Brandeis Magazine

Editor-in-Chief Laura Gardner
Photo credit: Mike Lovett

When Arthur Levine ’70 returned to the Brandeis campus last year as president, he settled into the same Bernstein-Marcus office he once occupied as a student protester. It’s a telling detail in the life of a leader who believes deeply in both tradition and reinvention.

Levine is focused on both values at Brandeis — though, necessarily, a bit more on the latter. Higher education is undergoing a shift as sweeping as the Industrial Revolution was. Technology and globalization are reshaping how students learn. Institutions that don’t adapt, the president warns, risk irrelevance.

Amid this upheaval, the liberal arts remain indispensable, Levine argues. What must change, he says, is how a liberal-arts education is delivered. In my interview with Levine, he outlines the university’s new competency-based approach, designed to prepare students to flourish in a digital knowledge economy. “The liberal arts have always been most successful when they’ve had one foot in the library — the accumulated knowledge of humanity — and one foot in the street, the real world,” he says.

Despite the constraints of his tenure — he has announced he plans to leave his post in mid-2027 — Levine is driving a major transformation: the reinvention of the liberal arts. “Content has a shorter half-life than ever before,” he explains, “so we will focus on the competencies, the skills, the knowledge that will take our students forward,” including their ability to communicate clearly, think critically, adapt to change, work creatively and collaborate.

Change is afoot in this office as well. This is the 37th issue of Brandeis Magazine I’ve led — and my last, as I prepare to retire in a few months. When I became editor-in-chief in 2010, I knew I had found my dream job. Nowhere else could I have immersed myself in so many fascinating ideas; met so many astonishingly accomplished alumni, faculty and students; or connected with such engaged readers, often eager to share their stories and opinions.

I’ve been lucky to work with a small but mighty team. Managing editor Susan Piland has strengthened every story we publish, from cover features to the shortest captions, with her trademark editorial elegance and steadfast commitment to journalistic standards (not to mention her unflagging insistence that we meet copy deadlines, a responsibility I suspect she will not miss when she retires at the end of January).

Art director Eson Chan designs each issue with style and imagination, guided by a deep understanding of what makes Brandeis Brandeis. Production manager Jessica Quirk keeps all aspects of printing and mailing moving smoothly, without sacrificing quality. And senior features writer David Levin produces memorable stories with a vivid “you are there” sensibility that consistently earns kudos from alumni and faculty alike.

Leading this magazine has been a privilege. Thank you for reading, and for caring so deeply about Brandeis.

Best,

Laura Gardner, P’12
Editor-in-Chief