Exclusive: Brandeis sacks string quartet
NewsBrandeis University, facing a sharp drop in donations and student enrolment, has sacked the Lydian String Quartet in a cost-cutting measure. All four musicians – Professor Joshua Gordon, cellist, Prof. Julia Glenn and Prof. Clara Lyon, violins and Prof. Mark Berger, viola – will lose their jobs at the end of the current academic year.
The Lydian String Quartet has been a fixture at Brandeis for 44 years. With its removal, the music department will lose one-third of its teaching staff.
Brandeis has been a noted hotbed of anti-Israel and anti-semitic agitation in the past year. It has dropped in U.S. News and World Report rankings from 35 to 63rd place. Brandeis’s president resigned last month.
University Provost Carol Fierke urged the faculty to help, saying the most helpful thing they can do is to ‘recruit or retain one student.’ Desperate times, desperate measures.
UPDATE: Joshua Gordon has been in touch to say the quartet is not disbanding.
Astonishing that a university so closely linked with the Jewish faith and with such a high percentage of Jewish students should be a “noted hotbed of anti-Israel and anti-semitic agitation.” It is, after all, named for a Jewish Supreme Court Justice, and was founded specifically to make university a free and happy experience for Jewish students, whose welcome was not always warm elsewhere.
But the young and small, though deservedly well-respected university has financial problems of a monumental sort. And being young, they do not have generations of alumni to invest in them. Being small, the post-Covid shortfall in enrolment hits them very hard. They have tended to spend on their research programmes, and are currently facing infrastructure problems that could become critical.
There is considerable resistance within their community to the closure of the Lydian Quartet, though other aspects of their music programme have also suffered.
Brandeis is very vulnerable financially; the controversy over how they handled protests over the last year has not done anything for its reputation; the change in leadership leaves an aura of uncertainty around its general image. From the point of view of those who run the place, I would imagine the loss of a string quartet is among the least of their concerns.
It’s a shame. It is an institution well worth saving.
Isn’t Brandeis a “jewish” university? Now is anti Israel? I am bit puzzled..
This is sad. Clara JUST joined the quartet. Great group of people
https://www.thejustice.org/article/2024/10/faculty-express-dissatisfaction-as-budget-cuts-result-in-removal-of-lydian-string-quartet-and-receive-admissions-updates-brandeis