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Pauli Murray's influence, and her amazing trajectory of interests and causes, spanned much of the twentieth century. While much of her pioneering work for civil rights and women's rights has become well known, the story of her remarkable experience at Brandeis University, where she taught in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has yet to be told. Even I -- who came to Brandeis' American Studies Department six years after Pauli had left it, assuming the leadership of the fledgling women's studies program as well -- never fully understood the extent to which Pauli's battles on behalf of women's issues at the university made possible my own.(1)
Arriving at Brandeis in the fall of 1968 as a visiting professor of American Civilization, Pauli helped make possible the transition of the American Civilization program to an American Studies department two years later. She introduced the first courses in legal studies, African American studies, and women's studies, curricular innovations that would outlast her residence at the university. Overlapping the awakening of second-wave feminism and the peak years of the black power and student power movements, Murray's new academic position offered momentous, but daunting, possibilities. In her memoirs, she described her five years at Brandeis as "the most exciting, tormenting, satisfying, embattled, frustrated, and at times triumphant period of my secular career."(2)
In spring 1968, she had been invited to join Brandeis' American Civilization program by the incoming second president, Morris Abram, who was to succeed founding president Abram Sachar. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Lawrence Fuchs, professor of politics and chair of the American Civilization program, urged Abram to seek an African American faculty member who could introduce courses on the black experience at Brandeis.(3) After some initial ambivalence, Murray became convinced that the opportunity to introduce legal studies and African American studies courses at Brandeis would be a "thrilling adventure." The fact that Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she so greatly admired, had been on Brandeis' faculty and board of trustees, and that she associated the institution with its founding social justice ideals, helped persuade her to take the job.
Murray was given the Louis Stulberg Chair in Law and Politics in 1971, receiving tenure as full professor in American Studies. She regularly taught courses...