I don’t have a car on campus, but many of my friends do, and I drive with them into Waltham fairly frequently. Clearly, it’s a driver’s responsibility to learn the local regulations, but if you’re only at Brandeis for parts of a few years and you rarely go into the city, it can be hard to keep track of the legal minutiae. So credit should go to Mr. Callahan and the Department of Public Safety for doing their best to help students. This e-mail is a small act, but it’s one less thing people will have to worry about, and it could save a Brandeis student a hefty fine.

Also, thanks to Captain Donald M. Feeney and the Waltham Police Department for reaching out to the Brandeis community. It would be only too easy for the city to leave students to their own devices and simply collect ticket money from Waltham’s most transient residents. Instead, they took the initiative to inform us, and the whole community will hopefully run that much more smoothly because of it.

Waltham drivers, do your part by taking a glance at the restrictions and keeping them in mind as you drive around the city. No one wants a ticket, but more generally, it’s a sign of good citizenship towards a city that always welcomes Brandeis students with open arms.

The following message is from the Waltham Police Department

This memo is to alert students of the parking regulations in the City of Waltham that may not be known to all campus personnel who park a vehicle in Waltham.

· NO PARKING ANYTIME 2:00 AM TO 6:00 AM UNLESS OTHERWISE POSTED

· NO OVER 24 HOUR PARKING ON ANY STREET

· NO PARKING ON ANY STREET DURING A DECLARED SNOW EMERGENCY

All Night Parking is defined as a vehicle that parks on a public street anytime between the hours of 2:00am and 6:00am. Many streets are posted and All Night Parking is allowed on ONE SIDE ONLY.

A vehicle that is parked for 24 consecutive hours, on a public way, is subject to a parking ticket and may be towed, at the owner’s expense. Vehicles parked on a Private Way may be towed by the owner of the property, as a trespasser.

A Snow Emergency exists when 2 inches of snow has fallen. Snow Emergencies will be announced on Radio & Television. In addition, the Waltham Cable System will have an announcement declaring when the parking ban is in effect.

Donald M. Feeney
Captain of Police
Community Services Division

The Certified Green Room program is run by the Campus Sustainability Initiative as a way to get more students thinking — and living — in an environmentally conscious manner. To sign up, you simply need to choose 15 green pledges from a list of 25, and put them to action in your daily life at Brandeis. The pledges are simple, such as “I bike with my own bike or ‘DeisBikes” and “I use reusable shopping bags”; you probably follow many of them already.

Why is it important to sign up? For starters, getting your room certified automatically puts you in a weekly raffle to win one of several useful prizes — we’ve already given away smart power strips and solar-powered chargers. If you’re certifying your room for the second year in a row, you’ll also receive a free travel mug. More importantly, however, getting Green Certified is a reminder to stay eco-friendly and a declaration that you care about living sustainably.

So get yourself certified right now! It’s quick, painless, and open to all Brandeis students (even if you’re living off-campus). The College Sustainability Report Card gives us an A in Student Involvement — let’s keep leading the way to a greener future.

Brandeis is far from the only campus to feature bike-sharing — in fact, a recent USA Today article shows that we’re part of a growing movement across the country. Nearly 90 American universities have adopted similar programs, many that dwarf our small 12 bike fleet. My favorite:

In 2008, faced with a parking crisis, the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, raised parking permit fees and began to give away free bikes to freshman students who promised not to bring cars to campus, university spokeswoman Kathleen Taggersell says.

Since then, the university has given out 530 bikes and, as a direct result of the program, turned a 95-space parking lot into a basketball court with a river-view tent for university events, Taggersell says.

Maybe we don’t have the money to do that now, but coupling free bicycles with a increase in parking fees would be a simple and very effective carbon tax that I think the majority of the student body would support.

The Drury University program also jumped out at me, particularly because of how it’s funded. The Drury student body agreed to pay a sustainability fee of $20 per year, much like the Brandeis Sustainability Fund we voted for last year. We already have bike-sharing, but Drury shows that this relatively minor contribution can go towards green initiatives that benefit the entire community.

Speaking of the BSF, the deadline to apply for funding is October 12th, so if you’ve got that awesome idea you’d love to see become reality, check out the BSF website for application instructions. Environmentalism doesn’t have to be chore; it can be as easy as riding a bike.

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Peretz published these vile words in a September 4th column about American attitudes towards Muslims. This is the most shocking passage, but the whole thing is worth reading, if you can stomach it. Basically, Peretz posits that, despite polling evidence to the contrary, there is a vast reservoir of anti-Muslim sentiment among Americans. Furthermore, this hatred is completely justifiable because Muslims apparently do not care about the terrorist actions carried out by the fanatical fringes of their faith community. The article is one of the most disgusting pieces of writing I’ve seen from a supposedly serious journalistic source.

Unfortunately, it’s also par for the course for Peretz, who has made bigotry a cornerstone of his career as a journalist. Earlier this year, he gave us this gem while writing about the War in Iraq:

Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

In another column, he informs us that:

…Palestine will be a wretched society, cruel, belligerent, intolerant, fearing, with no real justice (or justice system), and no internal peace.

To me, Peretz’s connection with Brandeis is an embarrassment, not a point of pride. Using his name to promote Brandeis is a betrayal of our values and can only serve to repel the type of student that we should be trying to attract. However, this bond also gives us the unique opportunity to call out Peretz from his home, to join together as a community and forcefully reject his brand of demagoguery. That’s why members of the Brandeis community are circulating a petition and calling for a public apology from Peretz. Visit www.fromBrandeistoMarty.com and add your voice; if we get 500 signatures, we’ll send it to the New Republic and demand that Peretz retract his call to hate.

Our university was founded to combat persecution against an underpowered religious minority. Marty Peretz may not appreciate what that responsibility means, but most of us do. Sign the petition; say no to Marty, and yes to Brandeis.

Imagine, if you will, Brandeis about a year from now.

The campus thrives with good-hearted students, all who are, in various ways, working hard to make the world a better place. A year ago, they barely knew each other, now they clasp hands as brothers and sisters when they pass each other on the roads and hallways of Brandeis.

Imagine Fred Lawrence, the new President, only a semester into his tenure, taking students seriously and treating them as equals ,making sure to consult students on every major decision. Under his tenure, social justice is not a buzzword used to generate fuzzy feelings, nor is it an adjective tacked on to every new faculty or administration initiative. Yes! Imagine a Brandeis where the term Social Justice is a clarion call to action!

Imagine a Brandeis that takes that core value seriously, a Brandeis that prepares its citizens to strive for a better future, a Brandeis that has given students the tools, skills, and connections they need to make our world a better place.

Imagine a Brandeis where changemakers of all stripes – social entrepreneurs, budding organizers, the left, the religious, the artists, and everyone else – all of them celebrating each other’s successes, attending each other’s parties, and learning trusting, growing, laughing with each other.

In this future, Brandeis alumni will visit, and pass on the torch to the next generation of changemakers. Social Justice Activists from across the land will flock to Brandeis to train, inspire, and hire these budding students.

Imagine this Brandeis. Seize this vision.

It can happen. With your help, it will happen.

We at the Change Agency believe in our hearts that this future is worth investing in. We are working night and day to make this vision happen because we want to be citizens of a Brandeis that inspires us, not just customers of a Brandeis that teaches us.

The Elaine and George Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism is Brandeis’s vehicle for restoring the power of a truly free press.  The Institute will celebrate it’s birthday next month, marking six years as the nation’s first investigative reporting center housed at a university.  Its directors are well aware of the trials facing the news industry; the Institute’s website states that it was founded “to help fill the void in high-quality public interest and investigative journalism—and to counter the increasing corporate control of what Americans read, see, and hear.”  As technological advances change the way we access news, it’s important that the voids that traditional news outlets leave are filled with well-trained, ambitious muckrakers.  Rather than killing investigative journalism, the online revolution can be a restorative purge — and the Schuster Institute puts Brandeis at its forefront.

Just like the University, the Schuster Institute is built around the pillar of a commitment to social justice.  Its major projects involve exposing governmental and corporate abuses, freeing wrongly-incarcerated prisoners, and uncovering gender inequalities in society.  While it’s important that they avoid bias, journalists can maintain objectivity without losing their conscience, much like biologists who employ the scientific method while developing medications.  I’ve always considered the pursuit of truth to be a desirable end in it’s own right, but it can also be the means to building a better society — perhaps our most important goal as a species.

In short, I believe that journalism has the potential to do almost limitless good in the world, and I’m proud that Brandeis approaches it with such seriousness and humanity.  But the news is only useful if it reaches people and inspires them to action, and I’d like to help in whatever way I can.  So Innermost Parts is going to start an effort to publicize Schuster Institute reports on campus and explore ways that Brandeis’s awesome activist clubs can work to address the issues they raise.  You can check out the Institute’s archives here, and check here for opportunities to work directly with the Institute.

Therefore, it’s disheartening to hear of the double whammy that mental health patients have suffered as a result of the recession.  A new study from Brandeis’s Dominic Hodgkin reports that state and local mental health services have been substantially cut in the past few years; meanwhile, the difficulties of living in a recession economy have caused demand for mental health services to increase.  These effects have been seen on a global as well as national scale.

If all this seems self-evident (of course recessions lead to spending cuts!), then check out the press release for more details or read Hodgkin’s full study in the International Journal of Mental Health.  While the conclusions are grim, it’s always great to see Brandeis researchers contributing to understanding global issues, and I hope that Hodgkin can play a small role in finding a solution to the mental health crisis.

The Boston Herald reports that Brandeis has just signed a contract with Sotheby’s, a famous auction house, to explore options for raising funds by leasing artwork from the Rose.  Does that mean we’ve finally dodged the bullet of selling off the collection it took us decades to acquire?

The vote by Reinharz and Brandeis trustees Jan. 26, 2009, to sell the art remains in force. Asked whether selling the art remains a possibility for the Waltham-based university, [Brandeis spokesman Andrew] Gully said: “Yes, because the vote remains. But the intent is clearly at this point to explore nonsale options. Clearly you wouldn’t be selling anything while we were exploring those options.”

Why are we still considering selling artwork?  Didn’t we hear in March that the University had already developed a plan to balance its operating budget by 2014?  Board of Trustees Chair Malcolm Sherman certainly seems to think so.  In a letter to the Herald published on July 19th, Sherman reaffirms the 2014 plan and assigns a different purpose to the potential art transactions:

Now we are exploring options we hope will allow the university to retain ownership of the Rose collection while generating funds for: financial aid; state-of-the-art academic, research and residential facilities; faculty compensation that long ensure excellence in teaching.

Sherman’s letter is disingenuous from the beginning.  He claims that the original Herald story “presents an unfair picture of the university’s fiscal situation”, then goes on to recite the exact same facts that the article mentioned.  The question that Sherman needs to answer is: Has the value of artwork from the Rose been calculated as part of our plan to balance our operating budget or relieve our structural deficit?  If the answer is yes, than Brandeis’s financial solvency is based on leases or sales in an uncertain market that may be illegal anyway.  Our financial future is much more shaky than the administration or Board of Trustees would have us believe, and it is really Sherman and Jehuda Reinharz who are guilty of stretching the truth, not only to the Herald but to the entire Brandeis community.  If the answer is no, then our continued attempts to seek profit from art prove that we’re just as poor caretakers as we’ve been accused of, and no rational art aficionado should have any reason to give us so much as a preschool watercolor painting ever again.

Art expert Raymond Liddell sure isn’t buying what Sherman and Gully are selling.  In his letter to the Herald from July 21st, the former museum administrator and university professor raises some tough questions:

The Rose Art Museum story gets curiouser and curiouser (“Thorny situation for Rose Museum,” July 11). It’s clear that Brandeis has not disavowed its decision to sell the Rose collection which has made it a pariah. It’s clear that Brandeis is trying to buy time and hoping the story will go away. It won’t. It’s not clear why Sotheby’s, whose primary business is selling art, is involved. It’s not clear what sort of museum Brandeis envisions for the future without a director. If it walks and talks like a duck . . .

Liddell has the credentials to know what he’s talking about (and not only because he borrows the language I used to describe Brandeis last week).  He clearly believes that Brandeis is already planning on selling artwork or even completely getting rid of the Rose, and I have to admit he makes a persuasive case.  The worst part for Brandeis is that the people who are suing us think so too:

“Lending art is something museum directors do, and Brandeis fired theirs,” said Jonathan Lee, chairman of the Rose Board of Overseers, who filed suit July 27, 2009, to block the initial sell-off plan. “So it seems a little wacky to have a sales agent do this for you. The kind of revenue expected for lending art is quite small.”

Meryl Rose, representing the Rose family in the lawsuit, said: “Well, it’s ridiculous. It’s just obfuscation so people will think they’re not selling art. But they haven’t taken that off the table.”

Maybe if we sell enough art, we’ll eventually be able to recoup our legal fees!

Last year, a report from a university committee prompted me to write the following:

“BRANDEIS IS NOT CLOSING THE ROSE AND SELLING ALL THE ARTWORK.” Words and italics from them, bold and caps from yours truly.  If you’re going to take anything from the interim report of the Future of the Rose Committee, make it that.  We’ve sat and listened as the Rose first was closed, then open for the semester, then for part of the summer, then the whole summer, then open indefinitely.  Finally, we have an absolutely definitive statement from a body that’s spent lots of time researching this very issue that the Rose is not going anywhere, and, in fact, that we’re bound by donor agreements to keep the Rose Art Museum open by that very name.

After hearing so much spin and backtracking over the course of just that one semester, I now realize I was naive to take any statement on the future of the Rose at face value.  I’d say that it’s time for the University to be completely forthright with us, with the donors, and with the public on the future of the Museum, but even if they did tell the full truth, how could we believe them?  We’ve spent such a long time with last week’s innuendo becoming next week’s policy that I’m not even sure it’s worth trying to ask for answers anymore.  My only advice those concerned about the Rose’s future is to visit the Museum and to do it as soon as possible.  You don’t know when your last chance will come.

That’s right.  Brandeis’s Great Place is the very spot the Board of Trustees wanted to get rid of.  And how many frickin’ buildings does Carl Shapiro have to buy before he gets his own Great Place?

Waltham is actually very well represented on the list; in addition to the Rose, four other Waltham sites earned recognition.  They are:

• Gore Place — The “Monticello of the North”, once home to former Massachusetts Governor Christopher Gore and currently hosting an active farm.
• Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation — Located in what were the engine and boiler rooms of Francis Cabot Lowell’s textile factory, which was named the fourth most important development to shape America by Life magazine in 1976.
• The Robert Treat Paine Estate — Also known as Stonehurst, a house designed by famous architects Henry Hobson Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted that serves as one of the earliest examples of modern architecture.
• The Lyman Estate — Built in 1793 by a Boston merchant, now includes a greenhouse complex that contains exotic plants from around the world.

I’ve often heard that the typical Brandeis student doesn’t have much connection to the Waltham community (the awesome work of the Waltham Group and Clubs in Service program notwithstanding).  I know I don’t; I’ve hardly seen any of Waltham besides the BranVan route.  So I’m going to take this as an opportunity to get acquainted with some of the local history and culture.  Over the next semester, I want to arrange trips to see each of our five honorees (including a walk-through of the Rose), and I hope anyone who’s interested will join me.  Each site is open to the public (a condition of being named on the list), and each is less than three-and-a-half miles from the Brandeis campus — we’ll make them bike trips.

If anyone has any other great ideas for exploring Waltham, share them in the comments.  If you want to help plan these trips, or just want to know when they’re scheduled, send me an e-mail at athu...@brandeis.edu.

Searches for “Lawrence, Frederick” and “Lawrence, Fred” on OpenSecrets.org revealed three contributions from an individual by that name employed at Boston University during the period in which President-designate Lawrence worked there (1988-2005).  I think it’s safe to say that they’re all from the guy we’re looking for, particularly since one of them specifies the donor as a “Professor of Law”.  They are:

• $250 on 7/27/92 to Bill Clinton (D)
• $2,000 on 9/20/00 to DNC Services Corp (D)
• $500 on 10/27/04 to DNC Services Corp (D)

It looks like Lawrence isn’t a major political donor, but he’s batting 1.000 for Team Blue so far.  It’s hard to read anything into his current six year period of inactivity; not only has he done that before, but I can think of plenty of reasons why the head of a law school in Washington, D.C. might want to remain publicly neutral on questions of politics.

I have to admit that I find it comforting to know that Lawrence’s sympathies appear to lean Democratic.  It supports my hope that he’ll pursue strong progressive policies for the University, and it could signify that the run of Democratic luminaries that Brandeis has brought to speak while I’ve been here (Bill Clinton, Carl Levin, Howard Dean etc.) will continue with institutional support.

[C]ells that are showing the very earliest signs of cancer start to have errors in the DNA replication process. To fix this, the cells use a number of methods to repair the damage, one of which is known as gene conversion.

Gene conversion repairs the break in the DNA strand by using an almost identical sequence from elsewhere in the cell’s DNA, providing a template from which the original strand can be reconstructed. Although this was once thought to be a mostly error-free process, the new study actually suggests it leads to a far greater number – about 1,400 times the usual amount – of DNA mutations than would otherwise be expected. Once these mutations affect the various genes that provide the cell’s ability to control its own growth, the cell quickly becomes cancerous.

Thus, tumors form where there was once healthy tissue.  Understanding this process is the first step in determining how to correct it and slow the rate at which healthy cells become cancerous.  Congratulations to Dr. Haber and to Wade and Minlee for publishing this important study and for working to ease the pain and suffering of so many people.  As an undergraduate, I find it easy to forget that Brandeis is a research institution as well as a school.  It’s gratifying to remember that so much positive work is being done at our university.

The announcement last year that Brandeis University planned to sell its noted, 6,000-piece collection of modern art stunned and angered museum officials around the world. The university said it needed money for its other operations. But to the art world, the plan represented a rejection of the idea that nonprofit institutions do not sell art from their museums except as a means to expand their collections.

As if you really had to ask…

Now, museums will need evidence of greater levels of commitment from their parent organizations to gain accreditation, particularly when it comes to withholding artwork from their pool of disposable assets.  This really puts into perspective what the Board of Trustees did: not just a major faux pas, but something so uniquely terrible in the art community that the rules have to be changed to account for it.

[New York Times columnist Nicholas] Kristof also brings up Peter Beinart’s recent article in The New York Review of Books “exploring the way young Jews in America feel much less identification with Israel than their elders did. Mr. Beinart noted that even the student senate at Brandeis University, which has strong Jewish ties, rejected a resolution commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel.” Brandeis, of course, was also where a student group unsuccessfully tried to get the university to rescind a speaking invitation to Israel’s Ambassador Michael Oren.

As Bogart said in “Casablanca,” “I wouldn’t bring up Paris, if I were you. It’s bad salesmanship.” But since Kristof brings up Brandeis, let it be said — as Kristof did not — that while many young Jews at Brandeis did want to distance themselves from Israel, at 51 other universities in 30 different states, reported JTA (May 21), one student president after another was inviting Israel’s ambassador to speak at their campus.

The letter to Oren, said JTA, was initiated by Brandon Carroll at Virginia Tech and Wyatt Smith at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, in response to disruptions Oren faced at the University of California-Irvine and the protests at Brandeis.

Such anti-Israel behavior “is absurd and offensive,” said the letter.  “Please be assured that these individuals do not remotely represent American college students or mainstream campus leaders.”

Basically, Mark says that although Jews at Brandeis might be moving away from support of Israel, pro-Israel sentiment is still prevalent elsewhere.

Last month, a friend of mine at Yale shocked me by saying out of the blue, “I hear your Student Union rejected a birthday resolution for Israel”.  Apparently, this relatively minor campus controversy somehow made a New York Times article three years later.  It’s very weird to hear something I was peripherally involved in used to prove a point on such a national scale, and it’s particularly disheartening to find it stripped of its context to say something that it shouldn’t.

Then again, I can’t blame Beinart, Kristof, or Mark for failing to grasp the nuances of Brandeis Union politics.  Their topics are far broader than our petty struggles; how can they be bothered to research the actual questions that were raised during the birthday resolution debate?  If I were in their place, I’d think that the resolution’s failure said much more about Brandeis’s waning support for Israel than it actually does.

It’s pretty obvious that anything related to Israel that happens at Brandeis will be viewed under a harsh microscope and analyzed as a metric of what young American Jews think about the Middle East conflict.  Therefore, should people on campus stop protesting events like the Oren speech for fear of sending the wrong message?

Of course not.  In both of the aforementioned cases, people weren’t actually protesting Israel or its policies.  They were protesting the intrusion of Israeli politics in inappropriate venues, namely the Union Senate and the commencement ceremony.  The real fault lies with those who injected Israel into these venues in the first place.  My friend Sahar is one of the most passionate Israeli citizens and supporters that I know, but he still drew the very real distinction between his patriotic sentiments and his opposition to Oren’s commencement appearance.  Unfortunately, his advocacy can now be misinterpreted as another blow against Israel from the very school that should be supporting it most fervently.  Shame on those who would force him into the false duality of choosing between his homeland and his principles.

The worst part is that those who try to make support for Israel a part of everyday campus are only hurting their own cause.  Jehuda Reinharz should be smart enough to know that appointing a divisive figure like Oren as a commencement speaker was bound to draw some level of controversy.  And he should be smart enough to know that Israel’s critics would wield that opposition as a cudgel to prove that Jews were abandoning Israel even at America’s foremost Jewish university.

There’s enough room at Brandeis for everyone to advocate and work for their own political causes, whatever they may be.  But when the line separating appropriate advocacy and invasion of campus life is crossed, everyone loses.  The media can’t be expected to get every detail of our campus life correct.  Let’s not make it easy for them to caricature us.

Though I never hear it mentioned on campus, our connection with the best-selling memoir in U.S. history might be our foremost claim to fame in the popular imagination.  I read the book in high school, but I didn’t make the Brandeis connection until after I had chosen to go there.  Now that I think about it, however, it’s pretty neat to have one of our former professors become the new model for the aging intellectual passing on his wisdom on his deathbed and reflecting on a life filled with simple pleasures.  Morrie Schwartz died in 1995; many of our current professors were probably his colleagues and friends.  It must have been surprising to see Professor Schwartz find such widespread fame posthumously, and it must be gratifying to them that his principles have touched millions of lives.

Admittedly, Tuesdays with Morrie is a little trite and cliched at times, and though it’s a pleasant read, it’s not exactly looked upon as a cornerstone of literature (like most mega-sellers aren’t).  It’s definitely not the kind of book that usually draws my attention.  I think I’m going to read it again though, and while I’m mainly interested in Mitch Albom’s Brandeis experience, I can’t help but think that we could all use a little wisdom from a fellow Brandeisian.

An article on Lawrence in the Jewish Week sheds light on what policies he’ll pursue when he finally takes the reigns before the spring semester starts.  Unfortunately, the story chooses to use the now-predictable “struggling Brandeis” framing (please, that’s SO 2009), but it gives us a chance to see how he’ll react to the most discussed (or at least most media-friendly) issues at the school.

Lawrence mentions that he’s planning a “listening tour” of the campus to introduce himself, a necessity to ensure a smooth transition.  He says that he’ll withhold announcing any cost-cutting or fund-raising measures until after the listening tour, which hopefully indicates a move away from the unilateral decision-making process that led to debacle after debacle after debacle in the past few years.  He adds that “one of his first priorities will be to increase the amount of financial aid available to undergraduates,” a great goal for offering a Brandeis education to as many as possible in tough financial times.

I also really like his commitment to the Four Pillars of Brandeis, of which he says “I look at the Four Pillars and I see my life”.  He indicates that he expects to be at Brandeis for a long time, and it’s cool that he intends to teach a class every semester.

His statements on the Oren controversy leave me a little disappointed.  Though he avoids tackling the question of how he would have handled the situation, he makes several comments framing it as a free speech issue, a position I think is disrespectful to those whose primary reason for protest was Oren’s presence at commencement rather than with Oren in general.  Has Lawrence actually looked into what students were saying?  Does he care?  Does this foreshadow more of the same administration-student disconnect that characterized the Reinharz years?

I definitely tend to give him the benefit of the doubt on these questions, and I realize that this is just one incident that, for better or worse, is now firmly behind us.  In fact, I’m excited at how strongly he comes out in favor of free speech in all instances, and I’m hopeful that he’ll pursue an open campus dialogue on all matters.  Realistically speaking, I can’t imagine anyone being selected by the Board of Trustees whom I’d rather see leading Brandeis, and I look forward to meeting Frederick Lawrence and welcoming him to our community.