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..
A lot of Jewish liberals oppose Israeli policies and actions in the last year. And while there is anti-Semitism on all too many campuses (and one is too many), there IS a distinction between what is sneeringly referred to around here as “pro-Pal” and anti-Semitism.
I get the impression that many of the newly pro-Palestinian faction are not very aware of any of the realities of the region but that they do see the size of the retaliation for October 7 (which they stubbornly seem to ignore) in Gaza.
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
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) gives Brandeis a very positive (A) rating as a place for Jewish/Zionist students, so U think this “hotbed” characterization is hardly correct.
Some 15 years ago Brandeis tried to close its art museum and sell off its important collection.
Since when is anti-Israel the same thing as antisemitic? Norman, I think I hear an axe grinding. I thought this was strictly a music magazine, but since you raise the issue, have you never considered that anti-Palestinian might just be antisemitic? Take some time to consider the history. Give it some well-deserved thought, Norman. Then give it a little more.
“so _I_ think…”, not “u”, of course.
This is sad and shocking. For decades, the Lydian Quartet was one of the leading quartets in Boston and in the United States. It was founded (if I am not mistaken) as an all-women quartet, with Rhonda Rider, the late Mary Ruth Ray, Wilma Smith and Judith Eissenberg.
I think he meant “noted target of anti-Israel and anti-semitic agitation” . See for example, https://www.brandeis.edu/magazine/2024/summer/featured-stories/antisemitism.html