Lewis Brooks:
Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us for this very special recorded Alumni Weekend event. I'm Lewis Brooks, from the Class of 1980, president of the Brandeis Alumni Association, and it's my pleasure to introduce President Ron Liebowitz. Brandeis' ninth president has led the university through one of its most challenging stretches in our history with transparency, a deep level of competency, and a strong sense of calm. Through the pandemic, President Liebowitz hasn't stopped thinking about planning for the university's future, a vision he will soon share with you. I'm excited to continue to work with Ron to help write Brandeis' next chapter. Please join me in welcoming Brandeis president, Ron Liebowitz, to share a university update.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thank you, Lewis. Thank you for the welcome and also for all you do to keep alumni connected to Brandeis, especially this past year, and also for your excellent work on the board of trustees. You've been an invaluable member of our board.
Ron Liebowitz:
I want to welcome alumni and friends back to virtual campus, at least. Perhaps a warning is in order after yesterday's university webinar, during which a fire alarm went off. Not again. After the fire alarm went off, happily after professor Tom Doherty's and alumnus Michael Sugar's excellent discussion, but just when I was thanking the two for their wonderful conversation. Now, odds are this won't happen again, but just in case, I give this warning.
Ron Liebowitz:
This alumni weekend of course looks different from past years due to what we hope is the remnants or at least the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic. I thank everyone for joining us virtually until we are back in person next year. The rallying cry on many recent Zooms has been "next year in Waltham," so let's hope. I also want to thank you all for engaging Brandeis so thoughtfully over the very challenging past year by attending virtual events, providing career mentorship and job opportunities to our students, and to giving financially to Brandeis to help support students and our campus with the many unanticipated expenses we faced during the pandemic.
Ron Liebowitz:
The success of the past year could not have happened without the support and engagement of the alumni community. I want to share a few updates and points to pride from last year because we often do not step back and appreciate the small and larger things that were met with calm, grace, and enormous patience by our campus community.
Ron Liebowitz:
First and foremost, of course, is how the Brandeis community responded to the pandemic, how Brandeis managed to sustain the school's teaching and research mission, despite the constraints of the pandemic, pivoting as it did. If you recall, back last March many faculty, most faculty had little to no experience teaching remotely, yet they dived right in and had to covert their classes. Then in June when faced with an opening of the past academic year, of having to do more remote teaching, more than 500 faculty members, 500 out of 530 jumped in and took a two week workshop offered by our Center for Teaching and Learning, that helped them teach more effectively remotely. It was great dedication on their part.
Ron Liebowitz:
As we look to the fall we have plans to reopen at 100% in person. Of course things might change as we find out more about the variant, but we're all very optimistic and hopeful that we can open at 100%. I'll talk more about that when we get into our Q&A.
Ron Liebowitz:
The Brandeis community has responded to what has been a year of social upheaval, also to me is quite impressive. If you think about the world around us, the politics of the country, the politics of the world, in fact, has been quite tumultuous, and yet the Brandeis community responded quite remarkably. First and foremost, we had this anti-racist agenda going on since George Floyd's death, if you recall. I sent out a request to our community to engage in the issue of racism and to think how subconsciously many of us perhaps have systems in place in our departments, in our units, across the university that might of course be racist in nature without us knowing. I called upon every unit of the institution to think through this and to submit anti-racist plans that were appropriate for their unit.
Ron Liebowitz:
Now, naively we thought this could be done in three or four months. As we found out, this took the entire year to do. Not only did we have to step back and think about things, we had to first understand what was meant by structural racism, what was meant by systemic racism. So, therefore it took much longer, but by now we have anti-racist plans from across the university. Mark Brimhall-Vargas, our vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion, is now summarizing and posting those for comment. We're going to keep those up on the website to get comment from the community. Then come fall, we're going to think about how these plans work into our ongoings at Brandeis. So stay tuned to hear more about that.
Ron Liebowitz:
One of the most remarkable things about the whole process, in my view, was how after I called these anti-racist plans we had two students from Georgia who decided that while the administration might pursue these anti-racist plans, they as students wanted to engage many of their fellow students, and over 600 participated, to work over the summer to give their perspective on what needed to be done on campus to address the issues that they faced and they experienced 24/7. We're on campus large parts of the day. The students are on campus 24/7. So, these two students took it upon themselves to work with all the other students across the summer to present to us what they call the Black Action Plan. That Black Action Plan is factored into many of our conversations on campus, in the administration, and also the board of trustees for the last year. That Black Action Plan really has formed the basis of our conversations that will show up in many of the plans that we see come the fall. So, kudos to our students.
Ron Liebowitz:
We also had a campus wide effort on revisioning public safety. One of the big issues that came up during our conversations about on campus safety was public safety and how we utilize our public safety officers, what we ask them to do, perhaps fairly or a bit unfairly in terms of their tasks every day. So, we had a reenvisioning in public safety in our campus. We faced certain specific threats at Brandeis that perhaps most university and colleges don't. The fact that we are targeted as a Jewish founded institution adds some stress and also some issues that we need to think about, but that reenvisioning process was also done beautifully, led by Stew Uretsky and Lois Stanley. They did a great job in getting input from the whole community.
Ron Liebowitz:
We also had a response to the attacks on Asians and Asian Americans. If you recall, this was a nationwide event, in our campus we responded with several calls for support and also engaging the issue about what we can do to protect our Asian and Asian American students much more. Then of course most recently we had the anti-Semitic attacks, which we're now looking at how we can of course protect that. We never think about that all that much at Brandeis because we're somewhat insulated, having a large percentage of our campus population Jewish as opposed to other campuses for college and universities. But in any case, all these things led to greater challenges on our campus that were met quite remarkably by our faculty and staff, challenges to our students' mental health.
Ron Liebowitz:
This was one of the biggest challenges of the pandemic, whereas we came out of the pandemic quite remarkably, one of the big issues and challenges for us was our students' mental health. This is something that I've spoken about before. It was one of the biggest factors, the biggest issues that we had to address. It was common across most universities and colleges. In fact, in my weekly meetings with other presidents of colleges and universities in Massachusetts, a weekly meeting that we have with presidents for an hour every Friday, this was the issue that took up most of our time in the second half of the pandemic, how to address issues of mental health. How do we support our students both living on campus who felt very isolated because of the social issues, we could not have social engagement as they normally would, and how about the students who were living at home, doing course work remotely? They felt very isolated too.
Ron Liebowitz:
We came through this year exceptionally well. We're monitoring the issue of our student's mental health. So far as, I'm happy to say that to date we've done a pretty good job on this, but we of course are monitoring this as we come to the next semester.
Ron Liebowitz:
Other issues that occurred during this year that sometimes we don't take pause and really celebrate is the faculty passed a new and very Brandeisian engineering major that had been in conception for about 10 years. Faculty members from the science division had envisioned an engineering program, a major, but not a separate department, not a separate school like you find at other schools, but something that's very Brandeisian and it draws on the strength of our sciences and also on our math and computer science in an overlay type of program. Rather than creating a separate unit, it will be a major that draws upon the strength of these other departments. It took about 10 years, because it is unique in some ways, and because it just takes that long to get something through sometimes university faculty, but I will say this, that the leaders of that program did their leg work. They met with faculty members from across the faculty, from the arts, from the humanities, from the social sciences, the natural sciences. They got an agreement within the natural science division and took their argument across the campus to show how this would be in the best interest of the university.
Ron Liebowitz:
We lose a lot of students each year that we accept to universities and colleges that have engineering programs, since engineering has become much more popular over the last decade. Students want to learn science, they want to learn math, they want to learn STEM, they want to learn applied work as well. So, what has been proposed here and what was passed by the faculty in two successive votes, as it's done here at Brandeis, we voted on two successive faculty meetings over the course of the spring, and then it went to the board of trustees and was also approved, was a major that will really draw on the strength of the sciences, like I said, but also pull in and really invite in faculty and programs from across the universities. There are really imaginative ways to think about engineering. It's not just about STEM, per se, but it's also about thinking about ethics and new business. It's about thinking about the MakerLab and how that ties in to engineering, which is really creativity by our students in that lab.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, this was a very, very exciting program that was passed, and we look forward to beginning to explain it come next semester. We also agreed to partner with a foundation recently to pilot a new program for students to fight hate in all of its forms. This is a student affairs type initiative that will have an academic element to it, but its goal is really to look at anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, all the hate forms, and to engage students and use students as ambassadors with one another working peer-to-peer to educate one another about hate, using their expertise with social media to confront all these forms of hate. Now, we're just about to put out an announcement on this, but we're very excited about this because it really is much in line with Brandeis's founding values and the whole idea of Brandeis being founded on the basis of fighting bigotry and anti-Semitism, of including people who previously had been excluded from entry into higher education. So, more on this as the summer wears on and the fall begins.
Ron Liebowitz:
On the anti-racism plans I mentioned before, we plan to have those posted on the website. I invite all of you to look at those, to send input. We'll have more discussion on that come September. We're also as a community looking more at environmental sustainability. Some of you might recall that we had a task force on campus sustainability that was working for more than a year. They came up with a full plan, a 50 page report that had multiple initiatives, and we've begun now to look through those recommendations and to adopt them one by one, issues such as adopting electric vehicles for our campus, and replacing our fleet, our fossil fuel fleet with electric vehicles. We're looking at also about purchases of single use disposable items on campus to reduce paper pollution and so forth. This will include continuing a phase out of our a bottled water program at the beginning of 2019 and that was halted by the pandemic.
Ron Liebowitz:
During the next academic year, related to this environmental sustainability, we'll begin planning a year long campus wide effort to provide in-depth analysis of the issues and inequities of climate change that we'll launch in the following academic year. This was one of the recommendations that came out of the sustainability task force, that it was about time that we embrace this issue of climate change on our campus, to at least educate everyone, including ourselves, about what the impact is and the unequal impact it is on certain populations. So, we will be doing that. Over the course of the year you'll hear more about that as well.
Ron Liebowitz:
We also began to turn our institutional attention again to the framework for the future. You recall this was a plan that was approved by the board of trustees in January of 2020. We basically were working on that for two or three months when the pandemic hit. But the framework will have a addenda first of all added to it to take into account the results of our anti-racist plans and the aforementioned report on campus sustainability. These are two issues that should undergird all we do, thinking about racism and thinking about all forms of hate and how we can address those, and also thinking about how our operations on campus and whatever we pursue in terms of new initiatives has the idea of sustainability behind them. So, we'll have an addenda, the board of trustees had passed the framework, so we'll add these as an addenda and make sure that in the document it says that these are important elements to our whole future.
Ron Liebowitz:
So you'll hear more about initiatives related to the framework the coming year, but just to give you a tiny little preview. We have restarted our planing for science 2A, which is a project which is called the second phase of the science plan, which stopped in 2008, '09, as a result of the financial crisis. That is a building that will predominantly replace our old chemistry labs and provide space for other programs as well, perhaps even for our new engineering program, but that's well along the way. We have a faculty committee, a faculty and staff committee that's underway under the leadership of provost Carol Fierke and hopefully we'll have plans for that building.
Ron Liebowitz:
By the way, we had plans for science 2A prior in 2009, but the way in which science is taught and the way in which the Brandeis faculty see engagement with students has changed sufficiently since 2009 that there were some changes to the program. We hope to have that done, those plans done within the year. We also have turned our focus to student life. As many of you recall, the framework for the future really identifies an improvement and attention to student life. As I mentioned before, Brandeis has always focused on the academic, perhaps at the expense of the quality of student life, the quality of residence halls, the type of activity that goes on in those residence halls. Students were very, very clear in our focus groups during the planning for the framework for the future to state what they thought was lacking. What's interesting, they stated many things, because we had seven sub task forces looking at student life, but two of the things that were most interesting was the desire on the part of so many students to have more intergenerational work on campus, to engage much more with PhD students, to engage with faculty, to engage with students in the residential life area. What's interesting is that they didn't want to talk about academics, they wanted to talk about life. They wanted to ask questions, they wanted to talk about passions, they wanted to talk about careers.
Ron Liebowitz:
Now, this is very different from of course when we were, or I was in college at least, when the last thing we wanted to see was a faculty member, an administrator, or god forbid the president, showing up in the residence halls and minding our business, but this generation is different. I owe it to in some ways social media, where students are much more tied to one another through social media rather than face-to-face engagement, and perhaps it's easier to have these types of conversations and to learn social skills like these more easily intergenerationally than it is with peers. Who knows? But in any case, this was an interesting issue.
Ron Liebowitz:
The other one was that students were pretty consistent in talking about the wonderful community they find among the 3,600 undergraduates on campus, but they also wanted more smaller communities in their residence halls. They wanted their dormitory life to be much more than just a place to sleep. They wanted to study there, they wanted intramurals through those units. They wanted to have much more engagement locally. So, we're looking at how we can do that better. So, student life is the second focus from the framework that we're looking at.
Ron Liebowitz:
Thirdly, we're looking at our Jewish roots and our founding values. I mentioned how our founding values are so critical to thinking about today, 2021, the anti-racism plans, the sustainability and environmental issues. So, our Jewish roots really do go back to 1948 when the institution was founded, we're trying to think about how they relate most effectively to 2021, and of course, everyone would agree that today they're as vital today and important today as they were back in 1948. So, we're talking about that and you'll see more coming as well.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, we look forward to both a more normal year come the fall, and also one that focuses on our future. I want to thank you for being integral part of Brandeis's past and future and thank you for joining us today. I want to stop right here to encourage all of you to submit questions, and I'm going to turn it over to Lewis to host our Q&A session.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you Ron, and yes, if anyone has any questions, please use the Q&A feature at the bottom of the screen. We do have a couple of questions, Ron. First, what permanent changes do you expect Brandeis to make do to its experience getting through the pandemic?
Ron Liebowitz:
Well, a lot of these things have to be discussed and negotiated, but I think there were some things that we all could agree on that has changed as a result of pandemic. One of them I mentioned previously and earlier in my comments was the efficacy and the effectiveness of remote teaching and learning. Prior to the pandemic, if you would've polled our faculty, I think you would've found a very small percentage of them would've thought that remote teaching made any sense. They loved the person-to-person, face-to-face contact, the in class engagement with individuals. The high touch type of undergraduate education that we're so proud of at Brandeis, and I think you get a lot of pushback. In fact, many universities and colleges that have been trying more remote forms of teaching over the past decade or so have found that faculty are allergic to this type of pedagogy. However, it's interesting to note in conversations with faculty there are a good number who believe that they are more effective teachers for some of their teaching and of some of their courses if they could do it remotely.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, I think the question in efficacy of remote teaching has changed dramatically, and I think we're going to be engaging the question more and more about which courses make sense for us to do or allow our faculty to do remotely. By the way, some students also found that remote learning was more effective than being in class, for whatever reason, be it anxiety or whatever case it is. Some found it very, very productive to have this opportunity or have this possibility of learning that way. So, that's one thing.
Ron Liebowitz:
The second thing is the possibilities of new cohorts of learners. I think we've always assumed that our undergraduates and our students were going to be 18 to 22-year-olds who are going to come on campus and live for four years, or at least three years, maybe go abroad, but I think now what we've learned through the pandemic is that there might be cohorts of even 18 to 22 year olds who want a Brandeis education but not necessarily fully on campus. So, who knows? The calendar and the residency requirement that we've had at Brandeis and many other universities and colleges might change as well.
Ron Liebowitz:
Then we also found out that cohorts of learners who are different, older, our alums for example who have graduated years ago, some retired, even preretirement age, have a real desire to engage and take courses from our Brandeis faculty. So, there's a whole world out there. We have 60,000 alums. Our alums tend to be far more academic than many other places, and so the engagement with our faculty in some way might increase as well. So, I think we're looking to that.
Ron Liebowitz:
Then finally the last thing I'll say, although there are many other things perhaps, is rethinking use of space on campus. The whole idea, the cost curve in higher education has become so great and extended because of costs and space takes up a large cost. Now, the question is, need everybody be on campus all the time? Could there be shared office space where you come in half the week and you work remotely for the other half, reducing the demand for space needs? Same thing with classroom sizes. If we have a situation in which some of our classes or parts of our classes could be taught remotely or in different ways, we'd have less of a demand on classroom. In fact, I'm thinking about our international business school plans. We were well underway of thinking about a third building for our international business school, but we stepped back because some of the classes that were done remotely in that school were so effective that Dean Katy Graddy is now thinking about wait a minute, do we need as much space as we thought?
Ron Liebowitz:
So, I think the whole idea of campus infrastructure will go through a rethinking and we're starting to think about that as well. Those are the three that I would point to immediately.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. That's great. With the class of 25 coming in in the fall, and then thinking ahead to the class of 26, what would you tell a high school senior who is considering applying to Brandeis to persuade them to submit their application?
Ron Liebowitz:
Well, this is my fifth year at Brandeis and I continue to shake my head at how little known is excellent about Brandeis out there. In other words, we know it, I think the alumni know it, and I think within higher education, faculty members know it, but in terms of the general population I think we need to get the word out about what is so special about Brandeis. What is so special is the value proposition that's really outlined in the framework for the future, it's the core of the framework for the future, and it points to the very unique space that Brandeis occupies in higher education where you can have a very personalized undergraduate education, 3,600 students, a really small undergraduate college really, and housed in a Research I, major Research I university. People fail to remember that Brandeis is one of the 65 leading Research I universities in North America. It's the smallest one too. It has the fewest students in PhD programs and undergraduates, except for Caltech. Caltech has fewer undergraduates actually, not fewer PhD students, but fewer undergraduates, and that combination of this personalized undergraduate education and this Research I enterprise means that undergraduates get to work with faculty in ways that are usually only reserved for graduate students at these other places.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, if a student is serious academically, and most of our students are serious academically, and most of our prospective students are serious academically, they get the opportunity to work in an environment that is very different from all others. So, that's the one thing that I would say. The other thing I would say is a reflection on how our community came together to keep the infection rates so low. I mean, I talked the pandemic. Our infection rate I think we had a total of 75 students from August 1st until the full year who came down with the virus.
Ron Liebowitz:
A large part of that had to do with a lot of people working very hard, of course, and the incredible preparation by our staff to get our campus safe, but it also was a result of a community spirit and the way in which our students really respected and saw and treated one another. Some would say, and I've said before too, that maybe our students aren't as partiers like other college university student bodies, and as a result there was less infection and less spread, but I think it does reflect the community spirit that extends to the atmosphere for learning. We have so many students who are premed, which is probably the most competitive environment in higher education, yet I routinely hear over and over again, among the premeds, and even students who have dropped out of premed, that the atmosphere for learning is not that competitive intense environment, but rather one of collaboration, that students tend to collaborate with one another. So, I think those two things I would really highlight. Opportunities that students would have to work alongside faculty across the curriculum that they would not have elsewhere, and then secondly, the community spirit and the respect for one another that was best reflected in how we dealt with the pandemic.
Lewis Brooks:
That's wonderful. Thank you, Ron. Another question. Like the engineering major, are there any other new high level education initiatives on the horizon?
Ron Liebowitz:
Well, right now there's a lot of conversation going on about a collaboration. Maybe not necessarily "new" programs as large as what's called engineer and science major, but rather a collaboration. I think what really spawn that was in fact the conversations about anti-racism and fighting hate. The question is, how do we break out of our academic silos? How do we reach across our departments, our academic departments, and even our schools so that The Heller School of Social Policy and Management, the international business school and our college of arts and sciences, how do they work together to sort of find interesting ways for students to connect and connect the dots of all these important things that are going on? A good example is our Near Eastern and Jewish studies faculty reaching across to engage our African and African American studies faculty. That's just one. The Near Eastern and Jewish studies faculty also reached across to our classics and classical studies faculty looking for tangents in the Near and Middle East to talk about the ancient world, the ancient Mediterranean world. So, there are collaborations that are not being discussed, mostly because we talk in the framework for the future about horizontal integration, meaning looking across the university and integrating that way, instead of a very up and down silo type of existence that you find in a department of physics, or a department of mathematics, or a department of sociology, or a department of classics.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, we're looking to try to integrate as best as possible to the benefit of our students, and I think faculty are taking this up with some degree of zest. So, no specific new programs that I can point to. We have enough on our plate with the science and engineering, and everything else, but the encouragement that the institution will support faculty who look across the university for this horizontal collaboration.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. How has COVID affected philanthropy to Brandeis?
Ron Liebowitz:
Well, I think on the macro level in general we worry and we're concerned that first of all, people were affected. A lot of people were affected financially as a result of the pandemic and so we expected to have some challenges in fundraising. That's on the macro level. In reality, what's happened is alumni have really focused their support for our emergency fund last year and also in support of students this year. So, we didn't really see a decline for fiscal year 20. Now, fiscal year 21 ends June 30th, so if people are so predisposed to make a gift to Brandeis, you have until the end of June of course to do so for the fiscal year. But we anticipated that there would be some degree of pullback as a result of the financial challenges that people face. Secondly, the number of competing needs out there, people have to really consider where their philanthropic dollars need to go. Of course, we see Brandeis as a very important target, but to think about all the needs out there, it's understandable that alumni and friends of university also see the need to support those in greater need.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, we're anticipating a slight reduction in our total fundraising for the year, but we're working hard to sort of make sure it's just for this year that it happens, and we're trying to sort of make up in the end of this fiscal year.
Lewis Brooks:
Thank you. We actually have time for one more question before the second part of the program. How are Brandeis's diversity objectives determined?
Ron Liebowitz:
Wow, that's a great question. We have several committees now. I'm proud to say that we have a diversity, equity and inclusion committee at the board of trustees, which was just formed in the last year. It's a very active group and it's really populated by people who are committed to diversity. Then we also have a faculty new committee that's called DEI, diversity equity and inclusion—J, social justice, J for justice. It too has been an incredibly positive feature for us, and it works with Carol Fierke, our provost and myself, and also Dorothy Hodgson, our dean of arts and sciences, to sort of help formulate ideas, to question, to push, to come up with ideas. On the faculty side, they will work with the faculty senate. It is a committee that came out of the faculty senate to think about curricular and other types of programming. It just began actually, and so we've only had our first set of meetings, and to me it's been very, very productive. As we're now advertising for a new vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion, that committee of course is a volunteer to help us along the way to do that there.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, that's where most of the input comes, but of course it's a national conversation. We all know what the issues are. For those of us who have been in higher administration for a while, we know exactly what the challenges are. It's not just a matter of waving the wand and say, "We would like to hire X, Y, and Z." It's a matter of helping to create a pipeline to put individuals who are underrepresented over the years, for years into that pipeline, giving them the opportunity of course to rise within the academy and become candidates across the board.
Ron Liebowitz:
So, on the student side, we've been doing this for a while. We've had the Posse Foundation, Posse program, as many of you probably heard of, but even before that we have the Transitional Year Program, which started in the late '60s. We have the Martin Luther King scholarship program. We have a whole assortment of programs that help us increase our diversity. One area that we do get criticized, and the one area that the whole academy is wrestling with, and we are too at Brandeis, is the idea of intellectual diversity. There are questions about whether or not students are getting the type of intellectual diversity, which is really difficult in today's political climate because of the polarization of political views. It's very difficult these days to have conversations and then to have conversations in an environment that is so heavily weighted, or perceived to be so heavily weighted one way, makes it all the more difficult. But we will take this up as well in our committee on DEI, our board committee and also on our faculty committee and see how much progress we can make there.
Lewis Brooks:
Thanks Ron. Thank you.