As Brandeis’ interim president arrived on campus, The Hoot had the chance to speak to both Interim President Arthur Levine ’70 and Director of Presidential Communications Carolyn R. Assa about the new administration’s plans for Brandeis. President Levine has worked at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as President Emeritus and a Senior Fellow, as President Emeritus of the Columbia University Teachers College and as a Distinguished Scholar of Higher Education at the New York University. Notably, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Brandeis before moving to the University of Buffalo to complete his PhD in sociology. Presidential Communications Director Assa has also worked as the Director of Communications at the Harvard University Office for Sustainability and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and has also held several other communications leadership positions.
Where would you like Brandeis to be headed? How do you view STEM fitting into the university’s structure?
Arthur Levine: When I was at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, one of the things that I did was I had a program for whole states. I’d started with the governor of the state, then I’d line up the legislature, then I’d line up accreditors, universities, school systems and funders. What I wanted to do was prepare STEM teachers for high need schools; get really top people who came out of top universities to agree to teach in high need schools. So in Indiana, for example, I got maybe six universities to sign up. They each had to change their teacher education program in order to qualify to be in this program; they had to change it profoundly. We gave them all money and they had to match a little money, and then we gave fellowships to the students. The end result is that we got hundreds of high quality STEM teachers. When our program was done, which was seven years, the state legislature decided they wanted to do it. I’m a big proponent of STEM. For me, what really matters is … the liberal [arts]. I think the undergraduate college is terribly important. The notion of having an elite research university is an unusual combination with [a] liberal arts college. What makes it unique is if we were to go to the University of Michigan, what would happen is that graduate school would overshadow and set the priorities for the university. That doesn’t happen here. What happens is we have this incredible union in which both sides, the research university and the undergraduate college, benefit from the association and neither loses its integrity. I want to maintain that; that’s really important to me.
How does sustainability fit into your vision of Brandeis?
AL: Sustainability’s got to fit into everybody’s vision of everything. The fact of the matter is we’re living in a world and we’re destroying it.
How do you plan to face the financial headwinds facing Brandeis?
AL: Which is when the board appointed me, they didn’t assign me the job of making sure the trains don’t fall off the tracks. The job they gave me was to try to move the university forward and develop a plan for its future with the community. Beyond that, the goal was “can we define the kind of president we need?” So I’m gonna ask the university to do that with me as well. In terms of that plan, most of the focus has been on cutting. I don’t think Brandeis’ problem is really expenditures. There are some things that we probably ought to cut back on, but I think our problem is really revenues. For me, the two biggest issues are going to be enrollment and fundraising. But let’s say we’re successful in both those realms. The reality is that higher education is currently undergoing a transformation where we’re all facing, every college and university in the country … demographic shifts. We’re facing the movement from an industrial to a knowledge economy. We’re facing the move from analog to digital technology. Every college is going to be affected by that. 20% are gonna close. Community colleges and regional publics will be disrupted. What about Brandeis? Brandeis can’t stay where it is. No university can stay where it is, because the world is changing. We need to modernize to move into a global digital knowledge economy. At the moment what’s happening is research universities have been slow to do that. There are few around the country that have done that: Arizona State, Northeastern. We need to lead. We need to lead as a small research university developing what higher education needs to be for the decades ahead. The space is wide open and we have to do that. We have to for our good, for the good of higher education.
Carolyn Assa: I was just having a conversation with somebody on staff earlier today about how [education must change] just as the newspaper industry and media has had to change over the years. Even though for centuries people counted on a newspaper every day for information, information comes [in] different ways, so I think it’s the same with education. When you see what Southern New Hampshire University has done and [that] Harvard has a really good extension school [which] has become a really good go-to online school, a number of schools have different types of certificate programs so you can get stackable certificates as opposed to committing to a four-year or a longer program.
AL: What I want to do is I want to spend the next two and a half months just talking to the community. At the end of that two and a half months, I want to come back and tell you what you told me.
What lessons from your book, “The Great Upheaval”, do you think apply to Brandeis?
AL: Scott [van Pelt] and I ended up having about 70 different campus visits since the book came out. I got a real bird’s eye view a[t] the post-pandemic university, the things they’re doing, the things they’re not doing, what works and what doesn’t work. That’s one of the reasons it’s just so important to involve the community in where we go: to make sure that we’re all on the same page. Everybody doesn’t have to agree, but we need some consensus about where we’re going. … The reality is, nobody would bring me into a university that was in perfect condition, going from “A” to “A+”. I’d ruin it, I’d want to change it. I’m typically invited to institutions that are going through hard times, and my job is to help them end the hard times and have good times. So I wanna have some good times here.
You mentioned that cutting expenditures may not be the best way forward. But, as cuts have been made, it seems as though arts at Brandeis have been affected significantly. Is there any more specificity you can lend to your thoughts on balancing STEM and the arts at Brandeis?
AL: I wrote a book years ago. It was called “Quest for Common Learning,” and it’s about the history of general education at universities. Gen-Ed [General Education] has historically been the spare room where you shove everything. Let’s see, political science 718A isn’t getting students, so let’s make that a Gen-Ed requirement or a Gen-Ed option. So I said there were three languages people needed to learn to speak. One was words, one was numbers … and the third was the arts. … People have to be able to understand all three of those languages.
