Marty Fassler and I co-edited the paper in 1964-65. Those were frenetic times on campus, capping a four-year battle with the founding president, Abram Sachar.  Everyone with eyes and ears – including the keen reporters and writers for the JUSTICE – saw that the University was in full conformist mode. The liberal and even radical policies at the immediate postwar origins of our school, which sheltered exiled European intellectuals and domestic talent that found no other comfortable home, were “transiting” to the flabby mediocrity of a place that no longer wished to be identified as a leader in social criticism, literature, history of ideas, or left-wing writing of any kind. Sachar instead turned his aging head to the emerging neo-liberal norms epitomized by JFK: style over substance, a subdued and barely visible allegiance to racial justice, misogyny masked as “Camelot”. Sachar wanted a campus that would become quiescent in the intellectual , the moral, and the political sense. He had already fired Kathleen Gough Aberle, a feminist and rising academic star who publicly supported Fidel Castro over Sachar’s darling JFK during the “Cuban missile crisis” of 1962. He had put teeth in the absurd parietal rules that (unsuccessfully) kept boy from girl in the Castle and other campus trysting spots; he had contemplated censoring the JUSTICE itself and had to be subdued by that hardly radical thinker, Max Lerner (so went the rumor: it might have been John Roche who managed to make Sachar see the light on this occasion).

       We would have none of it. We warriors, we who had chosen Brandeis over the Ivies, we who adored the school – this editorial “we” launched into a year-long polemic against Sachar and his perceptible move to eviscerate what had made Brandeis terrific. Herbert Marcuse was, in effect, fired; that is, the University would not match a modest increase this intellectual giant at age 65 had received from remote places out West he could not even identify on a map much less home down in for his still-productive dotage. When asked by JUSTICE editors how in hell (we used a stronger expletive) he could let this central campus intellectual figure go, Sachar replied – dodderingly – “We don’t know what Marcuse’s health chart will be over the next few years!”.

        Yes, our swan song (the final editorial was captioned “Good Night, Sweet Prints”) gave the “radical polemic” its last ride……But the University was “hell”-bent for its middle-years meltdown.

        I have never fallen out of love with Brandeis, which was the place to be in the early ‘Sixties. Decades later, at my urging, a nephew attended and excelled. I taught in the English Lit department around that time. I have been the law professor of many stunningly smart Brandeis alumni. I offer this semester a Brandeis on-line (“BOLLI”) course for adults, which I call “Shakespeare Sides with Shylock”. I contribute faithfully to my alma mater. I follow the successes of many who came after me to get their B.A.’s from the school, and I bemoan those among them who have gone so horribly wrong, like Thomas Friedman, that subsequent  JUSTICE editor who has enthusiastically led his paper’s attacks on Israel from Oct. 8th to the present, quickly forgetting who bloodily started this tragic conflict. History will come to define the pejorative term “moral equivalency” by citing the NYT editorial and “news” pages during the Israel-Hamas war.

        I thank this year’s editors for giving me this chance to replicate our campus newspaper’s mantra from the ‘Sixties: “Once more onto the breach, dear friends! Once more!”.

(*) Weisberg and Fassler’s heated editorials of the early ‘60’s, like the full JUSTICE numbers from those and other years, are available on line.