From my vantage point in the science complex, the first option (retreating to a smaller fine liberal arts college) doesn’t seem like a winning proposition. We would lose a large fraction of our “world-class” scientists by doing so, and throw away the built-up prestige from the last 30 years. I think it’s got to be option two if you want the science faculty on board.

I’ve made some very pointed comments elsewhere about the attitude of the university in blithely announcing 50% cuts in graduate admissions (which may not even be uniformly true), so I won’t go into that here. If we want to be a world-class university (and I hope we do), we need to make sure that we find a financial model that allows us to continue to recruit top-caliber Ph.D. students and postdocs. To an extent, the science departments have a model based on federal research and training grants. I don’t honestly know how well that can be translated to other departments.

You’re raising a series of important questions.

The most important point you make relates to size. Brandeis decided to try something with very few precedents – to become a ‘liberal arts university,’ as our administration likes to say. That meant keeping the undergraduate student body quite small (3,233 students) while supporting a world-class graduate school. (I’m not referring to Heller or IBS, which are largely self-sufficient, and whose faculties are largely unrelated; I’m talking about GSAS.) There’s a reason that almost no other schools have pursued this model. The classic means of climbing through the rankings is to (a) radically expand the size of the undergraduate tuition-paying population while charging ever more (b) use the proceeds to hire star faculty members (c) use those faculty members to lure top graduate students, who actually do the bulk of the teaching and (d) use the resultant prestige to increase fundraising and support the whole thing. That’s the model used by schools like BU and NYU to climb from regional commuter schools to world-class universities.

Brandeis has eschewed this model in two separate ways. It’s kept its student-body very small, and still has faculty carry the vast bulk of the teaching load. It also helped that in the sciences, most grad students were grant-funded; that not every department had a graduate program; and that the programs that existed were quite small. The problem is that Brandeis has, apparently, never been able to balance its budget this way. It’s been covering a substantial hole with annual pledges. And that shouldn’t be surprising – why should we have been able to pull it off, if no one else has?

That’s the real crisis facing Brandeis. It recruited a faculty that wanted to teach at a university; it suddenly finds itself only able to support a liberal arts college.

So what’s next? Raiding the Rose or the Endowment only gets you so far – it plugs the short-term hole, but doesn’t solve the long-term imbalances. It’s going to be necessary to generate significant short-term revenue and restructure the education. That’s why the more controversial options are on the table.

It’s a branching point. Unfortunately, the university’s decision making processes are still paralyzed, and it appears to be pursuing two mutually-exclusive strategies at the same time. The first strategy is to abandon the attempt to be a world-class university with a comprehensive graduate school. That would mean trimming the faculty to reflect the more narrow scope of its responsibilities (10% cut? Check) and eliminating all or most of the existing graduate programs (we’ve cut the number of incoming graduate students for the next two years by half, and the word is that some programs may get the axe by the end of the month). The other strategy involves pursuing something closer to the BU/NYU model – increasing the number of undergraduates (check), seeking to maximize revenue (using, for example, a summer session), and assigning more of the teaching to non-tenure-track faculty and graduate students (check).

So what’s it going to be? A fine liberal arts college? Or a world-class university? If there’s a lesson to this crisis, it’s that Brandeis simply doesn’t have the funding to have it both ways. That’s the fight at the heart of this current crisis. It’s quite clear that the administration hasn’t yet figured out the answer. But it better figure it out soon, because we’re well on our way to the worst of both worlds – a larger and less intimate institution with fewer faculty, which also has fewer graduate students and offers an inferior education.

In the long run, Brandeis is not setting any investment or finance trends–if investors are bullish, Brandeis will be bullish, and they are bearish, Brandeis will be bearish. So for the immediate future, until the markets recover, caution will rule the day. But, there is no reason for Brandeis not to be aggressive in its future growth and development plans. Obviously precautions should be taken–a larger emergency fund for starters–but as long as this institution aspires for more, thenn it should plan that way.