A study released Sept. 28 by the National Research Council, a nonprofit institution to which many schools around the country belong, ranked Brandeis' doctorate programs in the life sciences, English literature, American history and mathematics at the top of their lists. In an interview with the Justice, Malcolm Watson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said that the study assessed doctorate programs from universities across the country for the 2005 to 2006 academic year by assessing over 5,000 programs and collecting data in two general scores-what Watson referred to as a "reputation" score and then a survey score.

Watson said that the way that programs were rated was not in a numerical list but instead in a "range variation." He said that no school was "given a score or told that they were number three, for example."

Watson said, "In general, we had between 72 to 80 percent of our programs in the top half of the programs in the country. You might say the top half isn't all that great, but considering we're a small school and we're up against [the Universities of] Michigan, Stanford and Berkeley. ... We have a lot of programs that did well."

Watson also said that he feels that the ratings were not as valid as he would have liked because the NRC did not include data like what jobs the students got once they graduated, if research was published in important journals or the amount of grant money a school was allotted. "As flawed as [the survey] is, it's a good thing for us to look at and figure out where we can improve and where we stand among other schools," Watson said.

"We are trying to do the best we can at having good graduate education and I think we do. ... We are putting a lot of hope into the graduate students that they will make us proud of them," he said.

The American history doctoral program at Brandeis was ranked as one of the top in the country. In an interview with the Justice, Prof. Jane Kamensky, the chair of the History department, said that she was particularly pleased about the ratings because the program is so small. "[It is] surprising for our size to see just how far above our weight we punch, but not surprising to know the work of my colleagues and our students is excellent," she said.

She also said that professors and students here have been trained to not "just think and teach in the subject of their dissertation but [also] think broadly about important historical problems over long periods of time and about the ways that history matters in our lives."

In reference to the sciences, Watson also said that Brandeis' size did not hurt the program. "We have good facilities that are not as varied as they would be at a large school, but when you're smaller, there are advantages. It's not treated as much as a factory but more of a place where students can work closely with faculty because of the smaller student-faculty ratio," he said.

About the size of the history program, Kamensky said, "[Brandeis is] a place where no student has fallen through the cracks." Of the forty years of Ph.D.s in American History, Brandeis has had three graduates who have won Pulitzer Prizes for their work. Kamensky notes, "We can't take full credit for their genius, but we are a place that allows people to find their own paths, and we really support them on their own paths. We're very proud of them.