On Brandeis and the Rose Art Museum…
We take a break from our usual troll through the filings to talk about something that’s been close to my heart this past week: the announcement by my alma mater, Brandeis, that it plans to close the Rose Art Museum later this year. For the past week, I’ve been reading the stories, the statements and the editorials, which have been overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of closing the Rose and selling its amazing collection of post-modern art to the highest bidder. I’ve also had several discussions — mostly via email — but sometimes over the phone, with a Brandeis administrator and several Brandeis trustees, who unanimously supported President Jehuda Reinharz’ decision to close the museum.
And here’s where this ties into what we normally cover here at footnoted: a complacent board and an imperial CEO. They should all be fired for their complete mismanagement of both the decision to close the museum, and, perhaps even more importantly, the amateurish way that the decision has been handled in the media, forever ruining the Brandeis brand. Unfortunately, universities are even less democratic than publicly traded companies.
Even though students and alums have banded together — creating a website, staging a protest, and launching an online petition — in the end, there’s probably little that can be done to save the Rose. It would be interesting to be able to dive through the numbers (and, of course, the footnotes) much the same way you can for publicly traded companies and see what’s really going on here. My hunch — just based on what I’ve seen and heard so far — is that there are a lot of numbers that aren’t quite adding up and Brandeis officials need to come clean. Given Brandeis’ motto — truth even unto its innermost parts — the administration needs to provide a clearer accounting before they sell off important works by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg, to name a few.
To be sure, the financial crisis has probably hit Brandeis harder than some, given Bernard Madoff’s deep ties in the Jewish philanthropic community. One major Brandeis donor — Carl Shapiro — lost millions with Madoff — and the overall climate makes new fund raising very difficult. But based on the numbers that have been made public so far, the endowment fell about 23% last year and is currently at $549 million, it doesn’t seem all that bad, given the current market. Indeed, I think many of us wish we were looking at 23% declines in 2008, myself included.
Once upon a time, when Abbie Hoffman roamed the campus, Brandeis used to be a hotbed of protest. But when I was there, the biggest controversy was about adding pork and shellfish to the dining hall menu. It’s time now for my fellow alums and current students to stand up and raise their voices in opposition to the complete mismanagement we’ve seen at Brandeis over the past few days and call on both the board and Jehuda Reinharz to be shown the door. If we don’t, the value of our very pricey degrees will be worth about as much as the paper they’re printed on.
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February 2nd, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Interesting story. I followed your link to the Board and see 40 Trustees plus 4 Officers. That is a recipe for complacency, but all too common in Universities and non profits.
While acknowledging major donors through a leadership title is important, if they cannot commit the time to attend and be actively involved in the Board they should be on some type of honorary board, or other designation. I have zero insight into this matter and the Brandeis Board beyond what I have read here, but I would be willing to bet big $ that Board attendance at meetings is <50%.
It is very hard to get anything done with more than 12 people, and diluting the board with huge numbers does give the CEO a lot of opportunity to divide and conquer.
Lastly, interesting that Gershon Kekst is Vice Chairman. If anyone should be sensitive to PR issues, and willing to help with them, it should be him.
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Thanks, JR, for bringing Kekst to my attention. I totally missed that connection when I looked at the names on the board. For those unfamiliar, Kekst & Co. is a major PR firm that represents very large companies and major dealmakers. Gershon Kekst is Brandeis’ Vice Chairman. Clearly Kekst wasn’t giving PR advice to Brandeis here.
February 2nd, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Michelle –
I don’t know if you’re a public radio listener but here is a link to an interview w/ Jehuda Reinharz that was on NPR last week. The sale has been covered by NPR fairly well.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99974995
February 2nd, 2009 at 6:54 pm
@ Caleb: Thanks for the link to the NPR interview. I did hear it last week, but was in my car at the time so I just listened again and it hasn’t changed my opinion. I still think this is a bad decision that wasn’t well thought out. For anyone who knows about finances and the current conditions of the market, Reinharz’ arguments sound hollow at best. It still sounds like a decision was made, the board rubber-stamped it, and the press release was sent out — with little thought taken during each step.
February 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Note that the Chair of the Board is employed by Gordon Brothers, one of the country’s largest retail liquidators. Jehuda’s decision wasn’t a hard sell in that camp. Wonder who gets a referral fee to the auction house?
February 4th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Your attack on president Reinharz and the Brandeis Board is both ill-informed and unhelpful. If you take the time to carefully read all of the available information in the press and the President’s statements to the community over the past 6 months, you would understand that this decision was arrived at with great distaste and very reluctantly.
Because of the collapse of the stock market, Brandeis, like every other university in the country that depends on endowment, faces a severe financial crunch that will not end this year or next no matter how well the market performs. No gains, means no income. As a young university (50% of alumni graduated after 1987), Brandeis simply does not have the financial resources that its peers have. You can’t spend money that isn’t there.
A plan has been developed to solve these problems that includes 10% reductions in faculty size, a 12% increase in the size of the student body, and (regretably) closure of the Rose and the sale of some of the art it houses. (You might be interested to note that approximately 12,000 people visit the Rose each year including students, and that very little of the collection is ever seen for lack of facilities. Facilities that donors have been unwilling to expand.)
There is certainly a rational argument to be made that the Rose should not be closed, but then I challange anyone making it to propose alternative changes to Brandeis that will solve the financial problems without doing even greater damage to Brandeis and to the degrees it has conferred (How does a 30% reduction in faculty size, or the closure of the Graduate School sound?) The loss of the Rose would be a blow to the community. But the treality is that the Rose Museum, no matter how remarkable it’s collection, is not part of the core mission of the university. Indeed, closure of the Rose creates opportunities to provide fine arts studio and gallery space to students who desperately need it. Space that donors have been unwilling to fund over the past 8 years of the Campaign for Brandeis.
February 4th, 2009 at 10:48 am
@Michael: You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but you ought to identify yourself as a Brandeis administrator — something I found after a two-second search: Executive Assistant to Sr. Vice President Institutional Advancement, Brandeis University (2001 – ).
Indeed, this just further demonstrates my point: Brandeis did not anticipate the media reaction over the news of closing the Rose and they continue to mangle the response, more than a week later. Even with a top-flight PR person serving as the school’s Vice Chairman.
As for your comments, the fact remains that Brandeis has not exactly been open and provided the numbers that people need to really figure out what’s going on. Send me the numbers — I’d love to see them! I also doubt that insulting donors by saying they have been unwilling to fund the situation isn’t particularly helpful.
February 4th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Thanks for pointing out my omission, it was quite unintentional, but the truth is that I write only on my own behalf here, expressing my own feelings, and I do not speak for the University or any of its employees. You should also note that I made no effor to defend the process, there is plenty there to criticize. My only intent was to point to the challenging situation faced by the university and to suggest that the type of “insulting” headline used in your column was not useful if the goal is to find a course through these challenges. Nor am I insulting donors, simply pointing out that, with 2 very generous exceptions, the broader Brandeis family has not seen fit to support this portion of the campaign, despite 7 years of effort on the part of Faculty, volunteers and staff.
Brandeis is a precious jewel in the higher education landscape of American Education. One of the few universities that not only claims a broad and inspiring mission but actually works very hard to fullfill that mission. There is no campus I know of where social justice and the desire to make a better world have such a tangible presence, as I’m sure you know from experience.
I am not a Brandeis alum, nor am I Jewish, but I care much more for this university than any others I have been affiliated with (U of Chicago, Boston U. and Harvard), and I see the potential tragedy here not in the closing of the Rose, as sad as that will be, but in the possibility that the fate of the Rose might overshadow the fate of Brandeis.
Rather than critiquing my status with the university, why not address the underlying question I posed: If not the Rose, then what?
February 5th, 2009 at 9:10 am
@ Michael: Brandeis is indeed a precious jewel, which is why what’s happened over the past week has been so disturbing to alums like me. To watch Brandeis’ name — the Brandeis brand, so to speak — be dragged through the mud for the past 10 days has been very disturbing, and quite frankly it’s hard to imagine how the school will recover from that.
Think about it this way: if you were a parent of a high school senior who was considering where to spend that $200K (give or take) to educate your son or daughter, would you choose the school that’’s received so much negative attention and whose top administrator — President Reinharz — is repeatedly changing his story?
So while the headline may have been “insulting” to you, it wasn’t meant to be. While it still happens all too infrequently, in the corporate world, when the CEO and board screw up — and that’s a very generous assessment here — undoubtedly shareholders start calling for heads to roll. Why has Reinharz repeatedly changed his story? Where was the type of media advice that Kekst normally provides to his paying clients?
As for the numbers, Brandeis needs to put them out there. With so many talented alums in finance, perhaps one of them — or a group of them working together — can find the solution that clearly eludes the board. But without those numbers, all we have to go on is media reports.
February 6th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
The selling off of art at Brandeis is symbolic of what is wrong with America. Hopefully the economy starts to turn around and Brandeis can use this infamy and media attention to bring about a resurgence of interest in art in their environment.
Check out the photomontage dedicated to the Rose at http://www.castagnstudio.com.