Dear President Liebowitz, 

A prospective applicant to Brandeis alerted me to one of the two subjects applicants to the class of 2028 can choose to write about:

“Brandeis was established 75 years ago to address antisemitism, racism, and gender discrimination in higher education, and today, the university remains dedicated to its founding values of inclusivity and justice. How has your educational experience shaped your perspective on these values? (250 words max.)

Brandeis wants to know how your education thus far has influenced your perspective on inclusivity and justice, so tell them a story about an experience or experiences you have had that relate. Maybe you want to write about the time you confronted your school’s administration over outdated dress codes, your first experience in advocating for girls like yourself in an environment that prioritized the comfort of boys. Perhaps you took a community college course on race, class, and gender over the summer that blew your mind and made you realize you were seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Did that class inspire you to read more about the legacy of Jim Crow? A strong response will feature some reflection that shows how you process new information and experiences and apply those takeaways to your everyday life. Show admissions that you are prepared to uphold its founding values during your time on campus and beyond.”

The first time I read this I was surprised.

The second time I read this I was appalled.

The third time I read this I was tempted to rip up my Brandeis diploma and deposit what remained of it in a garbage can.

By including such a prompt, Brandeis reveals its commitment to an ideological agenda based on claims that are empirically suspect, if not false.“Inclusivity” in practice is a misleading euphemism for the kind of exclusion and reverse racial discrimination that the Supreme Court rightly declared illegal and unconstitutional last June.  Also, the prompt mentions dress codes.  On what empirical basis can one state that they are — presumably in every instance — “outdated?”  The same for environments “prioritizing the comfort of boys.”  And in the matter of “Jim Crow,” the prompt assumes that its legacy is still real.  If, by Jim Crow, one means that America is systemically racist, then that i-s a highly questionable proposition, challenged by many scholars, a number of them African-American, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly.

Could a prospective applicant be given credit for challenging the assumptions in the prompt?  I doubt it.

The essay prompt is intended to elicit a commitment to political activism on behalf of an ideological agenda. It is reminiscent of, and no less reprehensible than the Soviet Union and other communist dictatorships requiring applicants for party membership to pledge fealty to Marxism-Leninism.

Perhaps the motto of Brandeis should be changed to: “political indoctrination even unto its innermost parts.”

In sum, you have seriously damaged the University I attended and for which I had the most profound affection when I graduated almost 54 years ago. My four years at Brandeis were the most intellectually stimulating of my life.  This was because all ideas were open to debate.

Nothing was off-limits. There was no official “party line” on what one should or should not believe, and even opinions that called into question the conventional wisdom on every imaginable social and political issue were given a fair hearing.  The vast majority of students, faculty, and administrators to one degree or another opposed America’s involvement in Vietnam.  But the University never formally endorsed any particular position on the war, much less required endorsement of it as a condition of admission.

Regrettably, this is no longer the case.  The essay prompt, by the way it is phrased, shows unmistakably that to matriculate at Brandeis one has to express support for your particular opinions, which one can safely presume are shared by a majority of faculty. If this did not corrupt the University, it would hardly matter. But it does.

I cannot emphasize enough how dispiriting it is to write this.  But you leave me no choice.

Sincerely,

Jay Bergman (B.A. Class of 1970)

Professor of History 

Central Connecticut State University