When he left Paul, Weiss to go to that school, Morris thought he had arrived at one of the pivotal points of his life.
Sometime in the early 1960s Morris Abram was asked by an executive of the American Jewish Committee what he would most want to do if not practicing law. It did not take him long to reply. He said he would want to be a university president and, if he had a choice, it would be Brandeis, an institution for which he believed he would be especially qualified.
Brandeis University, the only nonsectarian institution of higher learning sponsored by the American Jewish community, was founded in 1948 at a time when Jewish students were still facing discrimination in college admissions. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, ten miles west of Boston, and named for the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis was the vision of largely one man, the historian Abram Sachar. It was Sachar who raised the money and developed a first-rate faculty that quickly lifted the university into the top ranks of American higher education.
As Sachar was contemplating retirement, Morris Abram was considering the possibility of a second run for political office. While still deliberating his decision to enter the Senate race against the incumbent Jacob Javits, Abram received a phone call from Lawrence Wien, the board chairman of Brandeis, with the news that he had been selected from 120 candidates to succeed President Sachar as the university’s second president. Abram was thrilled. He believed that his resume up to that point had been compiled for precisely that purpose.1
When he learned that his position on the war in Vietnam would preclude support from the White House, Abram discarded his plans to run for the Javits seat. His acceptance of the Brandeis offer followed soon thereafter.2 Letters of congratulation on his appointment poured in from friends and associates from around the country, including HEW secretary Wilbur Cohen, New York mayor John Lindsay, University of Chicago president Edward Levi, and his old college friend Bobby Troutman.3
As he prepared to take over the presidency of Brandeis, Abram could not have been unaware of many of the challenges he faced. As the year 1968 was quickly becoming one of the most divisive since the civil war, universities around the country were becoming centers of unrest, given both the growing unpopularity of the war and the rapid social and cultural changes taking place in the society at large. Many of the students and faculty at elite universities such as Brandeis were vigorously and sometimes violently challenging traditional conceptions of the role of the university. In the end, Abram’s appointment marked a turning point in his career, though certainly not in any of the ways he had anticipated when his tenure began. Before taking on his new role, Abram’s law partner Lloyd Garrison cautioned him that universities could be intensely political and petty. Garrison spoke from his experience as former dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Kenneth Sweder, soon to graduate from New York University Law School, first met Morris Abram during an interview for an associate position at Paul, Weiss in the spring of 1968. Abram had a better idea and asked if he would like to be his personal assistant at Brandeis. Sweder spent the summer of 1968 on campus getting the lay of the land and reporting back to Abram in New York.4
Abram’s inaugural, held over the first weekend in October, brought together for a series of addresses and panel discussions many people from his past, including labor leader Gus Tyler and the civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Abram’s period in Atlanta was represented by Jacob Rothschild, rabbi of Abram’s synagogue that had been bombed by white supremacists in 1958, and Coretta Scott King, Abram’s former client, whose husband’s assassination six months earlier had reverberated throughout colleges and universities around the country, including Brandeis.
In her speech at the spiritual service entitled “Can there be One America?” Mrs. King declared that what happened to her husband had not shattered her belief in his vision of a united society. “The question now, as we move into this last third of the present century,” she remarked, “is not whether there can be one America. Our very survival depends upon how rapidly we can overcome the forces which separate us from one another and alienate us from ourselves. Integration, personal and social, is the key to a healthier and happier America. If we can quickly learn to think anew and act anew, the dangerous, bloody future which looms on our horizon can be, instead, a liberating and exhilarating dawn of a new day.”5
In Abram’s inaugural address, he advanced the liberal philosophy that had defined his career. While acknowledging as a “compliment to education” the fact that the university was becoming a focal point for many of those seeking to reform society, any such institution that purported to be more than “a community of scholars or a commonwealth of learning” was putting at risk its central mission.
Universities, he believed, faced additional risks as well. While they continued to be threatened from the outside, today “the danger to dissent within the university comes also from a new direction. It comes from within.” Abram related the story of a recent conversation with a professor who voiced agreement with those who thought that certain points of view were so wrong that they should not be tolerated within the university. Abram concluded the story by countering, “I do not believe that in the academy as well as in society as a whole, the majority has the right to stifle the voice of the minority.”
Abram made it clear that he was not prepared to abandon the philosophy that formed the essence of his worldview. “I know that it has become fashionable in some liberal political circles to downgrade the liberal political creed. I am willing to examine and reexamine every substantive opinion, including those to which I am most committed. However, I am not prepared to reject the liberal methodology of fair play, civil liberty, and due process as the only way in which a civilized society can pursue truth, prevent the encrustation of error, and insure the fulfillment of one’s creative talents and inclinations.” The new president of Brandeis also voiced his strong objection to efforts to politicize the university. “A university politicized,” he said, “is a university doomed, as the lessons of the German universities under the Nazis proved.”6
The lofty rhetoric of inaugural weekend was interrupted by an episode that foreshadowed the difficulties Abram would soon encounter. During one of the panel discussions, Phyllis Raynor of Roxbury, a Brandeis senior representing the Brandeis Afro-American Society, accused the university of “institutional racism” by reneging on its promise to institute African and Afro-American Studies with major status in the curriculum. When Abram rose to defend Brandeis by attributing the problem to “procedural delays,” Raynor shot back that there would be no progress as long as “men like you” were in charge. She then proceeded to lead a walkout of some twenty-five black students.7
To Kenneth Sweder, Abram was “ready for the challenge, and enthusiastic about taking it on. He seemed to be the perfect guy for that spot at that moment.”8 But for Abram, it would not be long before encountering the harsh realities of running the university. Topping the list was its weak financial position. As a young ambitious university, Brandeis’s endowment was meager in comparison with its established peer institutions. When he accepted the position, Abram had little inkling of just how fragile the university’s finances were, and therefore how much time would have to be devoted to fundraising just to maintain its operations. In one month during his first year as president, Abram spent a total of nine nights sleeping in his own bed, spending the remainder on the road raising money.9
There was also the question of what to do about the looming presence of Abe Sachar. While considering whether to take the Brandeis job, Abram’s law partner Arthur Goldberg had advised him to “get rid of Sachar; get him off the campus.”10 But this was easier said than done. Sachar was a legend at Brandeis and was not going anywhere else. After Abram’s inauguration, Sachar took the title of chancellor, which included an office on campus, his old presidential residence, and full secretarial assistance, indicating to the new president that he was not about to step down gracefully.
David Squire, who had worked with Abram at the United Nations and whom Abram brought to Brandeis at the end of the first student semester as vice president of student affairs, believed that “it was a mistake to allow Sachar to have an office on campus after he retired, looking over his shoulder and keeping all his contacts. I mean, he would have various faculty members come to his office and they were undermining Morris. It was a terrible situation.”11
According to longtime Brandeis American studies professor Jacob Cohen, Abram was not alone in this treatment by the man who, he said, “turned this place overnight into the greatest success story in the history of American higher education.” Sachar, with whom Cohen became close in the 70s and 80s, “made every subsequent president’s life a living hell.”12
In the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination that spring, Sachar had made several promises to a group of black students, including establishment of a black studies concentration that Abram, long after he left Brandeis, believed to be a means by which blacks would be segregated once again in a two-tiered system. After Abram assumed the presidency, he learned that Sachar had left it to his successor to deal with these promises.
A mere three months after he was inaugurated, all the skills that Abram had acquired as a courtroom lawyer and a liberal civil rights advocate were tested by one of the country’s first student occupations of a university building. On the evening of January 9, 1969, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite reported that a group of black students had taken over Ford Hall, a three-story red brick building that housed Brandeis’s central communications network, the computer that serviced the university’s administration, and other facilities.
The students in Ford Hall sealed themselves behind mattresses, desks, and steel lockers, barricading themselves behind the three building entrances. A large banner of Malcolm X was draped from the second story window, and calls to the university were answered with the greeting “Malcolm X University.” Some two hundred white students marched around the building to demonstrate their support.13
The sixty-five students in Ford Hall sent the administration a tape-recorded message articulating a series of ten demands that included the awarding of full scholarships designated exclusively for black students and the creation of a Black Studies Department in which students would play a major role in selecting the chairman, faculty, and curriculum. In addition to these demands, the students insisted upon “total amnesty” from any punishment for their actions.
Returning to the Boston area from a fundraising speech, Abram held a press conference in which he said the students “have acted without prior complaint to the administration and even now refuse all discussions regarding the ten demands which they have made upon the university.” He asserted that the university would use “sufficient force to clear the building if necessary.”14
Although Abram felt blindsided by the takeover, he couldn’t have been completely surprised by it. Several weeks earlier he had received a call from William Sullivan, deputy director of the FBI, warning him that black radicals were on their way to Brandeis from Canada where they were seeking to stimulate a takeover at Sir George Williams University (now known as Concordia). According to Sullivan, they regarded Brandeis as an easy target because of the liberalism of its predominantly Jewish student body, which was likely to sympathize with the demands of black students.15
Abram was skeptical. But in fact, only days before the occupation, two activists from San Francisco State University, a junior faculty member and a graduate student, had met on the Brandeis campus with a group of black students. Students at San Francisco State were then three-and-a-half months into a strike. Other than the assistant sociology professor who had issued the invitation, the only other Brandeis faculty member present was Jacob Cohen.
In addition to his position in the American Studies Department, Cohen was director of the Transitional Year Program (TYP), an innovative project established in the aftermath of the King assassination to prepare disadvantaged students for college. In the early 1960s, Cohen had taken off two years from Brandeis to work for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). As he recalled,
San Francisco State was a notorious example of the exercise of student power. Quite violent, with stories about graduate student teachers who were bringing guns into their classrooms and putting them right in front of the students during the lectures. I’m listening and I’m writing down what the speaker [from San Francisco State] is saying. All the black students who are there are in the front rows. And he looked at them and he said, “If you have any balls, you will take over this place tomorrow.” And they rose, and they walked out together as a group and went into one of the classrooms on the first floor which at the time had glass walls. And it was that night that they cobbled together the ten demands. And put together this thing. Under the pressure of that meeting.16
The black students later denied that they developed their plan that night, insisting that initial planning had begun the previous November and a course of action decided upon three days prior to the forum.17 One of the leaders of the group in Ford Hall, student council representative Ricardo Millett, said that any police sent to evict his group would have “to crack heads, and when they start to crack heads, we will fight them.”18
Herbert Teitelbaum, a Brandeis alumnus, was then a young lawyer starting his career in the Boston area while his wife Ruth Abram was studying at the university’s Florence Heller School for Social Welfare. He arrived on the scene to provide his father-in-law with legal and moral support. As Teitelbaum recalled,
it was a pretty tense time for Morris and his family. You know, Morris came out of an experience down South where he was heralded as a leader of progressive politics, civil rights. When he got to Brandeis, there were kids there who were calling him “cracker.” So, it was a lack of civility, and Morris was a person for whom that was not part of his culture, it was not part of his background. I think it was very distressing for him. Morris went to Brandeis with the idea that he would be able to become involved in reshaping the intellectual life on campus, maybe having it become more akin to what he had experienced at Oxford. He wasn’t able to do that because so much of his time was spent raising money, dealing with faculty issues, and Abe Sachar was not helpful.19
Abram’s daughter Ruth explained, “Here he had been a Southern white taking stands that put him in some danger and were in opposition to the main tenor of the time, and he comes to Brandeis, a Jewish institution and to be told he is a racist, it was just so upsetting to him.”20
Abram moved quickly to obtain the support of the faculty. In an emergency meeting he convened, it voted overwhelmingly (153–18) for the following resolution: “We utterly condemn the forcible takeover of the University’s premises. We believe we cannot confront problems of a University under threats of coercion. The faculty demands that the students involved vacate Ford Hall and enter negotiations of any grievance with the University Administration.” The faculty rejected an amendment proposed by assistant sociology professor Gordon Fellman expressing sympathy for the students in Ford Hall and voicing support for the students and faculty at San Francisco State.21
Fellman recalled sitting in that meeting, where President Abram was exhorting faculty members to “fan out to the dormitories, tell the students just cool it, do your homework, go to the library, the administration is on top of this whole thing.” He and three colleagues walked over to Ford Hall that evening. The building was blockaded with chains and a padlock, so “we knocked on a window and they opened it. We said we’re faculty and we want to hear your story.” He continued:
They went into a huddle for a while and then they let us come in. We climbed through the window. One of the women had on a very tight skirt and we hoisted her up. So, we go into this classroom in Ford Hall and then I think it was Randy Bailey [the group’s spokesman] who was in that situation and Jewish at that point and wore a kippah. I think it was Randy who told us Sachar made some promises to black students when they came to Brandeis and Abram had not honored them. That’s what was behind it.22
The charge was not without merit. Indeed, one of the university’s harshest critics of campus radicalism, professor of politics and former LBJ advisor John Roche, noted after the crisis that the faculty committee set up after the King assassination to plan the concentration in Afro and Afro-American studies had failed to meet and when nothing happened, “they became invisible and let the president carry the can.”23
To Kenneth Sweder, Abram’s personal assistant who dealt primarily with student relations, the group in Ford Hall was for the most part not as radical as their counterparts in other parts of the country. “I’m one of those who never felt this was one of the more militant of the student protests or takeovers in those years,” he said. “These were students, many of them who became doctors, lawyers, and businessmen who I still see from time to time. These were not militants in the most extreme.” One of them was successfully ordered by his mother to leave Ford Hall.24
The most contentious issue presented by the students in Ford Hall was the demand involving black studies. Abram and most faculty members regarded the idea of students selecting the chairman of a department as a clear violation of fundamental academic principles. While expressing sympathy for the students, Lawrence Fuchs, professor of American civilization and former Peace Corps director for the Philippines, said that they simply did not understand what a university is and how it runs. “No distinguished black professor in the country which this faculty would want . . . would allow himself to be chosen chair on such a basis. He would almost certainly feel that his academic freedom had been compromised.”25
Several days into the crisis, Abram received praise both in the local and national press for the way in which he was handling it. Typical was this commentary by John Fenton of the New York Times: “In the face of a series of tense situations in the last few days, Mr. Abram has impressed observers with his flexibility, his endurance, and his ability to keep the rest of the university functioning smoothly.”26 The students in Ford Hall were clearly frustrated by the coverage. In the first bulletin they issued, they accused Abram of negotiating in bad faith and playing politics with the press. In their second, they referred to him as a “fork-tongued Georgia cracker.”27
Although Abram publicly expressed his support for a Black Studies Department, believing that he could not renege on Sachar’s commitment, the concept was fundamentally at odds with his belief that ghettoizing black students in this way would only work to the detriment of all students, both white and black. As he argued during a 1982 appearance on William F. Buckley’s syndicated public television program Firing Line, he did not believe that the black experience was being taught properly in American universities. To the contrary, the blacks in Ford Hall were correct that the teaching of American history either ignored or distorted the impact of racial discrimination.
He continued, “And I think there’s an enormous amount of American history and American sociology and American politics and American economics—the loss to our country from the economic production of black people who are unemployed or underemployed, this has an economic impact. I never learned any of this in college. I wanted that introduced into the standard curriculum that blacks and whites would take, not put off in some segregated hole and taught as black studies, which only blacks would go to, which would qualify them for nothing.”28
During the occupation, up to several hundred white student supporters sat in the corridor between the two administration buildings. At one point they sent a delegation to the administration to request amnesty for the black students and to seek assurances that the police not be called in. When the delegation was not met by Abram, they voted overwhelmingly to call a strike. Its effects were minimal, as most students were preparing to take their first semester exams.29 Several days later, five black women wearing bandannas entered the reserve room at Goldfarb Library and scattered over two thousand books and periodicals. Guarding the door, one of them ripped out a telephone.30
Shortly after the students began their occupation of Ford Hall, Abram convened a group of advisors consisting of administrators and faculty who would meet periodically in the university’s boardroom to assess the situation and consider their options. One of those present at these meetings was Jacob Cohen, whose Transitional Year Program was the subject of one of the ten demands. Cohen recalls the first meeting between the students in Ford Hall and Abram’s negotiating team:
In this first meeting, a student who, by the way, had very well-off parents and was outstanding academically, that student put a bull whip onto the table between himself and his group which had come on one side, and the representatives of the administration of which I am one, since I am the TYP Director, on the other side around Abram. And he said, “You listen to me mother-phile—though it was a little less alien than that—we’re going to burn this place down if you don’t give us what we want.” Very soon after these meetings between the student leaders and Abram began, the black students were accompanied by elements in the Boston community: extremely radical, in very good condition by the way, really ripped, who came in and stood behind the students, very little sense of humor, in which they said to our students, the black community of Boston is behind you.31
The one student invited into the group of faculty members and administrators was Eric Yoffie, president of Brandeis’s student council. Yoffie would later become the leader of the congregational arm of the movement of Reform Judaism in North America. According to Rabbi Yoffie, the main debate within the group from the beginning was between those who said the police should be called in and those who were opposed to that course of action, although both sides recognized that ultimately, if negotiation broke down, outside authorities would have to be called in. Yoffie believed that the black students had some legitimate concerns and seemed to be negotiating in good faith. He strongly believed that if the administration called in the police, “the campus would blow up, taking a bad situation, a dangerous situation, and making it much worse.”32
Yoffie convened a group of student leaders with whom he conferred during the occupation and to the person, they agreed with that assessment, and believed that calling the police should be avoided virtually at all costs. But President Abram, who was receiving advice from some in his inner circle to call in the police, was himself ambivalent. As Yoffie recalled,
the thing about Morris Abram is that he was someone who had fought the civil rights wars, based on the legal end of it. On the other hand, he was sort of a Southern gentleman, and there was part of him that reacted strongly that they were taking over these buildings. And he found something offensive in that. To some extent it was a generational thing between students and the older generation that was playing out all across America. So, he was a new president. He had a certain feeling that here I just came in. I’m someone who knows something about struggles of African Americans. I have a record here. I’ve done something on the ground, certainly in the legal world. And all of a sudden there’s this hostility. There was a part of [Abram] that went along with that element of the negotiating group that said, you know, we need to call in the police. They’ve taken over a building, they’ve done so illegally.33
At a faculty meeting held the evening before the students left Ford Hall, politics professor Roche offered a motion directing the president to inform the students that the faculty would proceed with establishment of a legitimate Department of African and Afro-American Studies as soon as they withdrew from the building. The motion passed by a vote of 132–52–30.34
By then, the students in Ford Hall were beginning to realize that they were close to achieving virtually all their demands. One of the older TYP students, concerned that the whole episode might well end up badly for the group, proposed that they declare victory and end the occupation.35 Eleven days after the takeover of Ford Hall, the slightly reduced contingent of occupiers walked out, greeted warmly by student supporters. In the end, Abram was hailed in the national media for mediating the crisis without calling in the police.
Morton Keller, the American historian who was chairman of the History Department at the time, recalled Abram’s judicious handling of the occupation. “I thought he handled it well,” Keller said, “very much in the tradition of a smart, reasonable, level-headed liberal lawyer, and I thought that was the right tone to take. It was not going to make the two sides very happy. There was criticism from the conservative side as well as the left, but that is often a good sign when someone ends up that way. I thought he did well.”36 Others, such as the sociologist Gordon Fellman, disagreed: “He certainly wasn’t up for understanding why the blacks had taken over Ford Hall, what it was all about. There was a larger picture: this was going on nationally, it wasn’t just Brandeis.”37
Less than a month after the black students departed Ford Hall, Abram published a lengthy article in the New York Times magazine, a kind of “how to handle a campus crisis.”38 Eric Yoffie thought it ironic that Abram was offering his colleagues advice to favor negotiation over force:
In addition to the article in the Times, he went on the Today Show and his central claim was, negotiate this out. And I was a hero because I listened to the students and I heard their concerns. Ultimately, what he was saying was “smart, sensitive negotiators such as myself can reach an understanding here,” and he was presenting his negotiating model as a model for other universities. And I remember my strong reaction as the only student participant was it wasn’t an entirely honest picture because repeatedly, he had been close to doing the exact opposite of what he said he did in the article. And he had repeatedly been close to bowing to those who took the opposite view and said, “Let’s call in the police.” And had seemed sympathetic. When we got through this, my view was whew, my God, we made it. But look, ultimately, he deserves the credit. Ultimately, the decision was his, ultimately it was the right decision for Brandeis, but he presents himself as much more of a dove than he actually was during the negotiations.39
Kenneth Sweder disputes the notion that Abram was ever on the verge of calling in law enforcement to end the occupation of Ford Hall. “We certainly discussed it, but I don’t believe that he was ever really that close. It was the kind of situation where if it was floated by him it was more of a testing out of the ideas among [his advisors] to hear our arguments. But I don’t remember that he was close to calling the police.”40
Many on campus perceived the article in the Times as a personal public relations tool for Abram that students found offensive and which, according to Professor Jonathan Krasner, “contributed to the undoing of his presidency.”41 Ten days before Abram’s article appeared in the Times, he sent a copy to Abe Sachar. To it he attached a message that read, “One thing more: there are revolutionary forces on the campus—not necessarily at Brandeis. Yet the enclosed material from President Gloster of Morehouse makes the point.”
Abram had served on the Morehouse College board of trustees since his days in Atlanta. The enclosure was a memorandum from its president to the board noting that during the last week in January, “a group of black revolutionaries, including Black Panthers from California, came to Atlanta for the purpose of leading our students in a takeover of the Atlanta University Center.” The platform proposed by the group included the renaming of the university (“The University of New Africa”), student control over all courses, and cessation of the term “predominantly Negro” (“We are African People.”) The platform failed for lack of student support.42
Soon Abram regretted the fact that he had agreed to grant the students amnesty before they left the building, particularly for those who had damaged university property. He envied his old law professor Edward Levi who, as president of the University of Chicago, had expelled a group of students who were part of a larger group that had occupied the administration building shortly after the end of the Brandeis takeover to protest the firing of a sociology professor.43
When Abram discussed this with Levi during the latter’s tenure as attorney general under President Ford, Levi pointed out that, unlike the situation at Brandeis, in Chicago the student protesters were white, the university was more or less unified against their actions, and Chicago was not a Jewish-sponsored university, where an expulsion of the students would have been regarded, albeit mistakenly, as a clash between blacks and Jews. As Abram told William F. Buckley Jr., “I felt a little better and relieved, but still I feel very keenly that it would have been good for those students to be punished.”44
One day after the students left Ford Hall, the day of Richard Nixon’s first inauguration as president, David Squire assumed his new position as vice president for Student Affairs. His job, Abram told him, was to see to it that the ten demands coming from Ford Hall were implemented. “You take care of it,” Abram told his new vice president, but, according to Squire, “the crisis really continued. It wasn’t just with a takeover. There was pressure every day and there were student sit-ins all over the place. The faculty senate ended up in my office every day practically, because they were still working on trying to be helpful in resolving these ten black student demands. I was trying to work with the faculty and the students to get out of this thing without any further danger and without any occupation and without any cops.”45
But problems persisted. On the night of February 25, 1969, two offices in the building housing the Politics Department were severely damaged by a clear case of arson. Authorities discovered eight separate fires, and damages totaled between $40,000 and $50,000. The targets were Professors Roche and I. Milton Sacks, two unapologetic supporters of the war in Vietnam. Benzine jars that had been stolen from a chemistry lab supply closet in Ford Hall were discovered at the scene. Although the Waltham police suspected students who had been involved in the Ford Hall occupation, the case was dropped in March of the following year.46
Six weeks after the end of the occupation of Ford Hall, a racially mixed group of students, including some who had been involved in the occupation, held a sit-in outside of the president’s office to protest what they regarded as a delay in the implementation of the ten demands. Declaring that they would be subject to disciplinary action, Abram organized a judicial committee to handle the matter that was void of student representation. After additional protests, including a condemnation from the student council, he backed down and the resulting adjudication allowed the group involved in the sit-in to avoid punishment. For Abram, it affirmed his belief that the decision not to act against the occupiers of Ford Hall had been a mistake.47 Abram’s discomfort was reinforced by new demands related to the use of quotas in the future admission of black students that included full financial aid. He regarded it as “their most outrageous demand to date, but tragically, the most obtainable.”48
Abram’s skill in handling the Ford Hall crisis soon became overshadowed by his growing inability to relate well with Brandeis’s faculty and students. According to Squire, “He didn’t really listen to and respect the students. I think that was the main thing, students more than faculty. And he pretty much talked down to the faculty. In meetings with the faculty Senate, he did some lecturing about what should be and about the students’ terrible performance and the faculty wasn’t really doing anything about it. They weren’t showing any resistance, any discipline in any way or another to students for doing this. Too many were sympathetic. Soft, he called them, soft.”49
Recalling her father’s experience at Brandeis, Ruth Abram related what he had described to her as the “éclair” story: “He invited some deans to have a discussion one day and I guess there were six deans and he had expected five. He had ordered his favorite dessert, eclairs, and the deans started fussing about how to divide them. And he felt that this was a metaphor for the pettiness of academic life.”50
Later that year, Abram received an offer from an unnamed donor to fund the establishment of a law school, something he was promoting as a logical tribute to the university’s namesake. Many on the faculty and board of trustees believed that it was particularly unwise to start a law school at a time when Brandeis was under enormous financial pressure. When he shared with a reporter plans for the law school, it infuriated many on campus, including members of the board who had not been consulted.
Among those surprised by the announcement was his advisor David Squire:
One day in January I picked up the New York Times and lo and behold I read an article entitled “Brandeis to Have a Law School.” Now, mind you, I was with the president every day. Never heard that. Never heard anything; we never talked about it. He loved to be with the press, he loved to have news conferences and get the press in. And evidently, I wasn’t in the room, but he said something like “we’re going to have a law school.” Mind you, you know how universities work, the faculty are the most important thing and he hadn’t ever discussed it or even offered it or mentioned it to the faculty, never mind his colleagues like me.51
In an article published in the journal Daedalus in the winter of 1970, Abram voiced the frustrations of administrators trying their best to deal with both external and internal challenges, given the constraints under which they operated:
The basic problem of most administrations is that they have great responsibility without the accompanying power over the causes of discontent in the university community. These causes originate largely in the outside world; the university president can rail against them, but seldom has the capacity to change them. . . . Moreover, disciplinary action from the administration is likely to be perceived, often unjustifiably, as an infringement on academic freedom. Nevertheless, administrations have a large role. The president who does not regard himself as a leader of the faculty, as a problem-solver, and as a source of innovation and renewal in academic matters is failing both faculty and students.52
In the end, Abram’s ambitions exceeded both what he could accomplish and what was expected of him, leading to his downfall. While praising his ability as a fundraiser, Squire attributed many of his difficulties to a lack of acceptance of his role: “He didn’t understand at all about how a university governs itself, the role of the faculty and how important it is, and the role of the president how unimportant it is, except for fundraising. He never understood that nor accepted it.”53
Eric Yoffie’s take on his tenure was similar if a bit more sympathetic:
He was a guy of great personal charm, somebody who knew how to work a room. He knew how to talk to people. He saw himself and rightly so as somebody who could be convincing in a debate or in a personal argument. He was somebody who was used to bringing folks over to his side. And he walked into a university situation in the 1960s. So first of all, there are all these constituencies in the university. He thought that in short order he was going to win them all over and charm them as only he could do. So, my sense is this smart, charming accomplished attorney coming out of the South all of a sudden found that his particular skills really didn’t work terribly well in this environment. And it was going to be a struggle for him to succeed here and that the satisfactions that he hoped to get from life were not going to be forthcoming from a university setting.54
To Kenneth Sweder, Abram was simply not a good fit with the world of the academy. “With its prerogatives and protocols of the administration, faculty, and students, it was too cumbersome for him. He was an activist lawyer. And I don’t think trying to function in the way he had to in the academy was something that worked for him.”55 Jacob Cohen said, “[Abram] saw this university in some idyllic college president way that was totally unsuitable for the times, and for the situation, and for Brandeis.”56
When Hubert Humphrey, then a Brandeis trustee, suggested that Abram enter the wide-open Democratic primary for the Senate seat in New York held by Republican Charles Goodell, he seized the opportunity, saying goodbye to what he had once considered his dream job after less than a year and a half. In a final act of humiliation, when he announced his resignation from the Brandeis presidential residence in the town of Weston, he faced a group of student protestors who blamed Abram for abandoning the university in the middle of a financial crisis. Many there and on the campus charged that he had used his brief tenure at the university to further his political career.57
Abram’s tenure at Brandeis was deeply demoralizing. Ambassador Alfred Moses, who knew Abram well at the American Jewish Committee and later at UN Watch, said “He never really recovered from it. It tarnished him. Up to then, he was the golden boy.”58 To his Atlanta law partner Robert Hicks, who stayed in touch with Abram throughout the rest of his life, “It was one of the turning points in Morris’s life. A terrible blow. It rattled his fundamentals. When he left Paul, Weiss to go to that school, Morris thought he had arrived at one of the pivotal points of his life. Instead, it was a critical disappointment. It really crushed him.”59
Although Abram’s tenure at Brandeis was short, his immediate experience with political radicalization contributed significantly to his political education and, as he later wrote, toughened him for his subsequent battle with leukemia.60 He had spent the first two decades of his career championing the cause of racial integration. Now, as in the case of the aftermath of the Six-Day War, he was seeing the old coalition of Jews, liberal Protestants, and blacks breaking apart in a new political climate, one in which the New Left was attacking fundamental values that had informed his worldview.
When Abram consulted students and faculty about punishing the students, particularly those who had damaged university property, he was advised against doing so. “The law,” he said, “for me the hallmark of civilized life, would have to be ignored.” Recalling Martin Luther King’s respect for the law, the contrast between his expectation to suffer the consequences of breaking it, including time in jail, could not be more different from that of the black students on campus and their supporters.61 While demoralizing to him personally, Abram’s Brandeis experience fortified his commitment to the liberal principles that had guided his actions and beliefs since his early days.