or in person to learn from the research of current students and contribute memories to the GSAS website.

“My favorite memory from [biochemist] Chris Miller’s lab is getting a hard-won outcome from an experiment, and dancing up and down the hall with him,” Chari Smith, GSAS PhD’89, wrote on the website.

Merrill Joan Gerber, GSAS MA’81, who studied English at Brandeis, remembered, “One snowy day in 1960, I was on the way to a class at Rabb Hall from my room next to the Castle in Schwartz Hall. As I tried to balance on the icy path going downward to the entrance, I collided with another woman, and we both fell down, clutching each other and laughing a bit. As we helped one another up, I realized I was looking at the face of Eleanor Roosevelt. A moment of great joy, never to be forgotten.”

John M. Vail, GSAS PhD’60, who studied physics, managed to escape the lab regularly. “Each day after lunch, I spent a couple of hours browsing in the library,” he wrote. “There, I first encountered the works of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Caldwell — and, most important, of Faulkner. Beyond that, my wife and I were able to attend evenings in small schoolhouses around Boston where Robert Frost would spend an hour or so ‘saying’ some of his poems. This was truly the thrill of a lifetime.”