Past Messages from the Vice Provost and Dean
From August to May, the Vice Provost and Dean distributes a monthly newsletter that includes updates for faculty and staff. Each newsletter also includes a message. Messages are archived below from the past semester.
To see the most recent message from the dean, please visit the news page.
September 2025
I am delighted to greet you at the start of the new semester. Welcome to our new students and welcome back to our returning students!
Returners may notice that I am writing to you with a new position under my name, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs and Dean of Undergraduate Studies. This role is part of the restructuring we undertook at the end of the last academic year. In this position, I now have two broad, primary responsibilities.
First, I work directly with the many academic support offices that we have at Brandeis, all of which are here to ensure that you have the help you need to make the most of your educational opportunities. You can find a list of these offices at this link. Over the course of the coming year I plan to highlight some of these units and the important work they do. I encourage you to take full advantage of the support and enrichment they offer.
The second broad responsibility that comes with my new role is to work closely with the founding deans of our four new schools to ensure that we take full advantage of the opportunities they provide for interdisciplinary and collaborative initiatives. We want to facilitate boundary-crossing between these schools to create innovative academic programs. And we want to leverage our broad and deep commitment to the Liberal Arts as the means through which to prepare students for the lives they will lead once they graduate—both on the job and in the world. You will be hearing more about some of these initiatives in the coming year, and I invite you to learn more about some of the new majors we are launching that exemplify this integrated approach, including Communications and Media Studies (CMS), Engineering Sciences, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), and a BS in Quantitative Economics (QE). The School of Business and Economics has also added a new minor in Finance.
At the start of each academic year I think it is important to remind ourselves of some of our core values, values that must guide us, both inside and outside the classroom and that make the Brandeis experience welcoming and enriching to all:
- Affinity groups can be safe spaces, where those who may feel marginalized or minoritized have room (both physical and mental) to be with one another, to share in their common hopes and fears, and to find ways to support each other
- Classrooms must be brave spaces, where we ask tough questions, challenge our own perspectives and assumptions, leave ourselves open to think and re-think through the issues of the day
- Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Arab bias, together with racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other prejudices, are forms of hatred that have no place within the Brandeis community
- Discrimination, bullying, or harassment based on an individual’s religious or national identity is a violation of university policy
- Differences in religious observance, political affiliation, and political views are all matters of personal right
- Discrimination by anyone against students because of their support for Israel or the Palestinians (or for any other political view) is contrary to Brandeis’s ethos and also a policy violation
- Conversations about any of these differences are welcome, even encouraged, so long as they are grounded in the values of belonging and inclusion. Ideas, words, and actions deserve our scrutiny; people deserve our respect
We are fortunate to have many extraordinary faculty at Brandeis, across all departments and programs. Their job is to challenge you, helping you to develop and refine your critical thinking, along with the various methodologies that are the essential tools of the academic disciplines you are studying during your time here. But they are also here—along with the many dedicated administrative and advisory staff—to support you in your efforts. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it!
Speaking of our wonderful faculty, we are delighted to welcome the following new colleagues this year:
- Justin Campbell, Mathematics
- Ilsoo Cho, History/East Asian Studies
- Caleb Cook, Physics
- Beth Derderian, Anthropology/Crown Center for Middle East Studies
- Amanda Faherty, Psychology
- Spyros Garouniatis, Mathematics
- Duane Juang, Engineering Science/Biology
- Amy Kahng, Fine Arts/Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies/Rose Art Museum
- Taehyeong Kim, Mathematics
- Rachel Klein, African and African American Studies/Legal Studies
- Surena Hozoori, Mathematics
- Nicholas Anthony Mancini, Fine Arts
- Troy Luster, Biology
- Elijah Rivera, Computer Science
- Yihan Shao, Chemistry
- Khalil Shikaki, Politics/Crown Center for Middle East Studies
- Kostas Solomos, Computer Science
- Preston Stone, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
- Ayuma Teraoka, Politics
- Hyunjun Yang, Biochemistry
You can read more about the research and teaching interests of these new colleagues here.
Finally, as you embark on this new semester, I want to ask two things of you: First, don’t ignore your own personal needs. Find the time to exercise, to hang out with friends, to eat well, and to take the breaks from work that are so important in maintaining a healthy, balanced life. Second, I want to remind you that lots of learning happens outside of the classroom and at Brandeis we have a wealth of programming offered by our departments, centers, institutes, and other clubs on a whole range of topics. I urge you to take advantage of these rich, multifaceted opportunities, especially those that seem provocative or outside your comfort zone. Be curious and inquisitive. Don’t take anything for granted. That is, after all, why we’re all here!
Wishing you all a rewarding and successful semester.
May 2025
May is the time for celebrating achievements and I have had the great pleasure of attending several wonderful pre-commencement festivities in honor of our students over the last few weeks. Some highlights for me have included the First Year Closing celebration for the Myra Kraft Achievers Program (MKAP), the GenOne Night of Celebration honoring graduating seniors who are the first members of their family to earn college degrees, the Exceptional Achievement Endowed Awards in the Creative Arts (sponsored by Herbert and Sandra Fisher), the Creative Arts Commencement Celebration, and the GSAS Reception honoring our newly minted Masters and PhD graduates. Of course, there were many more I couldn’t attend—there are only so many hours in the day—but I am sure they were all filled with the same joy and well-deserved sense of achievement that I witnessed at the events I was able to join.
I’ve worked in higher education for more than thirty years, and these celebrations never fail to move me. Indeed, the more time I spend in the academy, the more powerful they feel, perhaps because I have an ever-growing appreciation of the challenges and struggles (many of them hidden from view) that our students must overcome to complete their degrees. And, as I am sure you all will agree, so many of them not only complete them, but excel in the process, achieving things that may have seemed unimaginable even a few years earlier.
Like many of you, I have felt the alarming and demoralizing impact of the pervasive attacks on higher education coming out of Washington since January 20. These springtime celebrations offer something of a salve to the wounds inflicted by those attacks. They remind us more powerfully than any op-ed or petition, however well-written or well-intended, why what we do continues to matter, continues to change lives, continues to enrich the world. The students who graduate from Brandeis this May will play an essential part in how we respond to—and recover from—the havoc being wreaked on so many of our important cultural, social, and political institutions. Thinking about all the impressive things our students have already accomplished, I feel more hopeful now than I have in a while. I hope you do, too.
Speaking of achievements worth celebrating, I also want to acknowledge the significant career milestones several of our colleagues in Arts and Sciences reached through promotion and tenure. This was an especially active year for this process—and it is not yet complete, with several cases still working their way through the system—but I offer my warm congratulations to the following faculty, whose promotions and tenures were approved by the Board of Trustees in its final meeting of the year:
Promoted to Associate Professor and Awarded Tenure
Anne Berry (Psychology)
Greg Childs (History)
Yuri Doolan (History/WGS)
Michael Heller (Music)
Tymon Sloczynski (Economics)
Michael Strand (Sociology)
Steven Wilson (Politics)
Promoted to Full Professor
Jonathan Anjaria (Anthropology)
Jill Greenlee (Politics)
Shantanu Jadhav (Psychology)
Kate Moran (Philosophy)
Finally, this will be my last newsletter to you as Dean of Arts and Sciences. It has been a real privilege to work with you over the last two years, two of the most challenging and fulfilling years of my career. I knew I was fortunate when I was selected to serve as Dean, but I don’t think I fully appreciated just how much of that good fortune would be a function of my wonderful, brilliant, and dedicated colleagues. Thanks to all of you for welcoming me and working so hard to make Brandeis the very special place it is.
But of course I am not going anywhere, and I look forward to the challenges I will be taking on in my new role as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs and Dean of Undergraduate Education. I am excited to be a part of the new academic structure we’ve developed and eager to move forward in our efforts to reimagine general education, develop new and innovative undergraduate programs of study, and create comprehensive and sustainable structures to provide all our students with meaningful experiential learning opportunities both on and off campus. We’ve got a lot of work still to do, but having already met with the working groups engaged in these efforts, I am optimistic about the possibilities before us.
Wishing all of you a productive and restorative summer break. I look forward to seeing you back on campus in the fall.
April 2025
As many of you know, before coming to Brandeis in August of 2023, I spent eleven years at the University of Connecticut. But even before my arrival at UConn in 2012, I was a huge fan of the UConn Women’s basketball team. So you can probably imagine that I am pretty thrilled by the team’s utterly dominant performance in this year’s NCAA tournament.
There’s a lot to love about this year’s championship team, but what has impressed me most has been its resilience. This is a team that had all kinds of expectations for success when it first began coming together five years ago with the arrival of its superstar, Paige Bueckers. But if you have followed women’s college basketball you will know that those expectations were deferred because of a series of injuries, not only to Bueckers but also to at least four other key players over the last several years. The team’s victory against South Carolina on Sunday marked the culmination of a lot of hard work and could only have happened because the team had the confidence and mental fortitude to persist despite significant challenges over the years. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves. They just kept fighting back.
In a post-game interview after the championship, Paige Bueckers was asked about her relationship with her coach, the legendary Hall of Famer, Geno Auriemma. Her response was moving in a lot of ways, but the comment that especially stood out to me was how Bueckers described Geno’s ability to get the very best from his players: “he's challenging me and making me better in ways I never even knew I could be.” I am sure Bueckers’s comment could have been said about many sports coaches and I am highlighting this response not because I think it says something unique about Auriemma but because it captures for me the essence of good teaching.
Let me offer another example, from an entirely different realm of activity. My family and I were early enthusiasts of the reality TV show, “Project Runway,” and we watched it regularly for the first five or six seasons it was on air. There was a lot I admired about the show and it was amazing to see the creativity and ingenuity of the contestants creating “looks” from unusual raw materials and in response to specific challenges. But the more I watched the show, the more I realized that what kept me coming back was Tim Gunn, the show’s mentor and guiding spirit. With his famous mantra, “Make it work,” Gunn was the epitome of a good teacher, pushing contestants to realize their own visions, not the assumptions or preferences of their teacher. “I pummel people with questions,” Gunn once said, “because I need to know what they’re thinking, what they’re trying to achieve, what they believe the final outcome is going to be.”
Scholars of education may recognize what I am trying to describe in citing these two exceptional teachers from such different domains as versions of what psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The ZPD describes tasks that are beyond a learner’s current abilities but are attainable with the help and guidance of a more knowledgeable teacher or mentor.
Pushing students into that Zone of Proximal Development is the essence of good teaching. It’s where growth happens and where our students are best positioned to realize their own distinctive potentials. And it requires a core humility on the part of the teacher, who must deflect and constrain their own personal ambitions and predilections to create the space for that growth to happen.
In my two years at Brandeis, I have met quite of a few teachers who understand this at the center of their being. I feel fortunate to call them my colleagues and, even more important, our students are fortunate to be in their classrooms, seminars, studios, and laboratories. As we near the end of another academic year, I write this to salute all of you for your dedication to our students and to their success in achieving their fullest potential.
March 2025
Today is the festival of Purim, which celebrates the survival of the Jews in ancient Persia who were under threat of extermination from the genocidal intentions of Haman the Agagite. The story is recounted in the biblical book of Esther, named for the heroine of the story, Queen Esther, who uses her influence with King Ahasuerus to prevent Haman from carrying out his plan.
As those who are familiar with the holiday know, Purim is a carnivalesque festival, a day that celebrates the sudden and salvific reversal of fortunes of the Persian Jews; observances of the holiday often include costumes, playful, even scandalous sketches and jokes, and more than a little drinking. It’s a time to express gratitude and, in many ways, is the epitome of the old Jewish joke that describes all holidays as celebrations of the same story: “they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.”
For all its fairy-tale quality, however, there’s one moment in the book of Esther that always stops me in my tracks and makes me do some serious soul-searching. It happens early in the story, when Esther’s uncle, Mordecai, informs her of Haman’s plot and charges Esther with the responsibility of speaking to the king to save her people. At first, Esther demurs, claiming that it is too risky for her to approach the king without having been invited for an audience. Mordecai’s response is short and powerful: “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace…who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis.”
In a way, Mordecai’s charge to Esther is the biblical version of the widely shared poem by the Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller, “First They Came…,” which so powerfully condemns the silent complicity of German intellectuals and clergy during the rise of Nazism. But I think it’s actually a more precise call than Niemöller’s poem because it explicitly highlights Esther’s position of relative privilege and links that privilege with ethical responsibility. In other words, the call to speak out is not only in the eventual service of self-preservation (“They came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me”), it is specifically a function of having the privilege of speaking out, irrespective of whether those with privilege are under direct threat or not.
I have been thinking a lot about this kind of responsibility lately and how much it needs to inform my own actions. Unfortunately, we don’t lack occasions that call for some kind of response. And to be clear, I am not talking about public statements. Those are, in my view, largely performative and of little value. What I am talking about are messages and actions that make explicit our values, our priorities, and our commitments to the most vulnerable among us. It’s not only or even mostly about public defiance of the current administration, it’s about using whatever privilege we have to stand up for our own values, ensuring that the people who look to us for strength and support know that we are in their corner and that we see their struggles and anxieties.
The challenges we face in the coming months and years are significant. But we can only face them successfully if we don’t shy away from them, if we don’t duck and cover, if we lean into our mission and our individual and institutional commitments.