<p>According to the Wall Street Journal’s new “Gift of the Week” column, Brandeis received twelve million dollars to start a social research center. How cool is that? You would think the Journal’s first column would be for Harvard or Yale, but nope. It’s just more and more proof that Brandeis is on its way to the top!</p>
<p>Here's an article about another large gift that Brandeis received about 6 months ago to launch an investigative reporting program. Brandeis is definitely hot.</p>
<p>Pathbreaking institute in investigative journalism launched
Display PrintableReleased on: October 25, 2004 (Expired)
Contact: <a href="mailto:nealon@brandeis.edu">nealon@brandeis.edu</a>
Alarmed by the continuing rise of "infotainment," and sound bite news, two award-winning journalists and undergraduates in the Student-Scholar Partnership Program have launched a groundbreaking institute for investigative journalism at Brandeis.</p>
<p>The Student-Scholar Partnership Program is under the auspices of the Women's Studies Research Center.</p>
<p>Florence Graves, a resident scholar in the WSRC since 1996, said four students have begun working with her and Rochelle Sharpe as paid research assistants on projects related to medicine, mental health and the criminal justice system. One of the initial projects is called "the criminalization of motherhood." </p>
<p>Made possible through a $1 million gift from WSRC board member Elaine Schuster and her husband Gerald, the new institute is the first of its kind based at a university, according to Graves, who is directing it. As an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, Graves broke the sexual misconduct story involving U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood. She founded Common Cause Magazine and has won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Sharpe, the program's first senior fellow, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes investigative and in-depth stories on social issues for such papers as the Wall Street Journal. She won her Pulitzer in national reporting in the early '90s for a series on undetected child abuse murders. The series revealed that many unexplained deaths were erroneously being blamed on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome without autopsies being conducted.</p>
<p>Thomas Friedman, '75, the three-time Pulitzer winner and foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, praised the new program at an Oct. 18 reception at the Schusters' home to celebrate the launch. Friedman said the world needs more investigative journalism and less of the media that disguises itself, purporting to offer real news while spreading rumors and cheering causes - political or otherwise.</p>
<p>Friedman spent the day on campus, meeting with students from the journalism program, members of the Justice staff and other student journalists. He also addressed a packed Spingold Theater where he spoke about the evolution of terrorism from pre-9/11 to the present. </p>
<p>He characterized Sept. 11, 2001 as "a third-rate totalitarian challenge to open society," and argued that a safer world can be realized only when the people of the Middle East have free elections, allow their women to have the same rights as men, educate their young for employment in the contemporary world, and develop sustainable, non-oil-related means to support themselves and their families.</p>