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T h e I n d e p e n d e n t S t u d e n t N e w s p a p e r o f B r a n d e is U n i v e r sit y S i n c e 1 9 4 9 Volume LXXVII, Number 13
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
DEIS HACKS
Waltham, Mass.
MEETING
Faculty discuss cuts to graduate program admissions and hear plans for capital campaign ■ The faculty met on Feb. 7 to
discuss the state of their graduate programs and hear from Institutional Advancement as well as Interim President Levine By ANNA MARTIN
JUSTICE EDITOR IN CHIEF
Photo Courtesy of ELIZA BIER/BRANDEIS DESIGN AND INNOVATION
WINNERS: The 2025 Deis Hacks champions gather for a photo.
Hackathon for social good ■ Brandeis undergraduate and graduate students spent a weekend supporting non-profit organizations in the Waltham community. By ANNA MARTIN
JUSTICE EDITOR IN CHIEF
From Friday, Jan. 24 to Sunday, Jan. 26, members of the Brandeis community took over Farber Library in order to make a difference in the operations of non-profit organizations in Waltham. DeisHacks, “an annual social justice hackathon … [is] sponsored by Brandeis International Business School, [and] brings together students, faculty and community members to tackle challenges faced by local nonprofits.” This hackathon lasted for 48 hours, as “teams collaborate[d] to develop solutions for real-world problems in areas like education, healthcare and housing, fostering creativity, technical skills and social impact.” The 2025 hackathon theme was Design for Community, Design for Impact. On Jan. 24, participants arrived at Farber Library at 5 p.m. to check in and join the discord, which is the primary form of communication for everything DeisHacks. They then convened in the Rapaporte Treasure Hall for the opening ceremony. Following the ceremony, all participants dispersed to form their teams for the hackathon. Each team is made up of a DeisHacks board fellow and three to six other participants. The board fellows each represent a different nonprofit organization and are students in the BUS 297C: Leadership Internships in Social Impact Organizations Class. They spent all of fall semester connecting with their organization and preparing for the hackathon. Brandeis students from all walks of life served as board fellows, including Waltham Group President Natalie Saltzman ’25. In correspondence with The Justice on Feb. 10, Saltzman stated “With around 15 board fellows, the class is small, allowing for meaningful connections and collaboration with others. As a sociology major, this course has also been impactful in expanding my understanding of the quantitative side of things.” When reflecting on the intersectionality of the competition, she explained “This experience also tied in closely with my role as president of the Waltham Group. I had the opportunity to see many of the leadership skills I've developed come to life during Deishacks. I also work directly with the [Community Day Center of Waltham] through the Waltham Group, so this long standing partnership has been invaluable in understanding their challenges.” Saltzman had the opportunity to represent CDCW as their board fellow, connecting the class with one of her main extracurriculars at Brandeis. Through this, she was able to leverage her preexisting relationships with their leadership team while working on her project. Saltzman explained, “for our Deishacks project, we developed a resource database to
assist them in securing funding and resources for their Mission Metrowest 5k event in late April. While we didn't win a prize, the CDCW was thrilled with the product we created, and that, in itself, felt like a significant reward.” The hackathon was co-founded by senior lecturer Ian Roy (BUS) ’05, who currently serves as the Event Director as well as the professor of the class. Roy’s leadership team is made up of many individuals, including students. On the student side of the team, Erica Hwang ’25 came back to DeisHacks for another year as the Head Project Manager, with Co-Project Manager Avery Bishop. In correspondence with The Justice on Feb. 10, Hwang shared “It warms my heart to see the incredible dedication and creativity students pour into their projects. The energy and passion throughout the weekend were truly inspiring, and it was amazing to watch teams become so deeply invested in the nonprofit missions they were supporting. Seeing their ideas evolve and take shape in such a short time is a reminder of how much impact can be made when innovation meets purpose.” Hwang’s former Co-Project Manager Vincent Calia-Bogan ’25 joined the hackathon in a different role this year, serving as the board fellow for Charles River Community Health. In a correspondence with The Justice on Feb. 10 he explained, “Having been a part of this program for four years now, I’m thrilled to see where it is now … I can’t wait to see where future classes take it into the future.” CaliaBogan’s team ended up winning the entire hackathon with their “checklist initiative designed to both formalize some procedures as well as provide more regular employee feedback to the whole company. Specifically, [they] designed a survey in qualtrics and used Application Programming Interface access to auto-populate a google sheet, which in turn is built to automatically update statistics in real-time as well as run Natural Language Processing to provide a sentiment score and clustered words or phrases that employees are reporting in the short answer sections of the quiz.” The goal of the project was for this to be done entirely automatically, “making the analytics of feedback data easy so that the institution can be more nimble when it comes to employee concerns and retention.” Following the formations of the teams, groups had the rest of Friday night, as well as all day Saturday, to work on their projects. Participants had a variety of workshops at their disposal, gaining the opportunity to learn new skills that would benefit their projects. Projects were due at 11 a.m. on Sunday, giving ample time for judging prior to the closing ceremony in the Rapaporte Treasure Hall at 5 p.m. At the closing ceremony, many projects and the winner were honored. Waltham Mayor Jeannette McCarthy was in attendance. She is quoted on the Deis Hacks website as stating “I was inspired by the ideas the students came up with for our local nonprofits. It’s refreshing to see that type of brain-power. They combined heart with brains and that’s a wonderful com-
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On Friday, Feb. 7, faculty gathered in the Rapaporte Treasure Hall for their monthly meeting. The meeting began with a presentation from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Charles Golden. Golden presented on cuts to open admissions spots this year, explaining that they are “going for roughly 55 admissions across GSAS.” Golden also explained that “The master's programs are incredibly important to us as a university” and will be “ more flexible or as flexible as we can with financial aid.” He added that programs and departments will aim to work together “to make it affordable for our students, for new students to join us.” This led to a discussion of the implementation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, as new requirements have been put in place. Golden described it as “making the best of a difficult situation,” as “we did not have a prior model that allowed us to accommodate the new CBA requirements, up to 20 hours maximum.” Golden stated “as GSAS, we are more able to recognize the different level of work put into different [Teaching Assistant] assignments and I think going forward into the fall we’ll be much more prepared for how we are able to think about those.” Currently, the standard is one teaching assistant for every 30 students. He concluded his presentation by explaining that they are in discussions with the graduate student union, stating “we are going to be more creative, we are going to try to be flexible.” He also assured all faculty in attendance that “we are not alone in this,” referring to the need to increase revenue in order to increase admissions. “We are a small university committed to being an R1 institution,” Golden stated. The first professor to ask a question was Prof. James Haber (BIO) who inquired further regarding the R1 status of the University, and how the cuts in graduate admissions would affect this status. In a Feb. 7 exchange with The Justice, Haber explained “It is a concern but certainly not an immediate one.” He highlighted Golden’s response to his question by stating “as the Dean of Graduate Studies said, the danger to lose R1 status would only become a problem if (a) Brandeis did not increase its graduate enrollment back to about 70 (from 55) and (b) only after 5-6 more years from now, since the present cohort of grad students will fulfill the expectations of number of degrees.” Haber also explained “As the Dean said, this concern would assume that the Carnegie Foundation did not reduce its expectations, in view of the fact that a number of R1 schools have reduced their admissions numbers this year.” The Carnegie Foundation defines R1 institutions as a school that meets “a threshold of $50 million dollars in research expenditures and 70 doctoral research/ scholarship degrees awarded.” In an email exchange with The Justice on Feb. 6, Golden assured that “We are not close to losing R1 status. We continue to meet the Carnegie Classification for doctorate granting universities with very high research activity. As Interim Pres. Levine made clear in his message to the community on January 17, graduate education and research excellence are central to our mission as a university, and deeply intertwined with the liberal arts and undergraduate experience. This will remain true as we strengthen graduate education and build towards the future.” Speaking next was Prof. Rebecca Torrey (MATH). Torrey stated “The university is telling us that we have to have our Ph.D. students grade for 20 hours a week, four hours five days a week of grading. Can you imagine? Can you imagine trying to finish a math Ph.D. in five years when you’re doing this? This is more than double the work that our graduate students have done historically.” She also explained that the same 20 hour restriction applies to research assistants, however “the 20 hours for research assistants is 20 hours that's going towards their progress towards degree, and so grading an undergraduate math class is great for a lot of reasons but is not helping our grad students progress towards their degree at all.” Torrey shared that “our graduate students are actively talking about leaving the university.” She later confirmed this statement in a Feb. 10 exchange with The Justice. Torrey explained that Brandeis keeping its status as an R1 institution is based on graduation rates. She highlighted how hard it is to graduate if graduate students are expected to do this much work
TikTok ban
Cinema critique
Prof. Gary Jefferson (ECON)
Is "Emilia Pérez" deserving of its 13 Oscar nominations? From its poor execution to problematic messaging, the answer is a resounding 'no.'
discusses the social and political implications of the 2025 TikTok ban.
By MAEVE COAKLEY
By LUCIA THOMAS Photo courtesy of CREATIVE COMMONS
FEATURES 6
Photo courtesy of CREATIVE COMMONS
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ARTS AND CULTURE 14
Make your voice heard! Submit letters to the editor to forum@thejustice.org
on top of being a student, and encouraged meeting attendees to sign a petition created by these graduate students. Prof. Dmitry Kleinbock (MATH) spoke in solidarity with his department, as the undergraduate advising head. He began by stating “I don’t know how many people were here in 2008, probably some of you were,” and sharing that due to the financial concerns at the time, Brandeis either needed to cut graduate admissions in half or skip a year entirely. Kleinbock stated “At that time we chose to skip a year. It was a disastrous year, we didn’t have any graduate admissions, everything was very bad, but that is what we chose because cutting admissions from our five to six slots to essentially two is not sustainable.” He explained that one of the three spots for graduate students in the math department comes from a donation, “so the school now only supports two slots.” In an email correspondence with the chair of the mathematics department, Prof. Jonathan Touboul (MATH), Touboul shared “Here are the facts. The math department used to admit between [five] and [six] graduate students all funded by GSAS for many years, and the program has been incredibly successful. This support dwindled in the past two years and was reduced to [two] GSAS-supported students this year.” He further explained, “the University allowed to admit [four] graduate students this year, [two] funded by GSAS (so, down from the steady [five] to [six] admissions by a fact of [two and a half] to [three]), one funded by the Palais donation, and one admission which will only exist if we can find money to support it.” Golden responded to these statements by reiterating that he “[does] not have the increased revenue that we need to bring in more students this year, [he thinks] everybody is aware that we do not have enough doctoral students.” Golden also explained that he is an “enthusiastic supporter” of the decision to not add additional doctoral graduate programs at this time, instead focusing on the already existing ones. Prof. Amy Singer (HIST) joined the meeting via Zoom and stated “everything that my colleagues in mathematics have said holds true for the history department as well.” Singer explained that due to these cuts the program doesn’t have enough teaching assistants, nor does it “have enough people to make a sustainable cohort.” She explained that one of the aspects that makes the history department so special is the small but coherent group of students that they are in danger of losing. Singer also explained that the department has “had its own endowment that helps sustain the program for over 50 years and that endowment is now being parceled out in a somewhat more parsimonious manner. Why the University no longer lets it function how it was intended, which was to help us be competitive and recruit students.” Singer concluded her statement by sharing “none of us are suffering more or less than the others but this is a university-wide problem, and so what we need are not necessarily individual siloed solutions, but we need university-wide conversations, about sustaining our R1 status, about sustaining viable and healthy thriving programs.” Following this presentation, the faculty members were greeted by Jordan Tannenbaum ’72 and Stephen Rodriguez from the department of Institutional Advancement. Tannenbaum introduced himself, explaining that the department is “committed to a comprehensive campaign, a comprehensive campaign will include capital, endowment and annual.” He explained that he has “great hopes for this campaign and [believes] it will be a success. Tannenbaum then moved into a short explanation of his qualifications for the faculty, sharing that he ran a very successful capital campaign at the Holocaust Museum that took place over 10 years. He shared that the goal for fundraising this year is one hundred million dollars, and he has “every reason to expect that we will hit our goal this year.” To conclude his presentation, Tannenbaum shared that the University is entering the quiet phase of the campaign, and all can expect it to get “louder” in the spring of 2026. He explained that the first thing on his list is working to receive the funds that are necessary to “achieve Arthur’s vision.” Rodriguez explained that they have raised $53.4 million so far this academic year, putting them just over halfway to the final fundraising goal as they move into the second semester. Rodriguez stated that “the real stars of the University are our faculty and our students.” He shared some main fundraising highlights of the year so far, speaking about the Engineering Science Program which has reached the seven figure level. Rodriguez stated “this is unheard of for a program that has no alumni yet.” He also highlighted an 18 million dollar gift from a faculty emeriti, and a 1.2 million dollar gift that was received from the “single largest taxpayer in the United Kingdom.” According to Rodriguez, this was the “first gift to say hello” as
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