Dear President Levine and Members of the Board of Trustees,

I am writing as a proud alumna of Brandeis University (BA, Latin American Studies, 1997) and as a sociologist whose career has been shaped by the values I absorbed as a Brandeis undergrad. I am deeply troubled by the decision to award an honorary degree to Sheryl Sandberg and to invite her to deliver the undergraduate commencement address at the 75th commencement exercises this May.

Brandeis was founded on a commitment to social justice, intellectual rigor, and the protection of the vulnerable, and bears the name of a Supreme Court justice who dedicated his life to holding the powerful accountable. The decision to honor Sheryl Sandberg is an affront to those values.

As a scholar who studies gender, immigration, and inequality, I found Lean In troubling from the start.  I was not alone. Leading feminist thinkers — bell hooks, Susan Faludi (and many others)— identified the book for what it was: a repackaging of patriarchal logic in feminist clothing. hooks called it “faux feminism” that served “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” The book placed the burden of systemic inequality squarely on women’s individual behavior, telling them to try harder within a broken system rather than fighting to change it. This is not feminism – it is the opposite. And it is certainly not the kind of intellectual contribution that warrants Brandeis’s highest honor.

But the problems with Sandberg go far beyond a flawed book. During her fourteen years as Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sandberg presided over a company that caused incalculable harm. Sarah Wynn-Williams’s bestselling 2025 memoir, Careless People, details how the woman who told the world to “lean in” for other women reportedly created a toxic workplace for the women beneath her — crossing personal boundaries with subordinates, demanding obedience, and showing indifference when an employee nearly died during childbirth. The gap between Sandberg’s public feminist brand and her reported private conduct is a deeply disturbing hypocrisy.

More critically, Sandberg was a central figure in leadership decisions that have had devastating consequences around the world. Facebook’s platform was used to fuel the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. Activists warned the company for years about the spread of hate speech and incitement to violence on its platform, but leadership did nothing. The UN found that Facebook had substantively contributed to the genocide, during the period when Sandberg was its COO.

Under her watch, the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how the data of 87 million users was harvested without consent and weaponized for political manipulation, including in the 2016 US presidential election. When Facebook’s own security chief raised alarms about Russian interference, he was pushed out for making Sandberg and Zuckerberg face inconvenient truths. Internal documents later revealed that leadership was aware of the platform’s harmful effects on teenage mental health and its use by human traffickers — and responded with indifference.

This is the record of the person Brandeis has chosen to honor.

I urge you to reconsider this decision. An honorary degree is not a neutral gesture — it is an institutional endorsement of a person’s contributions to society. By honoring Sheryl Sandberg, Brandeis is telling its students, its alumni, and the world that the accumulation of wealth and corporate power matters more than the lives damaged along the way. That is not a message worthy of this university.

Brandeis taught me to think critically, to question power, and to center the most vulnerable in my scholarship and my life. I am asking the university to live up to its own teaching.

Respectfully, 

Laura Limonic, PhD

Associate Professor and Chair, Soci    ology, SUNY Old Westbury

Brandeis University, Class of 1997