Saturday, January 31, 2009

How long before the MSM does some actual reporting on Brandeis and the Rose?

Greg Cook seems to have had a brainstorm today - maybe Brandeis is in deep financial shit! Could the school be in such desperate straits that it's in danger of closing, or enduring a radical downsizing? This would seem to be the question of the hour - it is, I think, the only obvious reason for such a radical step as liquidating the Rose collection (as I said in my earlier post below). Figuring this out, or at least pondering it in print, would seem to be Job 1 over at the MSM, wouldn't you think? And yet there hasn't yet been any real reporting on the issue. Instead, today the Globe published an op-ed from a Brandeis student about how the university totally mismanaged the way they told the students about this. [Update: There's another one today, from an alumnus - all before we're really sure what's happening financially at the school!] Other papers have pointed a finger at the Chairman of the Board, Malcolm L. Sherman, and noted that he's part of a "restructuring and investment firm" without seeming to connect the dots about that. Sigh. As I've said before, between Brandeis and the Rose, I'll take Brandeis - and I don't see why some of the Rose's holdings can't wind up in the collections of other area institutions, where they'll actually be more accessible to the Boston public. At any rate, "outrage" over this shocking act of - what, philistinism? - seems a bit beside the point to me at the moment.

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