Last year, several racial incidents at Brandeis pushed issues of diversity and tolerance to the center stage of our campus, a good decade after they were encountered at many other universities. What makes them unusual and interesting at Brandeis is their relation to the University's remarkable Jewish heritage and Jewish sponsorship, which are in turn, I believe, linked to Jewish entitlement (that the University is principally for Jews) and institutional mission. How can a commitment to diversity-having it, not talking about it-cohabit successfully with this heritage? How can a consideration of diversity at Brandeis be credible without even discussing this linkage?When I've tried recently to discuss these delicate issues with non-Jewish Brandeis faculty, several have said to me, "Every time I try and say something about this, I get called an anti-Semite." Similarly, Jewish faculty have looked at me with fatigue and tears in their eyes and said, "Please don't make me talk about this again." After writing an opinion piece on these subjects last February (see people.brandeis.edu/thewatch), I privately urged a respected, senior NEJS professor-who totally disagrees with me-to write a measured response. He declined, emailing me that our disagreement was not what the rabbis would call makhloket leshem shamayim (a dispute for the sake of heaven). On the contrary, he wrote, "the problem [is] not with Brandeis but with your own sense of identity, your personal issues with being Jewish, and more." What an ad hominem response.

"Diversity at Brandeis" has to mean, first and foremost, diversity and tolerance of opinion-the tolerance of the inevitable diversity that comes from thinking for yourself, expressing those thoughts, and analyzing what others think, which is what we faculty are supposed to be teaching you! When I talk about history, culture, or religion, I'm like a freshman taking a University Seminar-there are faculty here in the humanities who know ten million times more than I do about these subjects. This is no reason to remain silent. Isn't the risk of sounding stupid (sure, I worry about it) the risk we ask students to take every day?

Brandeis benefits by the exchange of different views-for all our pious talk of "the life of the mind," here's a subject where thoughtful academic minds could make a positive contribution. Faculty and administration need to provide intellectual leadership: There's no excuse for people who hold tenured positions not to try to speak the truth about these sensitive subjects as they see it. Inevitable disagreement shouldn't be confused with disrespect. Those who believe Brandeis' role to be the think tank and intellectual action center of the Jewish community need not act like a football team with a lead: stay silent, sit on the ball, and run out the clock, hoping that conflicts between Jewish identity and diversity fade away. It's September-new year, new season.

I believe that the University is in noncompliance with its mission statement (academic excellence, nonsectarianism, social action, Jewish sponsorship). We act like a sectarian institution: not in the observantly religious, theological sense, but in the ethnic, nationalistic sense called civil religion. The unity of the Jewish people, mutual responsibility, Jewish survival, the centrality of Israel, the enduring value of education and Jewish tradition, tzedakah and social justice, and Americanness as a virtue: Doesn't this sound like Brandeis? Is this multiculturalism?

Jewish community organizations ought to be organized around the principles of civil and religious Judaism; hat's the business of synagogues, the United Jewish Appeal, B'nai Brith and American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. But Brandeis is a university. Diversity compels it to share equitably its varied resources among many interest groups. It is the gift of the American Jewish community to higher education. What strings are attached?

I have a dream about Brandeis-and it really is a dream rooted deeply in the American dream-that someday, years after Neil Rudenstine, Richard Levin and Harold Shapiro were, simultaneously, the presidents of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, that someday the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Provost, and President of Brandeis will all be non-Jewish, and it won't even be worth mentioning and that our academic programs and priorities will not be judged by their ethnic or religious affiliation, but by the forever fractious, tried and true tumble of academic politics that exists at every contemporary and truly nonsectarian university.

And that we'll be able to let an educational freedom ring by being part of a university secure in its Jewish history and its Jewish sponsorship, among other benefactors, without a parochial Jewish entitlement that drives people away-a kind of educational freedom that rings so loudly and so incessantly that a suicide bomber will tell Thomas Friedman '75 in the pages of The New York Times how he's ready to blow himself up for his beliefs-and in his next breath, confess that what he really wants to do is come to an American university and study engineering. Think of what else he could learn at the same time.

The real tikkun olam, the real redemption, that we can offer the big, messed up world around us, comes from a demographically and intellectually diverse, nonsectarian, secular university-that's how we can let freedom ring.

Editor's Note: Harry Mairson is a professor of computer science.