Learning about the University’s budget problems is nothing new to Brandeis students. There’s likely not a single student on campus who hasn’t woken up to an email from the president — either former or current — detailing the latest deficit or university crisis, and then outlining the brilliant and novel plan they came up with that will save us. Sometimes, these plans are called reorganizations, restructurings or reimaginations. In reality, they are almost always layoffs, cuts or cancelations. There was Brandeis’ decision to lay off more than 60 faculty positions in the spring of 2024. Later that year, the University ended its support for the Lydian String Quartet. That came following the 2023 decision to eliminate specific graduate programs within the music department. Of course, for those of us who have been here a little longer, some may remember the cancelation of the Science 2A project: the purported five-story and nearly $150 million expansion of science lab and classroom space attached to the Shapiro Campus Center. Finally, for those of us who have been here the longest, there is the University’s infamous post recession attempt to sell off the Rose Art Museum's nearly $350 million collection.

That’s why it was no surprise to students when, in his inauguration speech last year, President Levine acknowledged our historic undercapitalization and laid out another reorganization plan, at least in part intended to reduce costs across departments. However, what is surprising is that less than a year later, the current administration has determined that our university’s financial crisis is resolved, and that it is now time to expand the University's commitments. Specifically, they have decided that the time is ripe for Brandeis to add a new women’s lacrosse team to our suite of varsity sports, a commitment which will no doubt add a number in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to Brandeis’ annual expenses. And so unless Institutional Advancement’s new $750 million fundraising goal has already been met, I can’t help but question how the president and the athletic director, Jessica Chapin, arrived at such a decision. Not only would devoting funds towards a new women’s lacrosse team constitute a flagrant misallocation of resources, but it would also demonstrate an alarming amount of trust in an athletic department that has not produced real success in a long time — and in pursuit of a team that many students don’t even want.

First, while it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact number, considering the costs for coaching, travel, equipment, recruiting and overhead, it seems fair to say that a women's lacrosse program at Brandeis might cost somewhere in the range of $250,000 to $500,000 per year. Needless to say, that’s chump change compared to the University’s nearly half a billion dollar annual operating budget. Even so, it’s important to ask what other priorities that money could be spent on. Maybe the funds could go towards expanding academic opportunities by hiring a few more tenure-track professors or a dozen underpaid adjuncts. Perhaps the money could go into a pool used for staff and faculty merit increases, which have been repeatedly paused or suspended over the past couple years. It could also go towards expanding financial aid for need-based or merit-based scholarships — a key tool in improving Brandeis’ dreadful yield rates. In terms of physical infrastructure, a sum like that might be able to significantly expand accessibility on campus or pay for modest improvements for East Quad. If none of that appeals to you, why not keep the money in a rainy-day fund? The next time the administration needs to compensate for declining enrollment or rebuild a dining hall that burned down, they’ll know where to draw funds from. Regardless of where exactly the money goes, there seems to be a plethora of alternative ways to spend such a sum more closely related to the University’s core function.

Next, such an addition demonstrates an alarming amount of trust in an athletic department that has not produced meaningful success in a long time. For one, even if the athletics department has made up its mind that it would like to add a significant new cost to the annual budget, resources might still be better allocated to improve and expand our physical facilities instead, which lag noticeably behind our peer institutions in the University Athletic Association and, frankly, most of Division-III. 

In the UAA, Washington University in St. Louis, Emory, The University of Chicago and nearly all of our other competitors’ facilities outclass our own.  Moreover, other small liberal arts with equal or lesser endowments, like Kenyon, Middlebury and Colby, have state-of-the-art facilities themselves. Even when considering relative numbers instead of absolute ones, though Brandeis’ endowment per student sits above universities like Tufts, Lehigh and Bucknell, all three boast superior athletic facilities.

Meanwhile, back at Brandeis, our baseball team continues to play much of their schedule at Waltham’s Yetten Field due to drainage issues at Stein Diamond. Our softball field is banned from hosting playoff games due to not meeting National Collegiate Athletic Association size regulations, and our track teams are ineligible to host NCAA events because of safety concerns about the outdoor track’s degrading rubber. Concurrently, more than a dozen club sports teams are packed onto a single field that is slated to be demolished later this semester so Brandeis can build a new softball field. In the meantime, Brandeis’ more than 20 club sports teams will be forced to compete against each other, as well as outside groups to whom the University is increasingly renting facilities out to, for whatever space is left over. Putting aside the question of where a prospective women’s lacrosse team will practice when either men’s or women’s soccer are occupying Brandeis’ single regulation sized field, I can’t help but wonder whether it would be smarter to allocate resources to improving our existing infrastructure before adding a new team and increasing the burden on our already degrading facilities.