With the recent release of Interim President Arthur Levine’s agenda for changing some of our university’s academic standards, including the core requirements and creating task forces for specific areas of study, members of this paper can’t help but wonder if these changes will affect the minds of students or remain more promises of the Brandeis experience that can never quite reach their full potential. Sentiments among Brandeis students continue to trend disproportionately toward negative when it comes to their unfulfilled expectations of the university. While academic missteps are part of the problem, with the extreme list of requirements for science majors and the lack of focus felt by some liberal arts students (just to name a few) there continues to be a lack of acknowledgment for the divisive state of the Brandeis populace and their relationship to the administration. Students can’t be more clear about their dissatisfaction with anything from housing to dining, and yet they never see solutions, or those solutions involve a new Chinese restaurant in The Hive rather than a new meal plan option that would be less lucrative for the university. This paper understands, however, that the university is not prepared to address major issues at this time with its current financial deficits. Entering a climate with a combination of dissatisfied students and a lack of resources, how can an interim president succeed?

Students are not only members of the Brandeis community, but also the global community. We’re affected deeply by things like the California wildfires, by the inauguration of President Trump and by the wars that continue to rage in other countries. When students feel helpless under the weight of the world’s problems and the divisive climate of public discourse, which is only exacerbated in a college campus environment, they look to their college as another home with an academic structure in which to escape. Through it all, students need to feel at home on their campus. They need to feel comfortable in their living spaces, they need to have good and affordable food available to them consistently, and they need to feel like their advocacy can make a real difference in their community. Otherwise, as we see today, the majority of us stop trying and accept our dissatisfaction as a community value. 

This editorial board is cautiously optimistic that President Levine can make some change and is encouraged by the reforms that he’s announced in his most recent email. He shows a degree of concern for the student body, and we hope that he continues to show empathy for the students who feel that their complaints are too often unheard by Brandeis’ administration. We remain sanguine about the prospect that those changes will have a positive effect; however, we feel that President Levine will need to shift his focus to repairing the distrust between Brandeis students and their administration if he wants to create the positive atmosphere for which the Brandeis community has long been yearning.