On Wednesday, Sept. 10, President Arthur Levine ’70 invited academic policymakers, press and alumni to Washington D.C’s National Press Club for a panel discussion about Brandeis’ plan to “reinvent the liberal arts.” The Board of Trustees Executive Vice President, Cynthia Shapira, welcomed panel attendees. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey then provided opening remarks and expressed his desire to see the “Bay State” become the “Brain State” by delivering “accessible, responsible and effective” education to all. Markey concluded that the American Dream should be delivered through “higher education, not less education.” 

Following the senator’s remarks, Levine contextualized the University’s plan, noting a shift between today’s “global digital knowledge economy” and the previous “national analog industrial economy.” In terms of demographics, technological advancement, economics, politics and global relations, the United States has not seen changes of this magnitude and speed since the Industrial Revolution. Levine characterized the period as a “time in which all of our social institutions got left behind and they needed to catch up — they needed to be reimagined to meet the needs of the emerging society.”

 As a result of today’s era of reinvention, the president predicted 20% to 25% of universities will close and, instead, regional universities and community colleges will shift toward online learning. Levine described that an “army of new providers of secondary education” will take their place, noting that these forms may be for profit — such as Google, Coursera and Linkedin — or non-profit, which could be local community institutions such as local zoos, symphonies and museums. He plans to circumvent the supposed destruction of universities by “[reinventing] the liberal arts rather than discarding them” because “they’re more essential now than they’ve ever been.” The plan has already been unanimously approved by the Board of Trustees and adopted by an impressive 88% of faculty with a $25 million investment into implementing major systematic reconstructions. 

“The Brandeis Plan — that’s not a very fancy name,” said Levine. “But it’s a really powerful, unprecedented set of actions that are going to change the organization, the curriculum and the design of the University.” The president suggested a complete conversion of general education and core programs into “common competencies” to be earned like badges. These competencies will be placed on a secondary transcript from students’ academic grades, though with a focus on career skills instead. These competencies  include broad categories like “creativity” as well as area specific credentials like “[Artificial Intelligence] literacy.” These “common competencies” target post-graduation employers who are favoring practical abilities over theoretical understanding. In a time where unemployment, and particularly underemployment, is a consistent concern of recent graduates, Levine feels that getting back to employer desires is foundational to reinventing higher education.

The University will also start assigning students both an academic advisor and a career advisor. As the students’ academic interests become more specialized over the course of their time at Brandeis, as will the advice they receive. Levine said that, for instance, if a student is going into the sciences their advisor could be a Nobel Prize winner, and if they are pursuing the arts their advisor could be a “nationally-known producer.” As well as additional career advising, Brandeis will also start offering a yearly career course.

Faculty reorganization is another priority already taking place at Brandeis, as the University announced its four new academic schools in August. These schools include The School of Arts, Humanities and Culture; The School of Business and Economics; The School of Science, Engineering and Technology and The School of Social Sciences and Social Policy. Levine stressed that the challenge to higher education today is to create an education that prepares its students for the modern world: “We need to remake what we do to fit the world that we live in and the world that our students are going to live in.”

The event transitioned into a discussion moderated by Liz Willen, the editor in chief of The Hechinger Report. “Is the Brandeis plan going to save higher education?” Willen posed to Levine’s panel. 

 The President of the American Council on Education, Ted Mitchell, responded affirmatively, stating that Levine is going to save higher education and this plan is one of the “vehicles” which he is using to do so. Mitchell delineated that higher education nationwide has a cost, transparency and relevance issue. For instance, he said that skepticism surrounding the cost of university is worsened by a lack of transparency. For instance, he said that 43% of institutions in the United States do not distinguish between grants and loans in their financial aid offers, which means the difference between knowing the “money you get and money you have to pay back.”

Mitchell elaborated that the plan’s strength lies in how it makes Brandeis relevant. By highlighting career readiness “starting in the first week of a student's experience and paralleling academic advising with career advising,” students and their families will understand how each class matters to their education, mitigating the issue of “transparency” that he highlighted. Additionally, the plan will ensure that students have guidance for the steps in their careers. 

Willen then asked for further clarification about the plan’s proposed new transcript, questioning what it would measure. 

 “Durable skills as a first pillar, communication, collaboration, creativity,” the President and Chief Executive Officer of Educational Testing Service, Amit Sevak, answered. He said that skills such as these are the top requested on LinkedIn’s job descriptions, saying that the plan is getting back to the “basics” of what employers want. 

The President of the Council of Independent Colleges and Brandeis Board of Trustees member, Marjorie Hass, added that the plan is grounded in Brandeis’ core, tikkun olam — repairing the world — and will serve as a “model for others … [Levine’s plan] is intended as a gift to a much broader audience.” She said that having models in higher education seldom happens. Hass feels that a university’s typical instinct is to “hoard” its innovative plans behind closed doors rather than allow other institutions to replicate it. Instead, she clarified that the Brandeis University’s transparency and active work to publicize the results of these changes indicates the University’s intent to be a model for higher education. 

Willen asked what success of this plan might look like and how other institutions might learn from it, to which President Levine responded by reiterating the common “shortcomings” of higher education — the cost, its unwillingness to change and lack of relevance. He explained that the goal of reorganization is to address these issues, and that Brandeis itself gives it credibility among other institutions.

“This is a message of hope and a future that is dependently on the institution’s willingness to grasp the moment and move forward, to accept the fact that we need to do things differently, and to propose a plan,” Mitchell added. He claimed that Brandeis assessed its values as well as the needs and demands of its environment because it was “the right thing,” rather than out of sheer necessity. 

Sevak claimed that Brandeis graduates are already “overwhelmingly getting jobs” at a rate above the national average, asserting that concerns lay in terms of salary and graduation placement rate. However, he said this is an opportunity to create a foundation for a student’s long-term career, not only their first job, through faculty support. He said that the 88% approval rating among faculty and the unanimous support from the Board of Trustees expresses that Brandeis is an “organization that’s willing and ready to change.” 

Willen asked Levine how he garnered such strong support among faculty, which he answered with a short story. He recalled telling faculty that The Board of Trustees asked him to “identify a direction for Brandeis for the decades ahead,” to which he said they could not do without the faculty’s help as partners. Levine said that he had 160 meetings with members of faculty in his first two months at the University and another 60 meetings after the fact. “By the time they voted for this,” Levine said, “it was a campus that was ready to move and eager to move.”

 The founder and Executive director of Safer Country, a gun violence prevention nonprofit, Paul Friedman ’81, asked the panel how the University plans to evaluate artificial intelligence and defend jobs from being eliminated in favor of AI’s speed and low cost. Levine described that each time a new form of technology becomes widespread, it is unregulated. He said that the University has the chance to “create the guardrails now.”

Daniel Kazzazz ’74 MA ’11 asked what Brandeis plans to do about creating more jobs for its graduating students. Sevak said that students will have access to a “career-interest inventory” which gauges students' passions and what kinds of specific competencies would be most suitable. He explained that the plan’s secondary transcript will reflect competencies gained from formal curriculum and the out of classroom learning that students experience. For example, a student’s speech and debate skills from their participation in Model United Nations would be included on this transcript. Sevak said that qualities like character building, contribution and service can be broken down into sub-skills and measured through AI and video capture, project-based learning and other “new simulations.”

Additionally, Levine said that the University is building these competencies as a means for “up-skilling and re-skilling” as Brandeis graduates move throughout their careers. Matthew Kowalyk ’18 MA ’19 asked how The Brandeis Plan would engage with alumni, recalling a lack of support for career planning during his time as a student. Levine hopes alumni can return Brandeis to “re-skill” as they go through life. 

Larry Kanarek ’76, former chair of the Board of Trustees, asked the panel what the pacing for the plan looks like, possible “resistance points” and strategies to mitigate them. 

“We’ve moved at a pace that I can’t even imagine,” President Levine answered. He described his arrival at the University last November and gaining faculty approval for the plan by the end of March. He said that if someone had asked him at the start how long it would have taken for him to get faculty approval on a university reorganization plan, he would have estimated it taking the full two years he planned to be interim president — not four months. Although the University will not have every detail of the program perfected or entirely implemented by the first year, Levine hopes to continue expanding and improving it for years to come. 

President Levine also emphasized that he was not the program’s singular driving force. Although this is his third presidency, and he has ample experience in administrative leadership, he emphasized the faculty’s role in creating The Brandeis Plan. Levine insisted, “what I was blessed with was the best faculty I’ve ever worked with in my life — and extraordinary administration — and that’s why the changes that were made were made. Not because of me.”

During her remarks, Brandeis alum, Rani Balakrishna ’25, said that it is a “great move” for The Brandeis Plan to focus on demonstrating graduates’ skills beyond their academic qualifications. She shared her own experience with finding work, expressing that even with her background in politics and journalism, ample club leadership and GPA, employers have still wanted to learn more. Thus, the transcript of core competencies will give “future students a bigger portfolio with more credentials.” Further, the core competencies encourage students to take classes across disciplines, making them more academically well-rounded, contrasting this expansion with how students’ experiences already overlap at the University. Balakrishna’s varied experiences ultimately improved her performance across all of her interests — leading the Student Union helped her play softball better. 

“The Brandeis plan for reinventing the liberal arts is an open door to a larger world than Waltham, it is a door not only to skills and jobs but it is about applying what we learn, whether the learning takes place in a classroom or in the press club, it comes from all the experience that Brandeis gives you,” concluded Balakrishna. Following closing words of thanks from President Levine, the panel finished.