Past Messages from the Dean
From August to May, the Dean distributes a monthly newsletter that includes updates for faculty and staff. Each newsletter also includes a message from the Dean. Messages are archived below from the past three issues.
To see the most recent message from the dean, please visit the faculty and staff news page.
May 2024
Dear Colleagues,
This month marks the end of my first academic year as Dean of Arts and Sciences and it seems like a good time to take a step back and reflect on the experience.
I think it’s fair to say that I did not anticipate how challenging a year it would be. Between the significant tensions that arose on campus in the wake of Hamas’s attacks and Israel’s military response and the budgetary challenges we are now facing across the university, I don’t know that I can point to a solid week of my tenure thus far that could be described as “business as usual.” Not that there ever is such a thing as a typical week in the deanery, where we are always trying to strike a balance between managing the predictable routines of the academic year and addressing the unanticipated crises or opportunities (big and small) that inevitably arise. And, of course, there is always the need to carve out time to think and plan beyond the most immediate and obvious demands—there never seems to be enough of that.
As I’ve observed to some of you over the year, while I would never have wished for any of these substantial challenges, the silver lining to all of them is that they have accelerated the pace at which I’ve been able to get to know many of you and to learn about what matters most to you; to see just how dedicated you are to the work we do at Brandeis—and how good you are at it; and to understand what makes this place so special.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my first year and, while I don’t want to rehearse them here, I do continue to learn from them even as I keep making new ones. I am grateful to those who have given me the grace to acknowledge my errors and the space to make amends, even as I do appreciate your willingness to call me on my missteps—really! I can’t get better at my job if I don’t know where I need to improve. I strongly believe that we must model humility and open- mindedness to our students and feel it is among my chief responsibilities as Dean to set an example.
Most importantly, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the people who make it possible for me to fulfill my duties, starting with the team in the DAS office. Kathleen McMahan works quietly but oh-so-effectively behind the scenes, ensuring the smooth internal operations of our office and keeping me on task, expertly assisted by Brynn Sibley and Kayla Whitehurst. Shannon Kearns is simply superb at all things operational and administrative. First Wendy Cadge and now Charles Golden have been extraordinary deans, partners, and counsellors in the work we do in support of graduate studies. Without Joel Christensen (assisted by Alicia Hyland and Heather Young) and Olga Papaemmanouil (along with Lauren Buckley) I honestly do not know how I would have gotten through the year—their wisdom and perspective, not to mention their hard work, have been essential. I am grateful for my partnership with Dean of Academic Services, Lori Tenser. And I am delighted to welcome our new A&S development officer, Hannah Taytslin Devine, who will be a key partner in our increased fund-raising efforts going forward. I also want to thank Division Heads Bulbul Chakraborty, Caren Irr, and Aïda Yuen Wong for all their work and support, with a special shout-out to Bulbul as she steps down from the role at the end of this academic year. Finally, I want to recognize the dedication of all the departmental and program leaders, too many to mention here.
Thanks to all of you. I am so proud and thankful to be your colleague.
Wishing you all a restful, restorative, and productive summer. I look forward to seeing you back on campus in the Fall.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey
April 2024
Dear Colleagues,
March 2024 marked the 4-year anniversary of Massachusetts’s implementation of its stay-at-home order for all residents in response to the rapid spread of COVID-19. It seems like it was just yesterday…and also another lifetime ago. None of us could have anticipated how long and how deeply impactful the lockdown and its aftermath would be. Indeed, we are still feeling its impacts, even as we have adapted to the “new normal” of living with a disease that began as a pandemic and has essentially become endemic. Thanks to the broad availability of vaccines and other medical therapies like Paxlovid, the disease is no longer nearly as frightening nor as deadly as it was when it first emerged. But it continues to shape our behaviors and remains a meaningful concern, especially for the more vulnerable among us.
I have been intensely aware of the impact of COVID at Brandeis since my arrival here eight months ago. Though not as ubiquitous as they were at the onset of the pandemic, masks remain a common sight in meetings and other venues. We are all much more vigilant about protecting our friends and co-workers, exercising caution at the slightest sign of sniffles or a raspy throat. And most significantly, our work lives have become far more hybrid than they once were. By virtue of the necessity for remote work and instruction during the height of the pandemic, we’ve all learned that it is more possible to fulfill many of our responsibilities within the new virtual modalities available to us than we once thought.
Possible, perhaps, but not preferable.
I never got to experience Brandeis pre-COVID, either as a faculty member or as Dean. But I hear from so many of you how much has changed with respect to the sense of community and camaraderie that once characterized life on campus. And I get a sense of those changes when I attend a faculty meeting or public event that offers an online (streaming option) and note the disappointingly low in-person attendance. While some departments, programs, and committees have returned to in-person meetings, some continue to hold them fully online or with a virtual option. It is no wonder to me, then, that I hear so many faculty, staff, and students lament the sense of alienation, estrangement, and communal attenuation they have been feeling. As convenient as it has become to speak to someone over Zoom, it is a convenience that brings with it the significant cost of a loss of intimacy, directness, and connection.
To be clear, I am not dismissing or minimizing the real value of these important technologies. For those who continue to be medically vulnerable, who have challenges that require them to be off campus temporarily, or for similar reasons, remote work and participation can be a real godsend; I am fully in favor of their use on these occasions.
But there is a critical difference between reasons like these and matters of convenience or preference. There can be no real substitute, in my opinion, for sitting in the same room, across the table from one another, speaking directly and listening thoughtfully, especially as we seek to navigate so many of the serious challenges we currently face, whether they be political, programmatic, or budgetary. It is through this direct, personal contact that we can communicate our own views and hear the views of others with the full attention and respect that they deserve. The critical value of this direct, personal contact has been at the heart of my own approach to my first year as Dean and has been behind me efforts to be physically present as much as I can, attending events, joining department and program meetings, or having open office hours and casual lunches open to all at the Faculty Club.
We are nearing the end of the academic year, with only a little more than a month to go before summer break. I am calling on all of you to take seriously my plea to make yourselves as present as possible in the weeks to come. And as we begin to plan for next year, I am hopeful that more of the work we do will be done with our whole bodies, in the flesh. We owe it to each other and, even more, we owe it to our students.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey
March 2024
Dear Colleagues,
Back when I still had active accounts on Facebook and Twitter (okay, okay, I will confess to a Tumblr account, as well), I developed a daily practice of finding and posting a poem every day. I had come to realize that, though I had entered academia as an English scholar because of my love for literature, I was doing less and less reading for pleasure, reading not rooted either in a class I was teaching or a project in which I was involved. In order to structure a routine way to return regularly to the delights of reading for its own sake, I decided to give myself the assignment of finding a poem, prompted by something that might have happened to me that day or something in the news or some milestone in the calendar, and share it with my followers on those social media platforms. It could be a poem I already knew well, but more often I tried to find something that was new or largely unfamiliar to me.
In the early days of that practice (which continued pretty much unbroken for about five or six years), I took real delight in this renewal of my love of poetry, unadulterated by ulterior motives. It led me to find all sorts of poems I’d never read before, beautiful or angry, simple or complicated, playful or serious, formally rigorous or free-ranging. Some were directed at very specific issues of the day, others were rich in the ways they evoked broader themes of life, love, relationships, family, you name it.
If that had been all that I gained from this practice, dayenu, it would have been enough. What I had not anticipated was that, through the act of sharing these poems, I had discovered an entirely new way to (re)connect with people with whom I already had relationships of one kind or another—family, current friends, but also old friends from the past, or people I only had come to know through Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr. It was remarkable, and really moving, to see so many responses to the poems posted in the comments. People responded in deeply personal ways, sharing how a given poem might have been an old favorite or a new discovery, a poem that helped them think about a challenge they were facing or a life event from their past or present. I learned more about some of these people than I had even really known before through this process of sharing poetry. And it led me to find even more of value in the poems, too.
I offer this story because I find that it is so easy to lose sight of the things that really matter to us as we inevitably get caught up in the daily demands of lives we are living. As Michael Stipe sings in one of my very favorite REM songs, Nightswimming, “These things they go away/ Replaced by everyday.” And that means we can easily forget the whys of our life choices and our career paths, we can forget about the values that drive us, the dreams we have had about making meaningful lives.
The corollaries to my story about poetry may not be exact for those who work in other fields or disciplines. But I am certain that we have all chosen our careers and our areas of study for reasons that often get lost, replaced by everyday, as it were. I am writing this to remind myself—and you, too—about the importance of reconnecting with those reasons, of returning to first principles. There are lots of ways to do this, not just by posting poems on Facebook. Among them is some fulfillment of E. M. Forster’s essential reminder to us all, “Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.”
Sincerely,
Jeffrey