After nearly 15 years of non-profit investigative journalism, the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism shut down last month. Founded in 2004, the institute was the country’s first investigative reporting center based at a university.
The institute had been experiencing financial difficulties for the last two and a half years, according to Provost Lisa Lynch’s announcement of the shutdown in an email to the student body on Dec. 20.
Florence Graves, award-winning journalist and the founder of the Schuster Institute, spoke to The Brandeis Hoot about her work with student research assistants at the institute.
“We’ve had students who are just so bright and so passionate about social justice and our projects and about wanting to do a really great job,” she said. “The students have enabled us to do far more work than we would’ve been able to do if we did not have them,” she continued. “Their enthusiasm has inspired me all of these years.”
The Justice Brandeis Law Project, which is responsible for the exoneration of wrongfully-convicted men including Angel Echavarria and George Perrot, will continue operations until at least the end of the academic year, Lynch announced in the email. It will be housed in the Ethics Center. The offices the Schuster Institute occupies will return to the library.
Graves hopes that the law project will continue. “In terms of the Justice Brandeis Law Project’s work, public defenders and other lawyers representing indigent clients have significantly fewer resources than police and prosecutors. And they have told us that they simply can’t afford to hire professionals to do the kind of deep investigation that is often required to make significant progress on a wrongful conviction that has been standing for 20 or 30 years,” she said. “People who write to us say that we are their last resort.”
Because of the lack of funds, the law project has also suffered. “We’ve had to turn down people whose cases we would’ve taken if we had had the resources,” Graves said. “Which, as you can imagine, is heartbreaking when people have said you’re their last resort.”
The institute provided many students with jobs and mentorships from the time of its opening up until its closure. These students were able to learn from hired staff, and many students with a Journalism minor were able to count their work at the institute toward their minor’s internship requirement.
“Working at Schuster taught me a lot of what I know about investigative journalism,” said Elianna Spitzer ’18, former Managing Editor of The Hoot and research assistant at Schuster. “It gave me a lot of skills that I wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere.”
The center had been slowly winding down to try to preserve the projects and initiatives staff members and fellows worked on, said Graves, in the hopes that the center might receive more funding in donations or grants.
In previous years, the institute had a yearly budget of between $500,000 and $800,000, according to Graves, and about 85 percent of this budget went toward funding staff salaries, Lynch told The Hoot in an email. This past academic year, the budget was reduced to $55,000 to allow projects that were in progress to be completed, and about one-third of that budget was allocated to student wages, wrote Lynch.
The university provided $450,000, mainly to cover staff salaries and expenses made to support facilities, utilities and central administrative costs, Lynch told The Hoot. The funds donated by the university were a substantial portion of the institute’s funding, but if an underlying endowment does not exist, free-standing institutes and centers associated with the university are required to generate their own funding to sustain operations.
In the past year, the center had three full-time staff members along with several student research assistants, said Graves. The number of full-time staff varied on the amount of donations and grants the institute received. The biggest cost to the institute’s budget was people, according to Graves, which includes salaries and other benefits, such as healthcare. The university also took 15 percent of the institute’s budget as an administrative fee.
Many efforts were made to bring in funding and save the institute by senior administration and Florence Graves, the director of the institute. These efforts included outreach to potential donors and foundations.
The biggest source of funding for the institute was the Schuster family, who pledged a $5 million gift that launched the institute in 2004 and helped fund the institute for more than 8 years. The institute also raised funding from other individuals and foundations. The Schuster family is no longer supporting the institute, and fundraising was challenging in part because many potential donors assumed that the institute was funded by Brandeis and the Schusters, said Graves.
“They couldn’t imagine that we needed more money,” said Graves.
Another obstacle to funding the institute was a lack of an endowment, which meant the institute relied on donations and grants. “For many of the centers that have endowments, there’s a little less pressure to be constantly raising funding,” Graves said.
The institute also had to compete with an increasing number of non-profit journalistic institutions all applying for the same pool of funding, said Graves. “And then, when many other non-profits came on the scene, we were all in the same place — knocking on the same foundation’s doors and competing for the same dollars,” she said.
After assessing the feasibility of generating funds necessary to continue operations, Lynch consulted the President, Office of Institutional Advancement, Office of Budget and Finance and the Faculty Senate, and they made the ultimate decision to close the institute.
