Brandeis Magazine: Admissions Edition

Brandeis Admissions Edition / SUmmer 2016

Magazine

Greetings from Brandeis!

This edition of Brandeis Magazine, created especially for you, explores the outstanding accomplishments of members of the Brandeis family — people who are working to create powerful, positive change around the world. The strong sense of purpose and moral vision embodied by our namesake, Louis D. Brandeis, continues to this day within our Brandeis family.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined us on campus this year in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the day Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court. Justices Ginsburg and Brandeis epitomize what it means to be Brandeisian in their affirmation of social principles and in their belief in a just world. These are values that are shared by many in our community, on campus and beyond. In this issue of the magazine, you will read about the illustrious career of Louis Brandeis and why the legacy of his work is as relevant now as it has ever been.

Every issue of Brandeis Magazine delves into the fascinating lives of our students, faculty and alums. As you read this one, remember that, at Brandeis, you’ll be encouraged to create your own compelling story.

I hope that you will come chat with us as we travel all over the country this fall. Better yet, come to campus to meet the many dynamic Brandeisians — and see them in action.

Sincerely,

Jennifer J. Walker Dean of Admissions

Contents Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

Features 10 American Sage

By Philippa Strum ’59 The opinions of Louis D. Brandeis are more evocative and relevant than ever, 100 years after his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

16 Saigon Sayonara

28 Departments 2 Angle of View 4 Perspective Using kindergarten rules to inspire college kids? It’s elementary.

By Joseph McBride ’66 South Vietnam’s fall was both surreal and searing, says a State Department vet caught in that maelstrom four decades ago.

22 The Souls of Rich Black Folk

By Lawrence Goodman Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson ’68 looks back at the effect of growing up in an affluent black enclave in Chicago in a powerful new memoir, “Negroland.”

6 The Brief Ruth Bader Ginsburg visits Brandeis; budding Brandeis entrepreneurs present their ideas; studying prayer in the halls of Congress.

28 The Brandeis Questionnaire Myq Kaplan ’00

30 Alumni Profiles Lynn Jawitz ’78; Dennis Kelleher ’84; Barbara Clarke, IBS MA’91.

32 Arts and Culture Roee Gilron ’09 captures a fresh take on his homeland with the “Israel Story” podcast; the Rose expands its collection of works on paper; dance photographer Lois Greenfield ’70 repeals the laws of gravity.

36 On the Bookshelf 38 Inquiry The search for a grand unified theory of the senses; a collaboration with Hampton University aims to diversify the scientific workforce; uncorking a dripless wine bottle.

16 Cover: Illustration by Peter Strain.

Angle of View

Moonlighting When Ben Gomes-Casseres ’76 isn’t writing books or teaching at Brandeis International Business School, he likes to stargaze. A keen amateur astronomer and photographer, he captured September’s supermoon eclipse from Westford, Mass.

Because the moon in its elliptical orbit was at its closest point to Earth, it looked larger than a full moon usually does. As the moon drifted into Earth’s shadow, some sunlight could still reach it, bent by Earth’s atmosphere, coloring the moon brick red in a starry sky. From the moon, Earth would have looked like a black ball surrounded by a rim of red — the thousands of sunsets and sunrises taking place on Earth at that moment.

Photograph by Ben Gomes-Casseres

Perspective

P hoto of Th e Shady Hill School sea mu r al by Sa n d i Ta n g

The ABCs of SPLERT Kindergartners can teach college students a thing or two about learning.

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By James Morris

here’s a best-selling book by Robert Fulghum titled “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” a thoughtful reflection on everyday life and how to live it. It points out that many valuable life skills — small things, like sneezing into your sleeve; big things, like sharing, treating others with kindness and looking at the world with wonder — are learned when you are very young, and stay relevant throughout your life.

I am a biology professor, and my wife is a kindergarten teacher. Over and over, I am struck by how much her work can inform what I do at Brandeis.

For instance, her students do a lot of projects.

Project-based learning is becoming commonplace at universities like Brandeis, too. Last year, students built a savanna to learn about ecosystems.

This year, they mixed paint to match their skin color as a way of thinking about the limitations of the labels “white” and “black.”

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Guess where these activities happened? In my wife’s kindergarten, not my college classroom.

Her kindergartners make observations and do experiments. On a recent visit to Shady Hill School, in Cambridge, Mass., where she teaches, I watched as her students made predictions and then discovered, surprisingly, that grapefruits float and grapes sink (consider that one for a moment).

Once a year, Shady Hill observes Flex Week.

Students and teachers step away from their usual activities and do something different. Typically, they focus deeply on a topic. Last year, they studied the ocean: They made a sea mural covering an entire wall; they wrote a song about sea creatures; they visited the New England Aquarium.

Flex Week can be just as compelling in a college setting. Brandeis has semester- or summerlong versions of this kind of immersion, known as Justice Brandeis Semesters. Students in small groups, under the guidance of a professor or two,

pursue a topic in depth. Recent explorations have included social media for social movements, and biology-inspired design.

To kick off last year’s Flex Week at Shady Hill, the kindergartners, as a group, listed things they knew about the ocean (“fish tails go sideways; whale tails go up and down”) followed by things they wanted to learn (“what’s at the bottom of the ocean”).

Imagine a college class that, instead of starting with a set syllabus, began by compiling a list of things the students know (or think they know) and things they would like to learn. This approach could be used in a range of disciplines, as a way for students to take ownership of their learning.

The core education values embraced by Shady Hill’s kindergarten and lower school are described in a mission statement that can be summarized by the acronym SPLERT. S is “struggle.” Learning demands some frustration, even failure at times. Children have to know how to overcome obstacles, tackle problems and pick themselves up when they fall. A childhood free from struggle doesn’t allow them to truly grow.

P is “play.” Free, imaginative play teaches children to work together, take turns, discover new things and make connections. Free play is vanishing in our over-scheduled, adult-centered world, yet it is essential.

L and E stand for “limits” and “expectations.”

Learning works only if students feel safe. While freedom and exploration are encouraged, there have to be rules (not everything is OK) and boundaries (certain behaviors are not appropriate).

Everyone also has to show R, “respect,” by listening, being sensitive and caring for one another.

This applies to how children treat one another, and how teachers and students interact.

Finally, there’s T. Learning takes “time.” In today’s fast-paced world, that’s often overlooked. For deep learning, we need to delve into a topic, explore it, make mistakes, leave and come back to our inquiry.

All these values apply to college as well. Take struggle. What cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork calls a “desirable difficulty” is akin to the Goldilocks challenge. If learning comes too easily, students get bored. If studies are too hard, students get discouraged or overwhelmed. The trick is finding the level that is just right for them.

Play is often overlooked at the college level, but it is just as important as it is in kindergarten. When

there are too many constraints, we miss opportunities to learn. In my project laboratory class, students have the opportunity to do genuine research — experiments relevant to the field, which they don’t know the end points of — giving them ample room for play, exploration and discovery.

Limits, expectations and respect are critical, too. In a large classroom, respect begins when a professor learns everyone’s name, listens to and considers everyone’s responses, and treats every student as a serious learner.

Time is as overlooked in college as it is elsewhere. We communicate to students that doing more is better — more classes, more majors, more extracurricular activities, more leadership positions. Yet what students gain in breadth they lose in depth. Working in a lab over many semesters, composing a piece of music, tackling a difficult math problem — these are all spaces that require time, focus and concentrated attention.

Not long ago, I asked my wife’s students what science is. Here are three of their responses: “I think science is finding out mysteries. … Science can be interesting, and it usually includes

Free play teaches children to work together, take turns, discover new things and make connections. Yet free play is vanishing in our over-scheduled world.

being patient. And sometimes you can do little tiny science experiments.”

“It’s experiments. Like, you are learning about something, and you want to learn more about it sometimes.”

“Science is when you ask a question and figure it out, or something.”

These answers really go to the heart of what science is. With schools’ current emphasis on testing and memorization, my hope is that these students remember their answers, and indeed all of kindergarten’s lessons, by the time they reach college.

James Morris is an associate professor of biology and lead author of the introductory college textbook “Biology: How Life Works.” He blogs at blogs.brandeis.edu/sciencewhys.

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 5

The Brief

Ruth Bader Ginsburg visits campus to celebrate Louis Brandeis

By Jarret Bencks

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n Thursday, Jan. 28 — 100 years to the day that Brandeis University’s namesake Louis D. Brandeis was nominated to the nation’s highest court — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke to more than 2,500 gathered at Brandeis about his legacy and continued influence on public discourse and American jurisprudence.

Her address, held at the university’s Gosman Sports and Convocation Center, kicked off a semester-long centennial celebration of Louis D. Brandeis’ appointment to the Supreme Court.

Ginsburg, who has served on the Supreme Court since 1993, praised Brandeis for his commitment to civil rights and liberties, his willingness to change with the times, and his

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Ginsburg reflected on Brandeis’ legacy on 100th anniversary of his nomination to the Supreme Court.

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fact-based approach to writing legal briefs, which Ginsburg said she emulates.

“I can think of no greater tribute to all that Justice Brandeis — and this, his namesake university — stand for than to inaugurate our celebration with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” said Interim President Lisa Lynch in her introduction of Ginsburg.

Lynch pointed out some of the similarities between Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, and Ginsburg, the first female Jewish justice: Both have relied on fact-based jurisprudence to advance social change, and both have used their opinions and dissents to educate the public about the social conditions that affect people’s lives.

But there are also differences between the two, Lynch noted. Ginsburg had to overcome gender-based discrimination to practice law, starting in law school and continuing in the law firms where she sought employment. Yet Ginsburg did not allow this to block her path, which ultimately led to the Supreme Court.

“She is a force of nature,” Lynch said.

“Underestimate her at your peril.”

Before Ginsburg addressed the Gosman audience — which included Frank Gilbert, Brandeis’ grandson — she met with a small group of Brandeis students. During this talk, she reflected on her experiences coming up in the field of law, and compared them to what women now face.

“The world has changed enormously. ...

Opportunities are excellent, but there are still challenges,” she said. “One of the challenges is not to react in anger if you think you’re being put down because you are a woman.”

She offered a piece of advice drawn from her relationship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom she is known to have had

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a chummy rapport, despite their typically having considerably different interpretations of the law.

“If Justice Scalia said something or wrote something I thought was a bit over the top, unfair to a colleague, I tuned out as if it wasn’t there,” she said. “Never react in anger. Tune it out if you don’t want to hear it.”

In her remarks at the centennial celebration in Gosman, Ginsburg spoke about the famed “Brandeis brief,” a legal-writing technique Brandeis pioneered as an attorney, in which he cited science- and social science-based data at length in his briefs.

Ginsburg said the method is one she admires and has emulated.

But, she said, when you look back at the original Brandeis brief, written for the Supreme Court case Muller v. Oregon, much of the scientific information it presented wouldn’t hold up today.

The Muller case questioned whether the state of Oregon could impose a 10-hour-per-day work limit on women’s employment.

Brandeis’ brief argued in favor of the limit. Yet the social and scientific observations it cited were based on reinforcing the notion of women as caretakers and as physically inferior to men.

“Would Brandeis’ technique work when social and economic data are inconsistent, and used to challenge sex-based classifications in the law?” Ginsburg asked.

She also weighed in on how she thought Brandeis would view some of the court’s more recent landmark decisions. Ginsburg said she had “no doubt” Brandeis would have agreed with the court’s decision to uphold key pieces of the Affordable Care Act, and that he “would have deplored” the Citizens United ruling, which prohibits the government from restricting political-campaign spending by organizations, including for-profit corporations.

Ginsburg’s address was followed by a panel discussion titled “Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court and American Democ-

racy,” which included Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; Philippa Strum ’59, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Jeffrey Toobin, legal-affairs reporter at The New Yorker; and U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf. The discussion, moderated by former Brandeis President Frederick M. Lawrence, focused on Brandeis’ legacy, and the ways in which his ideas still resonate today.

Gants said Brandeis reshaped what being a lawyer with a social conscience means, and focused public attention on the pitfalls of a concentration of wealth.

“He recognized that if the excesses of wealth were not restrained and regulated by law, then capitalism itself would be destroyed by populist anger,” Gants said. “Sound familiar?”

Strum reflected on Brandeis’ belief in active citizen participation and the people’s role in determining public policy. In order to do that, citizens have to be able to educate themselves by reading, talking to others and listening, Strum said.

“To him, the most important thing about the right to speech was not actually the right to speak, but the right to hear,” she said.

Wolf pointed to Brandeis’ fierce dedication to combating corruption and his willingness to work with people from any background.

“I’ve long admired Brandeis for his capacity for growth,” Wolf said. “It came from interacting with a wide range of people.”

Brandeis’ life, which spanned the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War II, occurred during a period of tremendous change. Toobin believes those changes had a significant impact on Brandeis’ growth.

“I think Justice Brandeis’ career, as both a lawyer and as judge, is the story of his response to the Industrial Revolution,” Toobin said. “I think he was at his best when he was looking forward to the world it was becoming.”

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The Brief Waterfront Views In the early morning, the Brandeis rowing team skims a course on the Charles River that features views of Usen Castle’s tallest tower and the Shapiro Science Center observatory before pulling in at the dam just past the Watch Factory in downtown Waltham. Caroline Kaye ’18, Mozelle Shamash-Rosenthal ’16, Julia Zhu ’19 and Beth Alshvang ’16 make good time on this misty morning.

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Invention + Innovation = Commercialization

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hat do a fashion app, an online calculus tool and a special formulation of carrot fiber have in common?

They’re all inventions of budding Brandeis entrepreneurs. In November, 20 inventive students, faculty and staff debuted novel product ideas at the inaugural Hassenfeld Family Innovation Center’s Innovation Showcase.

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LEADING EDGE: Entrepreneurs explain their wares at the Hassenfeld Family Innovation Center’s Innovation Showcase.

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Each presenter used seed funding from the Office of Technology Licensing’s SPROUT (bench research) or SPARK (social, educational, business and computer science research) incubator program to develop their ideas.

Nearly 200 Brandeis students, faculty, staff and alumni, and area business leaders came to the presentations and “invested” in their three favorite inventions using Monopoly money. Grady Ward ’16, who developed a Web-based tool to help students learn calculus, praised the innovation center, a partnership between the Office of Technology Licensing and Brandeis International Business School, for “getting people thinking critically about ways to turn their ideas into something tangible and to consider, ‘What would the next steps be if I were to receive this funding?’”

“The event demonstrated our mission in action — to nurture and support entrepreneurial activity at Brandeis,” says Rebecca Menapace, executive director of the Office of Technology Licensing and the Hassenfeld Family Innovation Center, and associate provost for innovation.

The winning invention was a product that uses soluble and insoluble fiber from carrot pomace to prevent, delay or reduce type 2 diabetes mellitus. A potential cancer therapy using compounds derived from broccoli took second place. Third place went to FashionSnapp, a smartphone application that crowdsources realtime fashion advice.

— Christina Moores

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Newsmakers Eve Marder ’69 has received the prestigious Kavli Prize. The Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience at Brandeis shared the Kavli for neuroscience with two other researchers, for their individual lines of work in decoding how experience and neural activity remodel brain function. The trio splits $1 million in prize money. Marder’s research on small neural circuits found in lobsters and crabs has revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the fundamental nature of neuronal circuit operation.

David Rakowski, the Walter W. Naumberg Professor of Composition, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters — one of the highest recognitions of artistic merit in the U.S. — for his contributions to music composition. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Rakowski is perhaps best known for his 100 high-energy piano études. He is one of three academy members who hail from Brandeis; the others are professor emeritus of music Martin Boykan and professor emeritus of composition Yehudi Wyner, who also serves as the academy’s president.

Susan S. Lanser, professor of comparative literature; English; and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, has received the American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for her book “The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830,” published by the University of Chicago Press. The prize is awarded annually for the women’s history or feminist theory book that best reflects the ideals exemplified by Joan Kelly, a pioneering feminist historian.

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has established the Diversity, Excellence and Inclusion Scholarship (DEIS) for students often overlooked in traditional admissions processes. In its inaugural year, the scholarship will provide five students admitted to master’s programs in the humanities, social sciences and arts with full-tuition credit, a $10,000 annual stipend and extra programmatic support. The program seeks to help students transition into elite doctoral programs at Brandeis, and beyond. The first DEIS scholars arrive on campus in August.

Jonathan D. Sarna ’75, MA’75, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, has been named a University Professor. The title, the highest designation accorded to faculty at Brandeis, is reserved for those who have achieved exceptional scholarly or professional distinction, whose work cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and whose appointment elevates the university’s reputation and prestige. Sarna joined the Brandeis faculty in 1990.

Better to Receive Than to Give?

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f their prayers for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate are any indication, congressional chaplains have a good deal of faith in the Bible verse “Ask, and it shall be given you.”

A unique study by Brandeis and Clemson University researchers reveals that congressional chaplains are very good at asking God for help and much less interested in praising or thanking him.

The study, published in the Journal of Church and State, examined several components of 200 prayers offered by three Senate and two House chaplains to Congress in 1990, 2000 and 2010. Ninety-six percent of the prayers, or 191 of them, asked for something. (Apparently, few of the petitions asked the Almighty to help the U.S. Congress become more bipartisan.)

In 22 percent of the prayers, the chaplains offered thanks to God. They praised God even less — in 17 percent of the prayers. They “bore witness” in 71 percent.

“Although all five chaplains in our research Wendy Cadge invoked the name of God, we found few other commonalities across either the style or content of their prayers,” says sociology professor Wendy Cadge, who co-authored the study with Clemson political science professor Laura Olson and Brandeis graduate student Margaret Clendenen.

“The chaplains mixed pastoral and prophetic messages in ways not clearly connected to current events, election cycles or levels of congressional polarization,” says Cadge. And though Senate chaplains shifted from largely Christian to more religiously neutral prayer language between 1990 and 2010, House chaplains did not.

Each of the three Senate chaplains developed his own prayer style, says Cadge. Richard Halverson quoted the Bible in almost every prayer, spoke regularly of Congress, and often mentioned senators and staff by name.

His successor, L. John Ogilvie, actively reminded senators of their responsibilities before God and the nation in providential terms. Current chaplain Barry Black has never quoted the Bible and has mentioned Jesus only once, in reference to the Christmas story. These differences reveal a shift from a more explicitly Judeo-Christian approach toward more religiously neutral language, says Cadge.

The congressional chaplaincy dates back to 1774 when Jacob Duché, rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, was recruited to offer prayers before the First Continental Congress. But having chaplains in the halls of political power has also been controversial. In the 1850s, Congress received a number of petitions calling for the elimination of the position on the grounds of separation of church and state. In 1983, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Marsh v. Chambers permitted the practice of legislative prayer on the basis of historical custom.

— Jarret Bencks Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 9

“Y

A century after his appointment to the Supreme Court, Louis Br andeis is more relevant than ever, especially his ideas on social justice, the Constitution and democr acy.

ou were talking to Brandeis in your sleep again,” my husband said.

That wasn’t exactly a surprise. It was the early 1980s, and I was deep into writing a biography of Louis Dembitz Brandeis.

Any biographer will tell you it’s impossible not to become completely enmeshed in the life and thought of a subject.

As a professor of American government and constitutional law at Brooklyn College, I had arrived at the point in my career where I thought I should undertake a biography of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. I considered William O. Douglas, but he was still on the court, and I wasn’t sure writing about a living person was either ethical or wise.

Brandeis died in 1941, and the last full biography of him had been written in the 1940s. Surely, it was time for another generation’s take on the man.

I’d been intrigued by Brandeis ever since I was a Brandeis University undergrad in the late 1950s, walking past the statue of him that had just gone up on campus. The judicial robe sailing out behind him made him look like an alarmingly big bird about to take off. I wondered then what he had done to deserve being cast in bronze, much less having a university named after him.

What an extraordinary man I encountered once I began my research.

He pioneered savings-bank life insurance, fought the huge trusts that were rapidly taking over much of the American economy, and virtually invented the position of public-interest attorneys who provide free legal services for important social causes.

He negotiated settlements in major labor disputes, fashioned Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential campaign, created Wilson’s approach to regulating the economy, forged a new approach to constitutional interpretation, articulated the right to privacy and led the American Zionist movement.

And that was all before 1916, the year Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court. What he did in his pre-Supreme Court life and during his subsequent 23 years on the court left a lasting impact on American ideas and law.

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Sage Illustrations by Peter Strain

By Philippa Strum ’59

The principles Brandeis laid down remain extraordinarily useful as the U.S. grapples with 21st-century challenges. His ideals are timeless, capable of providing guidance yesterday, today and into the future.

Here are a few examples.

The living law

In 1908, while Brandeis was still practicing law in Boston, the National Consumers League asked him to defend an Oregon statute limiting women’s work hours before a U.S. Supreme Court that scorned labor-protective legislation.

At the time, American courts took a static approach to judging, particularly in constitutional litigation. Case analysis was either historical, based on what judges thought a clause’s writers meant, or mechanistic, relying on what judges saw as the plain meaning of the words.

Brandeis, on the other hand, believed the Constitution is a living document, designed to be interpreted in light of current societal needs. (In today’s terms, that makes him more of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg than an Antonin Scalia.)

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Departing radically from the norm, the brief Brandeis submitted to the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon devoted only two pages to traditional legal arguments and citations.

But over 15 pages, he cited state and foreign laws that limited women’s work hours, then included 95 additional pages of sociological and economic data culled from reports by numerous American and British sources. The data were meant to demonstrate that maximum-hours laws for women served a useful purpose in an industrialized society and that the idea of such laws had already gained general acceptance.

His strategy succeeded. For the first time, the court upheld a law limiting hours, and praised Brandeis by name in its opinion. Lawyers were electrified. Requests for copies of his brief poured in from around the country.

The style of brief now known as the “Brandeis brief” soon became the norm in constitutional litigation. Think Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which the NAACP used facts to demonstrate that “separate” was never “equal.”

Think the cases then-attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued successfully in the 1970s showing the harm done by laws that discriminated against women.

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Or, more recently, think Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), in which a host of briefs pointed out that 72 percent of Americans already lived in states that recognized gay marriage.

Today’s fact-based jurisprudence is a major part of the Brandeis legacy.

‘The right to be let alone’

The Fourth Amendment grants people the right against “unreasonable searches and seizures” of “their persons, houses, papers and effects.”

So, many Americans were shocked when Edward Snowden announced in 2013 that the National Security Agency (NSA) was monitoring their telephone calls and Internet communications. The U.S. government countered it was only doing what was necessary to protect Americans from terrorists.

In 1928, decades before the NSA was created, Justice Brandeis wrote a dissent to the decision in Olmstead v.

United States, a Prohibition-era case that involved wiretapping by federal agents trying to catch bootleggers.

The government argued, in words similar to those it would use almost a century later, that the wiretapping was necessary to protect Americans from criminals.

Besides, wiretapping didn’t involve physically entering anyone’s home, so the Fourth Amendment didn’t apply.

The majority of the justices agreed.

Brandeis was outraged. Back in 1890, he and his law partner had written a Harvard Law Review article that, for the first time, argued the right to privacy was inherent in American law. Now, in his Olmstead dissent, he noted that a constitutional principle, “to be vital, must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth” — in other words, that the spirit of an amendment has to be interpreted in the context of the historical moment.

He also reminded the court it had long held that the Fourth Amendment applied to the postal system, adding: The evil incident to invasion of the privacy of the telephone is far greater than that involved in tampering with the mails. … The tapping of one man’s telephone line involves the tapping of the telephone of every other person whom he may call or who may call him.

As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wiretapping.

Then, declaring that “the makers of our Constitution … sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations,” he

penned some memorable prose that seems quite relevant today: They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

As for the government’s insistence that the wiretapping was necessary for law enforcement, Brandeis wrote: Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. … The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, wellmeaning but without understanding.

The phrase “the right to be let alone” has since been invoked in almost every constitutional lawsuit and decision involving privacy, including not only instances of government spying but in such areas as reproductive freedom and gay rights.

Speech and the citizen in a democr acy

In 1920, the state of California found a woman named Anita Whitney guilty of “criminal syndicalism,” or breaking the law by working for political and economic change. Whitney was convicted of helping to organize the California Communist Labor Party, which advocated change not just through the ballot box but through strikes

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding,” wrote Br andeis. and demonstrations as well. Given the anti-Communist, anti-labor hysteria of the post-World War I years, that was considered subversive.

The Supreme Court upheld Whitney’s conviction.

Brandeis concurred for procedural reasons yet wrote an opinion that reads like a dissent. Invoking the words of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”) and the Founding Fathers who penned them, Brandeis described the relationship between Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 13

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speech and democracy. It was the first time a Supreme Court justice had done so.

Brandeis’ argument remains so central to this country’s uniquely permissive speech jurisprudence that it is one of the most-cited opinions in American law. He wrote: Those who won our independence … believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. … [The Founding Fathers] knew … that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.

100

Brandeis celebrates Louis Brandeis

To mark the centennial of Louis D. Brandeis’ appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, Brandeis University rolled out a semester-long celebration, “Louis D. Brandeis 100: Then and Now,” on Jan. 28, 2016 — 100 years to the day that President Woodrow Wilson nominated Brandeis to the court.

The kickoff event, “Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court and American Democracy,” included an appearance and remarks

by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a panel discussion moderated by Frederick M. Lawrence, former Brandeis president and secretary and chief executive officer of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Ralph D. Gants, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; Philippa Strum ’59, senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Brandeis biographer; New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin; and Mark L. Wolf, senior judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, were panelists.

In March and April, the celebration continued with a series of public discussions exploring Justice Brandeis’ lasting relevance in contemporary American society. Panels considered his views on democracy, citizenship, speech, privacy and “bigness,” as well as the growing diversity of the Supreme Court.

Details on all the centennial events can be found at www.brandeis.edu/ldb-100/events/index.html.

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In other words, the freedom to speak is the freedom to hear. Without access to all ideas, good and bad, how can the citizens of a democracy decide which policies are best and which politicians to support? Speech can be dangerous, and Brandeis acknowledged that. He nonetheless believed in the ability of the citizenry to sort out bad ideas from good ones, even if that takes some time, and so he opposed restricting speech if there is time for the bad ideas to be countered by the good.

His opinion continues: Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. … They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

If there is no immediate danger of lawlessness resulting from speech and there is time to counter “bad” speech with “good” speech, bad speech has to be allowed. In fact, bad speech has to be as protected as good speech, Brandeis believed, because the government cannot be trusted to define the “bad” and the “good.” The cure for bad speech is not government intervention but good speech, and lots of it.

What Brandeis could not anticipate, of course, was the invention of the Internet, with its wonderful ability to give everyone a forum for speech, along with its equally worrisome provision of a platform for cyberbullying, revenge porn, terrorist recruitment and other such phenomena. How do we apply the Brandeisian principles to these problems?

Remember that Brandeis insisted that the Constitution is a living document and that problems brought to the court have to be examined in light of current circumstances. He enunciated principles, not panaceas for present or future societal problems.

One of these principles is that the right to speech is inextricably tied to the responsibility to participate in the democratic process. “Full and free exercise of this right [of speech] by the citizen is ordinarily also his duty, for its exercise is more important to the nation than it is to himself,” he wrote in a 1920 case. A convert to the cause of woman suffrage, he had declared before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment that he was convinced

“not only that women should have the ballot, but that society demands that they exercise the right.”

Democratic citizenship implies duties as well as rights, said Brandeis. Uninvolved citizens — the ones who do not answer bad speech with good speech — are shirking their responsibility to learn about the issues of the day, to help think through answers, to engage other citizens in discussion and to make their views known to policymakers.

These two principles — that speech must be allowed unless there is immediate incitement to crime, and that all citizens have a responsibility to counter bad speech with good speech — still resonate today. It falls to us to work out how to apply them.

Too big to fail

Brandeis was particularly concerned about huge banks and other overly large corporations that used “other people’s money” — a phrase that served as a title for one of his collections of essays, speeches and judicial opinions — to amass enormous power that might be wielded in ways detrimental to society.

He believed a business became inefficient when it grew so large that the people at the top could not possibly know all the details of what the business was doing. Efficiency, to him, wasn’t just about making money; it also meant contributing to the general welfare — which every business ought to do.

“If the Lord had intended things to be big, he would have made man bigger — in brains and character,” Brandeis told a U.S. Senate committee in 1911.

In some instances, big trusts had amassed “such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state,” Brandeis wrote in a 1933 opinion. The effects on “the lives of the workers, of the owners and of the general public” were so “fundamental and far-reaching” that the country was in danger of becoming subject “to the rule of a plutocracy.”

Workers’ lives were of great concern to Brandeis. He supported maximum-hours and minimum-wage laws for men as well as for women, and fulminated against irregularity of employment. Work situations that underpay employees and allow them too little time for leisure and for educating themselves about the pressing public issues of the day endanger both the decent lives to which all people are entitled and the democracy in which they live, he believed.

Employment ought to be regular, and workers ought to be paid what today would be called a living wage.

Consider the economic crisis of 2008 or 21st-century income inequality. Brandeis’ thinking on the pitfalls

of bigness and the need for a living wage could not be more pertinent.

‘The last word’

A great admirer of the ancient Greeks, Brandeis regarded the Periclean Age as a model democracy that held important lessons for Americans. A journalist who interviewed him in 1916 reported wryly, “Euripides, I now judge, after having interviewed Brandeis on many subjects, said the last word on most of them.”

When I mentioned this at the dinner table one evening in 1980, my 12-year-old daughter responded, “Well, Mom, to hear you, Brandeis had the answers to everything.”

Not quite. But his is a legacy of which Brandeisians can be proud, and one to keep in mind as we ponder the many challenges that face us today.

Philippa Strum, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and professor of political science emerita at City University of New York, has published widely on the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. presidency, civil liberties, and women and politics. She is the author of “Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People” (1984), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in biography, and “Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism” (1993).

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 15

LAST CHANCE: On April 29, 1975, South Vietnamese citizens climb the 14-foot wall around the U.S. embassy in Saigon to try to reach evacuation helicopters.

Assoc i at e d P R e ss P h oto

Forty years after the fall of Saigon, a U.S. Foreign Service veteran remembers the disillusionment, desperation and chaos of South Vietnam’s final days.

By Joseph McBride ’66

Saigon Sayonara

S

outh Vietnam seemed strangely secure when I arrived in Saigon as a first-tour State Department political officer in late 1974. But signs soon suggested that stability was chimerical.

In early January 1975, I pulled late duty to send Washington the English translation of the speech President Nguyen Van Thieu gave to his nation after the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) overran Phuoc Binh, just 90 miles north of Saigon. Thieu had rationalized that retaking the jungle town was not worth the cost.

Militarily, he was right, but politically this was a disaster. Phuoc Binh was the first provincial capital the government had permanently abandoned after more than a decade of war. Even more dismaying, Thieu rambled on for three disjointed hours. Vietnam’s president and commander in chief seemed to be losing it.

While the translators worked, I slipped over to the Recreation Association to grab a sandwich. It was Luau Night around the swimming pool. U.S. contractors decked out in orchid leis were being served by waitresses in sarongs, all lit by tiki torches. The incongruity stunned me: partying as usual while the NVA racked up the score, less than 100 miles to the north.

This cannot last, I thought.

But I wanted to see the situation for myself. So in early 1975, I took annual leave for a four-day bus trip over the Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday, unarmed and unescorted, deep into the Mekong Delta. No travel clearance was required in those days. It was a different time and a different Foreign Service, hard to envision in the current era of cocoon-like constriction.

My intent was to poke around the district where I had served with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as the sole civilian on a joint military-civilian pacification advisory team from 1969-71. I wanted to gauge how security had changed on the ground, in a place where I could really judge the differences.

A reality check Our former team interpreter, a lasting friend whom I got out a few months later, went with me. We encountered no problems on the road. Vietnamese, though astonished to see an American on the bus, were happy to banter for long hours. Once we arrived in the district, the army captain now in command of it was a different matter.

Totally flummoxed, he wanted us out of there.

It soon became clear why. His outposts looked like the Maginot Line, because the Viet Cong roamed unchallenged right up to their gates and government militia to man the walls were scarce. Caught on the road at sunset once, we overnighted with a village notable we knew well. We could sleep in his house, but the Viet Cong were “all around,” he warned. The old gentleman kindly left us a concussion grenade before quickly departing to sleep elsewhere. We high-tailed it back down the road at the break of dawn.

I got what I wanted: a reality test of security on the ground, 1975 versus 1971. The official security rankings for the district — “average for the country” — had not changed in four years. But 18 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

the place we once knew to be 80 percent secure was now reduced to a hollow eggshell, waiting to be cracked.

Back at the embassy, my trip provoked no criticism. But neither was there a shred of interest in drawing on it for “defeatist” reporting to Washington.

My disillusionment was tempered by the explicit warning the department’s director of the Vietnam desk had given me before I left Washington: “Don’t stick your neck out to contest sanitized reporting. We all are perfectly aware Embassy Saigon is selling a concocted story, and nobody back here pays much attention to it.”

Accelerating collapse From mid-January to mid-April, the NVA rolled up the country rapidly. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam collapsed due to panicked orders from Saigon and incompetent senior leadership, with a few notable exceptions. The 18th Division bought 10 days with its heroic stand at Xuan Loc, northeast of Saigon, before it was overrun.

Although the imminent fall of South Vietnam was obvious to all of us, U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin adamantly clung to the hope that some political compromise could be worked out. Martin had lost a foster son, a helicopter pilot, in the war. He could not admit that defeat was a foregone conclusion.

The political section began discreetly identifying particularly highrisk Vietnamese for possible evacuation. In the end, however, the criteria were too vague, and the list was too long to be prioritized. For any given Vietnamese, it all came down to whom he knew, how lucky he was and how far his American contact would go to rescue him.

Several weeks before the end, two high-flying seventh-floor department staffers took unauthorized leave to rescue Vietnamese contacts for whom they felt personal responsibility. One morning, Deputy Chief of Mission Wolfgang Lehmann barged into the LIVES IN THE BALANCE: U.S. officials reach for a South Vietnamese child being transferred to a U.S. Navy ship.

Cou rte sy A n n e P h a m / U. S . N avy A r chives

That night, I fell asleep, exhausted, on an embassy desktop. On April 29, NVA rockets suddenly rained down from all around the city.

Nha Trang. At the end, the two personally nursed Alaska Contracting barges down the river to the sea. But due to the lack of embassy planning and execution, the enormous barges went out only half-filled.

That night, I fell asleep, exhausted, on an embassy desktop. In the false dawn of April 29, NVA rockets suddenly rained down from all around the city.

Hitting the streets The song “White Christmas,” the mission-warden code for activating the evacuation, started playing on the radio. It was time to rise and shine — and make things happen.

Several weeks earlier, I had signed on to drive high-risk contacts down to the Saigon docks for evacuation by sea. Around noon on the 29th, I grabbed a nine-passenger van with a full fuel tank and headed out to the safe house where political-section contacts were supposed to assemble. I requested that Lacy Wright, the deputy in the section, lead the way for the first run because he spoke excellent Vietnamese.

The ticklish part would be negotiating our way through the police guards protecting the docks to get to the evacuation barges on the river. I didn’t want any linguistic slip-ups to block our entry.

Herve GLOAGUEN / Gamma-Rapho via Ge tty Image s

political section and said, “Does anybody know Lionel Rosenblatt and Craig Johnstone? If they show up, have them report to the front office immediately!”

When he left, my boss muttered, “Before reporting in, those two better finish anything they came here to do, because they’ll be slammed into the first plane out of here.”

Sure enough, within the hour I ran into Rosenblatt and Johnstone climbing the back staircase to see me. I hurried them out of the embassy before they were spotted and, later, fixed them up with contacts at the Tan Son Nhut evacuation site. Over the next week, to their great credit, they got 30 contacts and their families out before departing themselves on the last commercial flight from Saigon.

A week before the end, the Department of Justice finally author­ ized “parole status” for the Vietnamese families of the estimated 5,000 private American citizens who refused to leave the country without them. An aide to the ambassador set up a center at the airfield to process these roughly 20,000 people. I soon joined him. We were stamping out “parolees” on the afternoon of April 28 when turncoat government pilots bombed and cratered the airfield. The damage put an end to any further fixed-wing evacuation.

We were now down to limited helicopter evacuation from the airfield and the embassy, plus a barge route down the Saigon River. The barges were the brainchild of two USAID field officers, who had distinguished themselves in chaotic evacuations down the coast from Da Nang and

IMPLORING, NOT ANGRY: South Vietnamese civilians wait outside the U.S. embassy gate on April 29.

The safe house was already swarming with people when we got there, and it only got worse throughout the day. Word on the street spread fast; it had been an illusion to think we could keep the safe houses secret. Separating out the genuine high-risk cases took time. We crammed up to 20 people into each van without making a dent in the inflow. Lacy sweet-talked us through the police and army barricades for the first run, then he and I got separated.

One foreign-service officer, stuck at the closed-off airport, linked up with the Marines to courageously thwart enraged paratroopers trying to force their way aboard the airlift or block the evacuation.

My boss got stuck with a houseful of high-level VIPs, but, despite frantic calls, no vehicles were ever sent to pick them up. In the end, he made it back to the embassy by foot but could get only three high-level friends through the gate with him. A third officer, driving a rescue mission, got stuck cruising around Saigon with two full bus loads and nowhere to take them. The airfield and the embassy were buttoned up tight. Tellingly, nobody in charge directed his buses to the barges leaving half-empty from the river docks.

Sadly, snafus and disconnects like these were the rule of the day, not the exception. Those with initiative — who would rather ask for forgiveness than wait for permission — were the ones who were truly effective. Officers from the Defense Attaché Office at the airfield had control of key assets, personnel to deploy and the nerve to jump the start gun. The rest of us played it by ear the best we could.

Back at my safe house, from all I could tell I was completely on my own. As the city shifted toward chaos, I could raise only the front office on my radio. I got plenty of “attaboys” and “stick to it as long as you can,” but no useful guidance or info of any kind.

Fortunately, the mood on the streets had not yet turned against us. Renegade South Vietnamese soldiers turning their guns on us — not the NVA — were always our biggest security risk. We knew leaders of the Airborne Brigade were actively plotting to Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 19

take Americans hostage to ensure their own evacuation. Beware the wrath of a betrayed ally.

I repeatedly delivered my passengers, and policemen guarding the docks grudgingly accepted handfuls of Vietnamese cash.

Toward the end of the day, a young army officer at a roadblock detained my van. Trouble, I thought. “No, I just want to say thank you for trying,” he said with a salute. The lieutenant declined to climb in with me, saying he would stay with his family.

Earlier, a senior embassy translator had declined a similar offer, snapping, “No, I’m Vietnamese. I’m staying.” It sounded like he’d already paid his dues to the new order and knew he was safe.

Heading for the barn By the time the long shadows of late afternoon arrived, there had been a long gap in the evacuation helicopters coming from the Seventh Fleet. Crowds overran my safe house. Two longhaired Saigon cowboys in bell-bottoms carried in a desiccated grandfather on an ebony chair — outrageous draft dodgers, not the people we set out to save. On top of it all, my van’s once-full fuel tank was now running on fumes, and gasoline stations were shut down tight. It was time to head back to the embassy.

I radioed that I was coming home. The ambassador’s longtime special assistant for field operations asked, as a personal favor, if I would make one more run to pick up his household staff. He told me I could siphon gas out of his parked car. So, gasoline taste in my mouth, I made one more run for the docks.

Back at the embassy, I found packed crowds hunkered down, waiting. Earlier wall climbers had been beaten down. Street toughs had cannibalized abandoned cars down to their naked X-frames,

If the Vietnamese trying to escape didn’t have an American protector to provide access to evacuation points, they were left behind. motor blocks and all. The vandals were snarly and scornful. But as I inched through them, the tens of thousands waiting around the embassy were imploring rather than angry.

The Marine guard at the main vehicle gate could not let me in.

Once he cracked the gate, masses of people would break through.

He had orders to fire on them if they did.

Baffled, I tried to figure out what to do. I threw my Samsonite briefcase over the wall, not wanting to get caught with the two hand grenades inside it if the crowd turned mean. Finally, another Marine directed me to the small sally-port gate opening into the consulate.

It was buttressed by projecting towers so that only one person at a time could pass. He asked me to collect the various Americans locked outside and quietly slip them over to the opening.

Slowly, mustering every courtesy term I could recall from language training, I worked my way around to the other side of the compound.

20 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

“Don’t worry — we’ll have helicopters enough for everybody who wants to go. We are not leaving without you,” I assured one and all. To my relief, they seemed to believe me. Because they wanted to, because they had to. What other hope could they have?

I collected about 10 Americans and their families, and gingerly got them to the consulate gate. Two huge Marines in full battle rattle came over the gate. I positioned myself between them as we passed each person through, including a very pregnant woman. Three stout men on the backside of the gate opened it and closed it behind each entrant.

My job was to pick out those who were to be saved and keep uttering the implausible promise that we would not abandon anybody. The two giant Marines repeatedly muscled the crowd back with their flak-jacketed bulk while snapping the loading slide on their (unloaded) M-16s for dramatic effect. I marveled at their cool — they didn’t understand the language and were totally vulnerable to a hidden knife or pistol. Later, I wrote them up, and they both got military awards and a coveted assignment to guard duty at the U.S. mission at the United Nations.

Pulling up stakes Inside the compound, I stripped to the waist, wringing buckets of sweat out of my shirt. I threw away a filthy gray-striped seersucker jacket that had covered the revolver tucked in the small of my back.

Suddenly, a platoon of some 40 Marines charged out from the main door of the chancery building, crossed the front lawn and flung their backs against the compound wall. Soon DCM Lehmann appeared, gesturing firmly, and called them back. The Marines moved away from the wall and back into the chancery building.

What was going on, I wondered. Lehmann, a former infantry officer, cleared up my confusion. “Nobody, nobody else gets into this compound,” he barked to all present. “Understand? And that goes for you, too, McBride!” Half-naked, I managed a “Yes, sir.”

It turned out the CIA station had assembled a bunch of “assets” in a building across from the embassy and then arranged for the Marine detachment to mount an assault over the wall and push the crowd back to open a corridor for those chosen few to get to the gates. Given the thousands of people in the street, it’s hard to imagine how this scheme could have worked out, unless the Marines had provoked panic by also firing into the air. But once the front office got word of it, the DCM promptly stomped on it.

The DCM’s intervention, however, was the only case I know of where the front office exercised effective control over any part of the street-level evacuation. On the contrary, the mission leadership was overwhelmed with dealing with Washington and, by all accounts, out of contact with what was going on outside. If the Vietnamese trying to escape didn’t have an American protector to provide access to evacuation points — embassy, airport or barge dock — they were left behind.

Most were left behind, including one agency’s full complement of 200 staffers and their families. Their American supervisors clearly were isolated and out of the loop until the balloon went up. When it did, they were ignored — misled, allegedly — and ultimately helpless

Dir ck H alste ad / Liais on

Saigon Sayonara

THE LUCKY ONES: Under the watchful eye of U.S. Marines, a line of nonmilitary evacuees, luggage in hand, board an aircraft at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, near Saigon.

to save their people. They had gullibly accepted generic assurances that their people would be wrapped up in the overall mission evacuation. No other agency, to my knowledge, was similarly naive.

I entered the chancery as tropical darkness fell suddenly. The political section was totally empty. Nobody could be found on any working-level floor that I could access. All the offices were thoroughly trashed, with the IBM Selectric typewriters getting special attention. An odor of alcohol wafted through from time to time.

Only when I got to the outer office of the executive suite on the third floor did I find a gaggle of people.

Though I saw nobody drinking, painkiller had clearly been applied here and there. I received plenty of congratulations and pats on the back. There was nothing more to do but wait.

Eventually, a CH-53 Sea Stallion arrived on the landing pad atop the building. A few Americans were needed to fill out an otherwise overwhelmingly Vietnamese passenger list. At the foot of the stairs to the roof, immediately in front of me, stood an impeccably dressed Europeanist doing his obligatory excursion tour to Asia, complete with perfectly pressed suit, neatly combed hair, starched handkerchief adorning his jacket pocket, polished attache case and overnight bag.

Right then and there, I decided I would never become like him.

As we started up the stairs, Ambassador Martin came out of his private office to pull me aside. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he intoned in a low Southern patrician voice that he knew what I had been doing out on the streets and he wanted to thank me. Truthfully, I felt honored to be there at the end, to have done all that I could do. For all his foibles, the ambassador had extended a gracious gesture that I had no right to expect.

It was pitch dark as the chopper lifted off the roof, but we could see scattered fires burning in the distance. By the glow of the eerie blue interior light, I could make out the Vietnamese passengers around me.

Some Americans were aboard for sure, but not many.

Contrary to some accounts, I detected no enemy groundfire reaching up to us. The NVA wanted us gone in time to celebrate

their victory on May Day, and we were going. They may have painted our choppers with their targeting systems, but they let us go unimpeded.

After a while, we landed under floodlights on the USS Hancock, a World War II-era carrier. Those of us with pistols handed them over. I slept for much of the five days’ journey to Subic Bay, in the Philippines.

‘Just a few more’ The evacuation concluded in the early morning of April 30. Ambassador Martin admirably made the evacuation as long as possible to get out every Vietnamese he could — “just a few more helicopters.”

Several inbound crews crashed from vertigo. Exasperated Navy officials finally got a direct presidential order to make the ambassador get on a designated helicopter just before dawn. That’s what it took.

Once the ambassador departed for the fleet, Americans-only boarding was strictly enforced. In the process, some 400 Vietnamese — including all mission firefighters who had volunteered to stay to the end — were abandoned.

Stuart Herrington, a Vietnamese-speaking captain in the Defense Attaché Office, had kept the crowd under control by promising he would not leave until they left. He was utterly devastated to be ordered — forced — to abandon those to whom he had given his personal word.

Deservedly, four decades later, retired Col. Herrington’s recollections of Saigon’s fall serve as the moral centerpiece of the 2014 documentary “Last Days in Vietnam.”

After joining USAID in 1969, Joseph McBride spent 37 years in the U.S. Foreign Service. In addition to Saigon, he held assignments in Rome, Bangkok, Lima, Managua, Bogota, Kandahar and Washington, D.C. His post-retirement activities have included backstopping drug eradication in Afghanistan and peacekeeping in Darfur. A longer version of this article appeared in the April 2015 issue of The Foreign Service Journal.

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 21

NEGROLAND (Black Belt, Chicago)

The Souls of Rich Black Folk Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Margo Jefferson ’68 grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a hidden world of African-American affluence. Spurned by whites and unlike most blacks, she’s spent her life figuring out her identity, most recently in a critically acclaimed memoir.

By Lawrence Goodman

A

s a child, Margo Jefferson ’68 wore her hair straight. It was naturally curly, but Jefferson is black, and whites set the standard of beauty back then. Everyone wanted to look like Brigitte Bardot or Elizabeth Taylor. Jefferson, like many black girls at the time, used a hot comb and a curling iron to undo her frizz. Every night, her mother slicked her head with oil to keep her hair in place.

Jefferson grew up in an affluent black enclave on the South Side of Chicago. It was part of the area known in the 1950s and ’60s as the Black Belt, but Jefferson prefers to call it Negroland, a word she also used as the title of her acclaimed 2015 memoir, published by Pantheon Books.

Negroland existed apart from both white and mainstream black society, a hermetic world with blackowned department stores, theaters and nightclubs.

There were riding stables and tennis clubs. Society clubs

“Is it kind of fun to be the brown-skinned person with blond hair? To do the unexpected?”

Jefferson says. “Sure is.” with names like the Links, the Moles and the Royal Coterie of Snakes threw formal dinner parties and cotillions. “We thought of ourselves as the Third Race,” Jefferson writes in “Negroland,” “poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians.”

Jefferson took ballet as a child. She studied classical piano. In high school, she acted in “Pygmalion” and “The Taming of the Shrew.” The future Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and New York Times cultural critic wore a short skirt and a preppy white sweater, and shook pompoms as the captain of the cheerleading squad. At her senior prom, she was selected to play Debussy’s “La Cathédrale Engloutie” for her classmates.

But for all its luxury and affluence, Negroland wasn’t an easy place to grow up. In fact, as Jefferson writes in her memoir, it “made and maimed” her.

I

n “Negroland,” Jefferson can come across as intense, aloof, cold and unhappy in her career as a writer.

“Her life has gone wrong,” she writes about herself.

She’s “ashamed of what she is.” “She knows she should love what she does [writing], but she doesn’t.”

“About love and sex, she should have been adventurous, not wary.” And that’s just the first chapter.

But conversing in a small, trendy restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, around the corner from the

24 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

apartment where she’s lived since the 1970s, Jefferson is charming. She smiles, laughs, makes jokes. Full of energy, she gesticulates as she talks, stabbing at the table to emphasize her points.

Today, she sports curly blond hair. She freely admits she started dyeing it in the early 2000s to hide the spreading gray. You might be tempted to see her choice of color as a serious statement about race — a black woman with blond hair — or a rebellion against the enforced straight hair of her childhood. She portrays it as the result of an inner playfulness. “Is it kind of fun to be the brown-skinned person with blond hair? To do the unexpected?” she says. “Sure is.”

She takes a similar approach to fashion. At the restaurant, she’s wearing a hooded vest with patches of tweed, slim black pants and a black sweater. She shops at vintage and boutique clothing stores. She’ll go “odd and eccentric one day, a little more preppy the next day, then a little faux ethnic or a little faux proper,” she says. She likes to mix it up.

Her journey from her cloistered upbringing with its suffocating mores and code of behavior to full selfawareness and autonomy required enormous inner strength. The freedom to tinker with her identity as she pleases was hard won.

Jefferson is a professor of nonfiction writing at Columbia University. Scrounge around Facebook and

you will find postings from former and current students heaping praise on her. She spent 11 years at the Times, which she joined as a book reviewer in 1993 after stints as an editor and writer at Newsweek and Vogue, and professorships at Columbia University and later NYU. In 1995, the same year she won the Pulitzer for her criticism at the Times, she switched to reviewing theater.

Her writing showed a deep breadth of knowledge and reflected her commitment to tying the arts to political and social issues. But she could be unsparing in her criticism, like when she described acclaimed theater director Daniel Sullivan’s staging techniques as “efficient, never organic … props are always used predictably.”

She says she wanted to turn her critic’s eye on herself in “Negroland.” Perhaps she is too harsh on herself. At the very least, she doesn’t give herself enough credit for her achievements or strength in overcoming personal and professional obstacles. Writers spend a lot of time inside their heads. They can focus too much on their faults, forgetting they’re no worse than anyone else’s.

Michael Lionstar

T

he idea for a memoir first struck Jefferson in the late ’90s, when her classmate Susan Dickler ’68 visited Chicago. Jefferson invited her to a tea hosted by her mother. Afterward, Dickler told Jefferson, “You have to write about this world.”

First, though, she had to write another book, “On Michael Jackson,” which explored America’s fascination with the King of Pop. In 2004, Jefferson left the Times so she could devote herself to finishing it. When it appeared two years later, Publishers Weekly wrote, “[Jefferson’s] slim, smart volume of cultural analysis may remind readers of Susan Sontag’s early, brilliant essays on pop culture.”

She committed herself fully to a memoir in 2010 when her only sibling, Denise, died of ovarian cancer at age 65. An accomplished dance educator, Denise was the director of the Ailey School at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Margo, who has never been married and doesn’t have children, says she suddenly felt an urgency to make a record of her life, that she had a “sense that time was fleeting.”

Jefferson’s ancestors were slaves, white slave owners, and free men and women. They quickly moved up the social ladder. They worked as farmers, musicians, lawyers, businesswomen and doctors. Jefferson’s father was a pediatrician. Her mother was a social worker who left the workforce to take care of her kids.

She also became one of Negroland’s leading socialites.

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the “Talented Tenth,” the select 10 percent of any racial or ethnic group qualified to lead the rest of its members forward.

South Side African-Americans thought of themselves this way and then some. “We weren’t raised to be average women,” Jefferson writes in “Negroland.” “We were raised to be better than most women of either race.”

The pressure to succeed was enormous. It also bred elitism. Negroland denizens looked down their noses at poorer blacks. They blamed them for giving AfricanAmericans a bad name and feeding white prejudice.

But the snobbery also masked insecurity. No matter what they did, whites would still never accept them.

They lived with a constant and real fear that their hard-earned privileges would be taken away from them. “Most white people want to see us as just more Negroes,” Jefferson’s mother told her.

Jefferson’s family lived with an unrelenting fear that whites would decide to take away what AfricanAmericans had worked so hard to achieve. “Nothing highlighted our privilege more than the menace to it,” she writes. “We had the moral advantage; they had the assault weapons of ‘great civilization’ and ‘triumphant history.’”

At the time, the proper response wasn’t thought to be resistance. Instead, your behavior as a female in Negroland had to be impeccable. You never wanted to do something whites could use to fuel their racism or aggression. Jefferson grew up feeling a crippling self-awareness about her behavior. She could never misbehave.

IMPECCABLE: Margo (foreground) and her older sister, Denise, during a visit to Canada, around 1956.

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 25

J

efferson wound up at Brandeis almost by chance.

She was touring small liberal-arts colleges in the Northeast — Wheaton, Wellesley and Pembroke (the women’s college at Brown University). Brandeis wasn’t

on the list. Then one day her train got stuck in a rainstorm, and a young Brandeis professor happened to be sitting nearby. They struck up a conversation. “Think about Brandeis,” he said. “It’s an interesting place.”

She followed his advice.

She liked the school’s progressive culture and that it was co-ed, still something of a rarity in the late ’60s.

There were few African-American students. But her high school, the progressive University of Chicago Laboratory School, had also been mostly white. She was used to it.

“It was a very good time to be at Brandeis,” Jefferson says. She became part of the Black Power movement. She took classes with Herbert Marcuse, the German social critic and prominent New Left theorist, and poet Allen Grossman. Students protested Vietnam, debated the place of black literature in the canon, and discussed Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael.

Excerpt from ‘Negroland’ I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.

I call it Negroland because I still find “Negro” a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures arise to challenge its primacy.

I call it Negroland because “Negro” dominated our history for so long; because I lived with its meanings and intimations for so long; because they were essential to my first discoveries of what race meant, or, as we now say, how race was constructed.

For nearly two hundred years we in Negroland have called ourselves all manner of things. Like the colored aristocracy the colored elite the colored 400 the 400 the blue vein society the big families, the old families, the old settlers, the pioneers Negro society, black society the Negro, the black, the African-American upper class or elite.

26 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses or uncertainties in public. (Even now I shy away from the word “failings.”) Even the least of them would be turned against the race. Most white people made no room for the doctrine of “human, all too human”: our imperfections were sub- or provisionally human.

For my generation the motto was still: Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.

Part of me dreads revealing anything in these pages except our drive to excellence. But I dread the constricted expression that comes from that. And we’re prone to being touchy. Self-righteously smug and snobbish. So let me begin in a quiet, clinical way.

I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation’s oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood she was a full-time wife, mother and socialite.

But where did they come from to get there? And which clubs and organizations did they join to seal their membership in this world?

Excerpted with permission from Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House.

Courtesy Robe rt D. Farbe r Unive rs ity Archive s and Special Colle ctions De partme nt, Brand e is Uni v e rs i ty

In her book, she recalls being 5 years old at a dinner party thrown by her parents and blurting out, “Sometimes I forget to wipe myself.” There was laughter but also an underlying anxiety. The unspoken message was clear, Jefferson writes: “Your mistakes — bad manners, poor taste, an excess of high spirits — could put you, your parents and your people at risk.”

Negroland’s residents stood apart from everyone else, black and white. They felt at home only with one another. By the time Jefferson arrived at Brandeis, she was, on the outside, the model black woman her mother demanded she become.

Inside, she was full of self-doubt and insecurity.

“If you were really thinking about all these things, you had to challenge not only your assumptions but your behaviors,” Jefferson says. “I rethought my snobbery.”

Her parents didn’t quite know what to make of what was happening. Although, of their two daughters, Denise was more aggressive in confronting them, Margo also had her quarrels. She remembers arguing with her father about Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer and Supreme Court justice who furthered the cause of civil rights but also supported the Vietnam War. Jefferson’s father thought Marshall could be forgiven. His daughter thought the famed jurist was beyond redemption.

By the end of her four years, the political climate had shifted. Other blacks now looked down on privileged African-Americans like her. “We were a corruption of The Race, a wrongful deviation. We’d let ourselves become tools of oppression in the black community,” she writes in “Negroland.” “We’d settled for a desiccated white facsimile and abandoned a vital black culture.”

Around this time, a sadness set in that Jefferson recognized as depression. She was furious at herself for not achieving the success her parents expected of her. And she hated herself for still being so much like them. She couldn’t make it as either a political radical or a dilettante. The depression, she says, was her anger and selfdisgust turned inward. “It was a secret revenge,” she says. “‘You think you’re little Miss Perfect? Oh, please.’”

A few years after graduating, the depression grew worse. She strongly considered suicide, she writes in her memoir. The pressure to succeed and perform felt overwhelming. “Every move I made had to be scrutinized in advance for its possible negative effects, its consequences, its effects on others,” she says.

Even in contemplating how to kill herself, she felt a burden to live up to standards. “You must set an example for other Negroland girls who suffer the same way,” she told herself. She practiced sticking her head in an oven but never worked up the courage to turn it on.

SCHOOL SPIRIT: Jefferson (third from left) joined the Brandeis cheerleading squad as a first-year student.

J

efferson plans to write another book. She doesn’t have a subject pinned down. She’s waiting for it to come to her. She says she’s in a new place as a writer.

“I’m continuing to explore, to try to do things that not only interest and excite me, but also scare me,” she says. “Negroland” “was a turning point for me in that way. It’s huge.”

She recently came across a photo of herself on the cover of a journal called Feminism and Socialism,

The depression, Jefferson says, was her anger and self-disgust turned inward. “It was a secret revenge.

‘You think you’re little Miss Perfect? Oh, please.’” taken soon after college. She stands between two white friends. It’s an image of solidarity, people power and racial harmony.

Looking at the photograph, you can see the distance Jefferson had traveled from her Negroland childhood.

She sports an impressive Afro. She wears hoop earrings and an African print dress. But her transformation wasn’t quite as radical as it seems. She bought the dress at Saks Fifth Avenue.

“We live on many different levels,” Jefferson says.

“The contradictions and symmetries — it’s all good.”

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 27

The Brandeis

Questionnaire

Myq Kaplan ’00

P hotos by M i ke Lov ett

S

28 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

ometimes, it seems stand-up comic Myq Kaplan doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Hopping from one subject to another, he deftly works his way through Buddhism, feminism and math in a couple of minutes, or snaps off a series of puns and stream-of-consciousness riffs.

As a young comic, Kaplan cut his teeth at the Comedy Studio, on the third floor of a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square. He started out performing satirical songs on an acoustic guitar, telling jokes in between. Eventually, he put down the guitar in favor of intricately crafted stand-up sets.

In 2010, Kaplan vaulted to the funny-bone firmament as a finalist on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” competition, performing before an audience of millions week after week. His most recent work is a Netflix special and comedy album titled “Small, Dork and Handsome,” released last year.

A comedy-scene regular in New York City, where he lives, he’s appeared on late-night talk shows including “The Tonight Show,” “Late Show with David Letterman,” “Comedy Central Presents” and “Conan.” He’s also logged more than 1,000 performances around the country, appearing with acts like Louis C.K. and Patton Oswalt. He’s appeared in a Comedy Central special and performed at Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival. And then there’s his weekly podcast, “Hang Out With Me.” Wordplay is Kaplan’s comedic trademark, and his intellectual interest: He earned a master’s in linguistics from Boston University. As he reminds us, “Words are pretty important. Words are really all that separate us — from the mimes.”

— Jarret Bencks

Who was your favorite Brandeis professor?

What was the most important shortcut you learned in college?

I liked so many. I loved my semantics class, taught by Ray Jackendoff, and several philosophy classes with Andreas Teuber. Joan Maling got me into linguistics, which I’ve loved ever since. They’re all my favorites. Like on Twitter. Today, you can have as many favorites as you want!

That there are no shortcuts. Also, if you want a shortcut for writing “shortcut,” try using “sh’cut.” So, turns out there ARE some shortcuts.

What three words of advice would you give to current Brandeis students?

Oh, I was a wild man. A different place every Saturday. Some Saturdays, it was studying in my room. Some Saturdays, it was studying at the library. Some Saturdays, it was studying at the movies or bowling. I think that’s the real answer: movies, or bowling, or dinner with friends.

Don’t worry. Ever. (That’s also advice for everyone. I once read a Taoist quote that said something like, “Don’t worry about things you can’t change, because you can’t change them. And don’t worry about things you CAN change, because you can change them. So there’s never anything to worry about.” I know that’s more than three words, but hopefully the subtext is there in the short version.)

When or where were you most miserable at Brandeis?

What would your friends say is your greatest strength?

I do my best not to think about misery too much, because I’ve been very fortunate. But maybe parking real far away from my dorm as a freshman when it was cold? But, also, I’m just grateful I had a car.

Some might say my almost obsessive focus. Others might say my capacity to love so simply and strongly. Still others might say my ability to pick great friends — they would probably be joking, but, also, they’re right.

Where did you usually spend Saturday night?

If you could be any other Brandeisian, who would it be?

Ollie the Owl? Is that allowed? I hope so. And not just because the letters in “allowed” also spell out “Owl? Deal!”

What is the most important value you learned at Brandeis?

I learned that some dreams I had that might have seemed farfetched were actually nearer-fetched than I thought, if I just took actions to head toward them. That was pretty important.

Which talent did Brandeis help you develop most?

Good question. Maybe a talent for asking and answering questions.

How am I doing? (This answer has an answer AND a question in it.)

Whom would you like to sing a duet with?

A Tuvan throat-singing monk, so the duet could be in THREEpart harmony. Or Joss Whedon. ESPECIALLY if Joss Whedon learned to sing like a monk. Or I did.

Which bad break was your biggest blessing?

I don’t believe that any break is bad or any blessing is big. So every break is every blessing. (Sorry this one’s not full of jokes. But at least it doesn’t make any sense.)

If you could climb into a time machine, whom would you like to hang out with?

Wish granting.

The inventor of the time machine, to ask why there wasn’t an easier way to get in than “climbing.”

If you could go back to college, what would you do differently?

On your deathbed, what will you be most grateful for?

Not much. I had a good time. Good work, college!

Getting to die in a bed.

What do you wish you had studied harder?

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 29

Alumni Profiles

Wall Street Watchdog Growls, and Bites

r oby n spector

Lynn Jawitz ’78

A few years ago, the chief of one of the world’s wealthiest financial institutions was calling around Washington, D.C., seeking to stifle outspoken anti-big bank crusader Dennis Kelleher ’84.

“You evidently don’t know Dennis Kelleher,” the bank boss was told repeatedly. “You are not going to shut him down.”

The big banks have been unable to shut him down or shut him up.

Since 2010, Kelleher, formerly a successful corporate law partner and a prominent U.S. Senate aide, has served as president of Better Markets, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown to protect the public’s interest on Wall Street.

Backed up by 15 staff members, Kelleher is a Wall Street battering ram, intent on derailing the big-bank money train most observers blame for causing the economic disaster. The Massachusetts native and Harvard Law grad appears on television, before Congress and at conferences to expose Wall Street’s misdeeds and efforts to undermine reform. He’s a frequent go-to source for policymakers, elected officials and regulators, as well as business reporters looking for incendiary sound bites.

“Who wants a lawyer to design their wedding?” florist Lynn Jawitz ’78 jokes. “It’s not the first thing I tell people when they hire me to plan their special occasion.”

She has even more to hide. Besides having a law degree, Jawitz also worked as a Merrill Lynch stockbroker before she turned over a new leaf and became an award-winning self-described “floral architect.” Today, the lush bouquets she creates at Florisan, her business on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, bloom in the pages of upscale magazines and at high-profile weddings.

Back in 1990, with a 1-year-old and another baby on the way, Jawitz realized corporate life would never allow her to stop and smell the roses. So she enrolled at Parsons to study Japanese, English and Dutch floral design, and began to build her floral business into the success it has become.

A native of Levittown, N.Y., Jawitz says she always had a passion for “beautiful presentations” — setting the tables at her synagogue, planning her own “magical” Sweet 16 in her family’s basement. Even at Brandeis, she planned elaborate end-of-year events for her friends at WBRS. “You love it. You love it,” Jawitz remembers the radio station’s general manager telling her as she catered the WBRS parties with wine, cheese and M&M’s.

Nearly 40 years later, petal to the metal, she admits, “He was right. I did love it.”

— Robyn Spector ’13 30 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

Mike Lovett

Earthly Delights

Barbara Clarke, IBS MA’91

better Mar kets

“The biggest banks try to get any rule, regulation or law made as light as possible, and then use that to lower the standards around the world, allowing them to engage in higher-risk activities,” Kelleher says from his K Street office. “It becomes a global race to the bottom.”

Kelleher punches above his weight to uphold the provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, unfazed by being vastly outnumbered and outspent by the big-bank lobby.

One measure of the power imbalance: Over a 15-month period, financial institutions met with federal agencies 351 times to discuss just one rule, the Volcker Rule (part of Dodd-Frank), compared to 19 such sessions for Better Markets and other public-interest groups.

“The banking industry has amassed enormous economic power, which it uses to buy political power,” Kelleher says. “So you can’t sit back on a victory. The industry sees any loss as a temporary setback to be fought another day.”

Kelleher turned down lucrative lobbying and corporate-law jobs to help launch and lead Better Markets, which is funded by a civic-

Dennis Kelleher ’84

minded hedge fund manager in Atlanta and other organizations, like the Rockefeller Family Fund.

“Life’s short, and you should do something meaningful in the time you have,” Kelleher explains. “I wanted to do something consequential in the public space, where I could add value.”

Which he’s apparently doing — just ask the bankers.

— David E. Nathan

Let the Data Do the Talking Financial analyst and angel investor Barbara Clarke, IBS MA’91, does not believe that men have all the good ideas.

So Clarke is determined to change the way the venture-capital world operates. Consider this sobering fact, she says: Eighty-five percent of venture funding goes to business teams with no women at the senior-management or executive level, even though multiple studies have shown that gender-diverse teams perform better along a number of scales.

“I do what I can as an angel investor to encourage venture capitalists to make unbiased selections,” she says. “Essentially, I tell them to put their money where their mouth is.” This means making data-driven decisions on the basis of business value and potential, instead of on personal judgments about viability, which is where gender bias can creep in.

Take Abbey Post, a startup Clarke is advising. It uses big data, including thousands of body scans, to create customized women’s clothing that fits all body types and makes customers feel great.

“The product attacks an underserved market,” Clarke says.

“It works if you are short here, wide there, tall — it’s for every woman. But a lot of male investors don’t quite get it. From an economic perspective, the possibilities for Abbey Post, like other companies in markets with no competition, are huge. When investors don’t bite, it indicates to me that whatever criteria they are using to evaluate opportunity are not data-driven.”

Working as a consultant to PricewaterhouseCoopers, Cradles to Crayons and KPMG, Clarke also urges the creation of diverse workplaces, where employees feel supported and heard. And she puts her own money where her mouth is, investing in and writing for DailyWorth, a website that provides financial advice for women.

“I’m onboard with working and investing in companies where there aren’t many women, as long as diversity is a core principle,” she says. “I’m comfortable being the only woman in the room if there’s progress being made. It’s much harder being the only woman in the room when nobody cares.”

— Samantha Mocle Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 31

Arts

&Culture

This Israeli Life The story-gathering passions of Roee Gilron ’09.

By Beth Kissileff, P’18

P

SOUND MEN: “Israel Story” creators, from left, Yochai Maital, Mishy Harman, Roee Gilron and Shai Satran.

odcasts are “a big humanizer,” says Roee Gilron ’09, and he should know. Gilron and three of his childhood friends are the masterminds behind “Israel Story,” a podcast presented in both English and Hebrew, which has gotten Israeli and American listeners hooked on quirky/sad/joyous slice-of-life stories about totally amazing, completely ordinary folks.

If you’re thinking “This American Life,” you’ve got the right idea. Like that audio pioneer, “Israel Story,” first broadcast in

Israel in 2012, lets audiences “strip away a lot of internal prejudice” and enter someone else’s world “with just a voice to go on,” Gilron says.

“Israel Story” topics range from a “redneck” retired Israel Defense Forces (IDF) lieutenant colonel who raises water buffalo for milk in rural Wisconsin. A bird “hitman” who has taken out thousands of overly aggressive crows in and around Eilat. Two residents of a countercultural religious community in Israel, married for

R oe e G i l ron

32 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

TALK OF THE SHUK: Harman and Gilron chat with locals at the flea market in Jaffa.

Pave l Wolbe rg / The Ne w York T i m e s

37 years, who are facing the husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis with humor and grace. “The podcast showcases Israelis you don’t see on TV or in the national media: regular people with interesting stories,” Gilron says.

Occasionally, the episodes are themed, like the one that explored the 10 how-to questions most asked on Google in Israel. One of the questions prompted an interview with seventh-graders eager to learn how to French kiss, a query many of their peers take to Google instead of to family members or friends. Another how-to piece revolved around arranging a sick day off in the IDF. Getting into people’s heads is truly a calling for Gilron, who expects to complete a PhD in neuroscience at Tel Aviv University next October. “Authors and neuroscientists try to answer the same questions about the mind with different tools,” he says. “They both ask the questions ‘Why do we do what we do?’ and ‘What drives us?’”

Fittingly for someone who makes connections through stories, Gilron’s particular area of study in neuroscience concerns the neural components of “the way you understand where you begin and where someone else starts,” he says.

Gilron began his neuroscience studies as an undergraduate at Brandeis, which he entered after completing his military service in Israel. Hoping to experience a lot of diversity in America, but not entirely sure that’s what he’d find at Brandeis, he was pleasantly surprised by university life. His best friends included a home-schooled student from Iowa and an accomplished pianist from South Korea. Gilron says he also got to know Israelis he never could have met in Israel, including a Christian Arab from Jaffa with whom he has stayed in touch.

Most important, he met his wife-to-be, Tiffany Roberts ’10. The couple married in 2014 in two ceremonies — the first in Israel and the second in Sonoma County, Calif., where the bride grew up.

While at Brandeis, Gilron made a point of cultivating his humanistic bent. He credits Janet McIntosh, associate professor of anthropology, with teaching him “the craft of observing closely.”

McIntosh remembers Gilron as “a brilliant student and a phenomenally good writer, fascinated by many things. He would wrestle with the tensions between cross-cultural differences and universalizing claims about human nature. He’s deeply interested in the human condition, and he has an abiding

respect for how different the world can look to different people. It makes perfect sense that he is story gathering now.”

Angela Gutchess, a psychology faculty member who was Gilron’s honors thesis adviser, says, “Roee’s curiosity and enthusiasm made it fun to talk about ideas for his thesis and make sense of the data. I’m not surprised he has found a way to develop his broad interests in a creative way that has at its heart a fascination with people and their stories.”

Gilron met his fellow “Israel Story” creators Mishy Harman (who serves as the podcast’s host), Yochai Maital and Shai Satran when they were kids in the Noam youth movement of Masorti Judaism (the analog to America’s Conservative movement).

All four are children of American immigrants to Israel who work in academia. Roee’s father — Jack (Gilberg) Gilron ’74, P’09 — is also a Brandeis grad.

Roee started listening to podcasts at Brandeis as something to do while folding laundry or working out on a treadmill, quickly becoming a believer in the power of the form. He convinced first Harman and then Maital and Satran that creating a podcast was a project worth tackling, as a way of giving Israelis and non-Israelis “a way to hear something about Israel that you don’t hear anywhere else,” he says.

“Podcasts,” he continues, “have this ability to transport you to another world, in the way a really good book does.”

Or a really good movie. According to an article in Haaretz in July, Steven Spielberg is an “Israel Story” funder. Apparently, he thinks it spins captivating yarns. And he should know.

Occasionally, the podcast episodes are themed, like the one that explored the 10 how-to questions most asked on Google in Israel. One of the questions prompted an interview with seventh-graders eager to learn how to French kiss.

Beth Kissileff is a freelance journalist. Listen to episodes of “Israel Story” online at en.israelstory.org.

The second English-language season (which is the third Hebrew-language season) is now available.

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 33

Arts

&Culture

I

n November, the Rose Art Museum announced that Baltimore businessman/ author/collector Stephen M. Salny has made a promised gift of 48 works on paper by leading contemporary artists, including Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell and Sean Scully.

Museum officials say Salny’s gift will augment major strengths of the Rose’s collection, which currently includes paintings and other works by some of the artists represented in the gift, notably Kelly, Johns, Motherwell and Frankenthaler. The gift will also extend the museum’s holdings in new directions, including bringing the Rose its first work by Hirst.

Selections from the gift will be displayed at the Rose next spring.

“Steve’s vision goes to the heart of what the Rose Art Museum’s holdings represent,” says Christopher Bedford, the museum’s Henry and Lois Foster Director. “Featuring some of the best artists of the postwar era, his collection gathers works of extraordi-

nary passion held in balance with uncommon elegance. It will enrich our exhibitions and ability to serve as a center of research and instruction in postwar modern and contemporary art.”

Brandeis holds special meaning for Salny.

His grandfather Samuel M. Salny was a friend of the university from its founding.

Samuel and his wife, Rae, established one of the earliest endowed fellowships for graduate studies at the young university. June Salny, Steve’s mother, introduced her son to the arts at an early age in part through programs led by Lois Foster at the Rose.

Central to the promised donation are 11 lithographs by Kelly, dating from 1970 to 2012, including “Blue-Green” (1970), “Green Curve” (1999) and “Dartmouth” (2011).

Their addition to the collection will allow the Rose to showcase Kelly’s achievements across 50 years, beginning with his landmark 1962 painting “Blue White,” currently a centerpiece of the museum’s collection.

Other highlights include four prints by Motherwell: “Djarum” (1975), “Red Open

© Ellsworth Kelly and Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles

The Rose Enlarges Its Paper Trail

MODERN MASTERS: The Salny gift includes Ellsworth Kelly’s “Green Curve” (1999).

With White Line” (1979), “Summer Trident” (1990) and “The Black Wall” (1981). The Rose already holds Motherwell’s oil on canvas “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 58” (1957-61).

Frankenthaler’s aquatint “Ganymede” (1978) and etching “Sunshine After Rain” (1987) are also part of the gift.

S e b ast ia n M lyn ar sk i

ArtBeat “Stray Dog,” a documentary about Vietnam veteran and RV park owner Ron Hall — the latest project of film director/writer Debra Granik ’85 — premiered on the PBS series “Independent Lens” in November. The film received a rave review in The New York Times (“Ms. Granik’s tact and curiosity are remarkable”), and in June it was named Best Documentary Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Granik’s 2010 film “Winter’s Bone” earned actress Jennifer Lawrence her first Oscar nomination.

Soprano Tony Arnold was named the 2015 recipient of the re-launched Brandeis Creative Arts Award, which brought her to the university for a yearlong residency. Arnold “is a highly inspirational figure and a dynamic force that propels the creation and performance of 21st-century music,” says Yu-Hui

34 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

Chang, chair of the music department. Composers who have written major works for her voice include Georges Aperghis, George Crumb and Philippe Manoury, as well as Eric Chasalow, dean of Brandeis’ Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

The Washington Post’s roundup of the 10 Best Books of 2015 turned out to be one-fifth Brandeisian. Two alumni authors — Margo Jefferson ’68, for her memoir “Negroland” (see story on page 22), and Marc Goodman ’87, for “Future Crimes,” a nonfiction look at the terrifying world of cybercrime — made the top 10.

According to the book reviewers who compiled the select list, only “exceptionally rewarding” volumes made the cut.

The Brandeis arts community celebrated a pair of milestone birthdays during the 2015-16 school year. The MusicUnitesUS world-music series enjoyed its 10th anniversary. It brought Kinan Azmeh, a clarinetist and composer from Syria, to campus

Web of beauty

Lois Gr eenfield

As sinuous as a rococo nymph, dancer Natalie Johnson is caught mid-step — framed by loose swirls of mosquito netting — in “Lois Greenfield: Moving Still,” the latest book of dance photography by Greenfield ’70, published in November

by Chronicle Books. Greenfield captures her exquisite shots with a stripped-down camera and no digital manipulation. The image depends purely on knowing when to snap the shutter. “In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture,” Greenfield says.

in the fall and explored Korean gugak in the spring. And the Spingold Theater Center marked its 50th anniversary.

Productions there in 2015-16 included an updated version of “Macbeth” in December and “Intimate Apparel,” by Lynn Nottage, in March.

miered in July 2015 at New York’s Fresh Fruit Festival. It follows Carson as she struggles for success in the male-dominated field of biology and ultimately chooses to take a stand for the earth, jeopardizing her career and her relationship with another woman. Jessie wrote the musical’s book and lyrics, and Jared wrote the music.

Lights, camera, roll the presses? Eileen McNamara, longtime Boston Globe columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner and current professor of the practice of journalism at Brandeis, appeared as a character in the Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight,” which tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Globe’s coverage of the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal. Boston actress Maureen Keiller (“Fever Pitch,” “Olive Kitteridge”) played McNamara on-screen.

Joshua Louis Simon and Jeff Arak, both ’07, have made a short film about their friend Tessa Venell ’08 and her remarkable recovery from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by a 2006 car crash on a rural Maine road. Simon produced and Arak directed “Then and Now,” viewable on YouTube at goo.gl/eNmlaf. They hope someday to make a full-length documentary about For more on the Venell, who was profiled in Brandeis arts at Brandeis, visit Magazine’s Spring 2011 issue. Venell www.brandeis.edu/arts/ mentors TBI patients and families, and calendar.html. is working on a book about her life.

The author of “Silent Spring” bursts into life in song. Siblings Jared ’11 and Jessie Field ’13 penned “Rachel,” a new musical based on the life of biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson, which pre-

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 35

On the Bookshelf

Faculty Books

The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon

When the Moon Is Low

Johnson, Congress and the Battle for

By Nadia Hashimi ’00

Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of

the Great Society

Morrow, $25.99

Austerity Versus Possibility

By Julian E. Zelizer ’91

By Robert Kuttner

Penguin, $29.95

Vintage, $16.95

Having established his bona fides as an ace arm-twister in the U.S. Congress, Lyndon Johnson leaned hard on his powers of persuasion as president, too. During his first three years in the Oval Office, he pushed through a massive wave of liberal legislation, something John Kennedy had been unable to do. But the Great Society’s success didn’t hinge entirely on LBJ’s force of will, as Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, reveals. The second New Deal had many fathers and a backdrop of serendipitous events. A fascinating account of how American politics took a giant step left in the mid-1960s.

Hashimi’s second novel (the first, “The Pearl That Broke Its Shell,” was the subject of a feature in Brandeis Magazine’s Spring 2015 issue) continues her exploration of the perils of modern Afghanistan.

Here, a mother and her three children escape the Taliban by fleeing into Europe.

During their long journey, the eldest child gets separated from the others in Greece.

As he and his mother try desperately to reunite and make their way to relatives in London, Hashimi exposes the hopes and vulnerability of 21st-century war refugees.

In “Little Dorrit,” Charles Dickens showed the rationale behind debtors’ prisons to be a flimsy, trumped-up lie. Taking a page from Boz, economics journalist Kuttner analyzes the politics of debt to vigorously debunk modern-day austerity policies. Around the world, leaders who won’t forgive debt and refuse to spend to spur growth are keeping their citizens locked inside dismal, airless economies, says Kuttner, currently the Kirstein Visiting Professor in Social Planning and Administration at the Heller School.

Alumni Books Negroland: A Memoir

You Blew It! An Awkward Look at the

By Margo Jefferson ’68

Many Ways in Which You’ve Already

Pantheon, $25

Ruined Your Life

A personal history filled with emotion, clarity and strength. Jefferson, whose book reviews and cultural criticism for The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, grew up ensconced in Chicago’s AfricanAmerican upper middle class (her father was head of pediatrics at the oldest black hospital in the U.S.). Yet the protections constructed by her family’s money and status created their own problems and, of course, were no match for the slings and arrows of racism and sexism. “Negroland” is both a beautifully written memoir and a profound meditation on race.

By Josh Gondelman ’07 and Joe Berkowitz

36 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

Plume, $14

Let’s cut to the chase: “You Blew It!” is really funny. Gondelman, nominated this year for an Emmy as a writer on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” plumbs the absurdities that crop up with family, friends, work and love. That’s fertile ground since, as the authors observe, life “consists of onslaughts of unpleasantness punctuated by brief periods of relief, like a Pixies song.”

The book carefully — and hilariously — dissects the OMG moments with which we are all too painfully familiar.

Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t

By Simon Sinek ’95 Portfolio, $27.95

Sinek is a TED Talk superstar for good reason. His ideas on leadership and organizations give hope to frustrated workers — and make soulless managers sweat — by touting simple rules for achieving business success, such as emphasizing empathy and trust, and defining your company’s “why.” This book adds another truth to the mix: An organization meets and exceeds goals only when its employees believe they are safe and valued.

Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World

By Naomi S. Baron ’68 Oxford University Press, $24.95

When you e-read, are you just e-learning — understanding and retaining less than

you would if you had a bound book in your hands? Baron, a linguistics professor at American University, digs into the effect Kindles, iPads and other electronic devices are having on the written word. How we read, write and think are all being reshaped by the proliferation of pixels, she says, for good and for ill.

Grizzly West: A Failed Attempt to Reintroduce Grizzly Bears in the

the Market Basket grocery-store chain, as avidly as they might watch the bad blood go down on “Empire.” In the real-life story, the deus ex machina was a stunner: Market Basket workers overwhelmingly supported one Demoulas cousin over another and, through their protests, restored him to the CEO role. Korschun, associate professor of marketing at Drexel, captures all the business and legal maneuvering, and all the drama.

Mountain West

ten by John Clare, a 19th-century selfdescribed “peasant poet” and, during the final decades of his life, a resident of the Northampton (England) General Lunatic Asylum. More than 150 years later, Guyer, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gives Clare the attention he deserves, looking anew at the concept of Romanticism through a close reading of his poetry.

Painting the Corners Again:

By Michael J. Dax ’08

Ketchup Is My Favorite Vegetable:

Off-Center Baseball Fiction

University of Nebraska Press, $37.50

A Family Grows Up With Autism

By Bob Weintraub ’55

Environmentalists successfully oversaw the reintroduction of gray wolves into Yellowstone and central Idaho during the 1990s, overcoming significant two-legged resistance along the way. Later, negotiations for a similar reintroduction of grizzly bears into Idaho and Montana began.

Yet this plan, painstakingly assembled, fell apart. Dax takes readers through the political, cultural and social brambles that blocked the grizzlies, and paints a compelling picture of the chasm that still divides the Old and the New West.

By Liane Kupferberg Carter ’76

Yucca Publishing, $24.95

Jessica Kingsley Publishers, $18.95

Weintraub’s second volume of short stories about the great American pastime is another walk-off winner for this lawyerturned-fiction writer. His situations and characters don’t just take us behind the scenes at the ballpark; they deepen our insights about life. Weintraub is also the author of “My Honorable Brother,” a thriller about the mob, politics and gambling in Rhode Island, recently released

by Yucca Publishing.

Getting Screwed: Sex Workers

Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies

and the Law

of First-Person Psalms

Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and

By Alison Bass ’75

By Davida H. Charney ’78

Everyday Life in the 1950s

ForeEdge, $29.95

Sheffield Phoenix Press, $70

By Anat Helman

To make a case for decriminalizing the sex trade, Bass, who teaches journalism at West Virginia University, combines the personal stories of contemporary sex workers with a historical account of shifting American attitudes on paying for sex.

Ironically, Bass says, “laws criminalizing prostitution not only are largely ineffective in curbing the sex trade but also create an atmosphere that encourages the exploitation of sex workers and violence against all women.”

Your arms may be too short to box with God, but you can always see how far you can get with coaxing. Charney, professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, analyzes the psalms with a first-person speaker (roughly a third of them) to trace how these exquisitely wrought arguments pester, praise and try to wrest specific results from a divine listener. A perceptive consideration of the role rhetoric plays in the Bible.

$35

We Are Market Basket

Reading With John Clare

By Daniel Korschun ’92 and Grant Welker

By Sara Guyer ’94

AMACOM, $24.95

Fordham University Press, $26

New Englanders followed the infighting among the Demoulas family, owners of

“I am — yet what I am, none cares or knows” is the first line of a poem writ-

A contributor to the New York Times blog Motherlode, Carter writes movingly about her younger son, who has autism and epilepsy. But this memoir isn’t just about Mickey, now an adult. It’s about the entire family. And it isn’t just about the problems you face when you live with a child with special needs. It’s about the celebrations, too. As Carter says, autism teaches a family what matters most: humility, resilience, acceptance.

Brandeis University Press

Helman, senior lecturer in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, describes what Israel’s early days were like for the ordinary folks building a state from the ground up. Descriptions of rationing, eating communally at a kibbutz and trying to get a seat on a bus go hand in hand with details about much larger issues, like the quest to make Hebrew the national language and the consequences of living alongside a constant military presence. A vivid portrait of the joys and struggles that shaped a nation.

Read many more On the Bookshelf reviews at www.brandeis.edu/magazine.

Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 37

Inquiry

Sense and Sensibility Neuroscientist Don Katz is making more sense of our senses.

By Lawrence Goodman

A

sk even the youngest schoolchild how many senses we have and she’ll tell you five — sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

Neuroscientist Don Katz thinks this might be wrong. The correct answer, he says, will most likely turn out to be one.

For nearly a decade, Katz, an associate professor of psychology, has been investigating the interconnection of smell and taste in rats. In 2009, he showed that rats’ sense of smell is altered when they lose their ability to taste. Two years later, he published a paper suggesting that rats depend on smell as much as taste to determine what food they like.

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Don Katz

38 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

Recently, in a paper published in Current Biology, Katz shows what happens when you shut down the rat’s sense of taste. Using an optical probe, he turned off the brain cells in the animal’s primary olfactory cortex that process taste signals from the mouth. This had an immediate impact on the firing patterns of the neurons handling smell. In fact, the smell neurons were transformed so radically the rat could no longer recognize familiar odors.

These findings about the interdependence of taste and smell have led Katz to speculate that they are a single sense — the “chemosensory system” is what he calls it. “How things taste depends on a lot of other factors than what’s on the tongue,” Katz says. “We think that taste and smell are part of one large system with two doors,” the mouth and the nose.

Other researchers have shown that sound, touch and sight are also inextricably connected.

This leads Katz to a grand hypothesis — all our senses belong to a single system. We have only one sense. He says it’s meaningless, for example, to talk of the taste of food, because “taste” is equally a function of what you see, touch, smell and hear as what you sense on your tongue. We don’t taste food. We have an experience of food.

Katz likens the brain to a computer fed an immense amount of data so it can generate a single simplified finding. For the program to run, information must be gathered through all the senses. But we don’t realize this. We are only aware of the program’s final result, which is the illusion that only one sense is responsible for what we experience.

All this remains unproven. Katz plans to continue studying taste and smell in rats. Research moves forward incrementally and methodically. But somewhere in the not-so-distant future, we may finally have a grand unified theory of the senses.

A New Scientific Method

O

ver the past 50 years, science has put a man on the moon, mapped the human genome, eradicated smallpox and created the microchip.

Yet it has not made many inroads into a particular, persistent problem. Nationwide, the percentage of African-Americans, Hispanics and women working in physical science and engineering still falls far below these groups’ representation in the population as a whole — creating a significant barrier to developing the best, most diverse scientific workforce possible.

Now a new kind of scientific collaboration between Brandeis and historically black Hampton University, in Hampton, Va., aims to find a solution. With $3 million in National Science Foundation funding over five years, the universities are launching the Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) initiative, to bring more underrepresented candidates into university labs and help them advance their careers.

The partnership combines Hampton’s access to a large pool of excellent underrepresented scholars with Brandeis’ broad range of laboratory-science opportunities.

“There are many talented young people who may never know they have an aptitude for research science,” says Raymond Samuel, assistant dean of Hampton’s School of Engineering and Technology. “If they’re never exposed to it, they don’t know they are missing out on it.”

Black students make up just 6 percent of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) undergraduate-degree recipients, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And African-American students who enter STEM programs as undergrads are likely to leave the field: According to 2003-09 data, 65 percent either did not receive a degree or switched to a non-STEM program. AfricanAmericans earned a mere 5 percent of STEM doctoral degrees in 2012; 3 percent of STEM doctoral degrees went to black women.

The Brandeis-Hampton partnership includes two programs. One, targeted at fostering students’ interest in research science, will bring Hampton undergrads to Brandeis, expenses paid, to conduct 10 weeks of research through the established undergraduate summer-research program at Brandeis’ Bioinspired Soft Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC).

Seth Fraden, PhD’87

Pathway to Professorship, the second program, will invite Hampton research assistant professors to work for a year in Brandeis labs. The following year, the researchers will continue their work back at Hampton, with the objective of preparing for a tenure-track professorship at either Brandeis or Hampton.

The Brandeis-Hampton partnership will be directed by Samuel; Seth Fraden, PhD’87, Brandeis physics professor and director of the MRSEC; and Deidre Gibson, chair of marine and environmental science, and director of PREM education and outreach at Hampton.

Brandeis is accomplished “in providing the kind of nurturing and commitment to develop great scientists,” Fraden says.

— Jarret Bencks

A Better Wine Bottle: Can the scourge of spillage be stopped?

T

his summer, someone, somewhere, is going to pour a glass of red wine and spill a few drops. And there goes grandma’s prized tablecloth.

Spillage is the bane of every oenophile’s existence. To prevent drips, sommeliers wrap the end of the wine bottle in a napkin and give the bottle a twist after pouring. But most of us can only stand aghast when the pour goes awry.

Enter Brandeis biophysicist Daniel Perlman, longtime wine lover and prolific inventor. Along with K.C. Hayes, professor emeritus of biology, he developed the “healthy fats” in Smart Balance spread. Perlman holds more than 100 patents for inventions, from specialized lab equipment to the first miniaturized home radon detector.

There are already products on the market designed to prevent wine spillage, but they involve inserting a device into the bottle

neck. Figure out the physics, Perlman thought, and you could eliminate dripping forever, without additional equipment.

When you pour a nearly full bottle, not all of the liquid flows straight downward into the glass. A small amount of liquid curls underneath the lip and slides down the side of the bottle. This is because glass is hydrophilic — it has a natural tendency to attract just enough liquid so that a small amount gets redirected from the stream of wine going into the glass.

Perlman’s bottle is designed to prevent this escape. He is talking with bottle manufacturers about adopting his design. He is also further refining it — right now drips still happen, though less frequently and in smaller amounts than they do with the standard bottle.

The wine bottle design we have today has been around for centuries. It might be time to toast a change.

— Lawrence Goodman Admissions Edition / Summer 2016 Brandeis 39

Inquiry

Student Joins Scientific Huddle Over Football Concussions

D

uring the fall of her first year at Brandeis, Madeline Engeler ’16 was elbowed in the head while playing volleyball.

She fell, then got up, finished the rest of her warm-ups for practice and played the game.

A few hours later, she was vomiting and needed to go to the hospital. She’d suffered a concussion.

Engeler, a double major in biology and Health: Science, Society and Policy, began researching concussions. Of course, she knew all about the controversy surrounding professional football players whose long-term brain damage has been linked to concussions. Parents, too, now worry their children are at risk of brain injury when they play a sport.

Engeler found a lab at the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute in Ohio that studied concussions. Funded by a Brandeis World of Work (WOW) fellowship, she worked as an intern there over the summer after her sophomore year.

She was interested in the relationship between epilepsy and a degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In the late 2000s, researchers at Boston University obtained the brains of six dead football players, in which they found evidence of CTE. It was proof that NFL athletes suffered high rates of brain

40 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2016

damage most likely caused by repeated blows to the head during their careers.

Engeler and her fellow researchers borrowed samples of the six players’ brains from BU. The telltale sign of CTE is the buildup of a protein called tau that kills brain cells and damages tissue. Tau is also found in the brains of epileptics.

Comparing the amount and the distribution of tau in the brains of the athletes and in the brains of epileptics, Engeler and the other team members discovered that both sets of brains looked very similar.

Engeler calls the finding “disturbing.”

She says it suggests the players with CTE suffered a level of brain damage comparable to having epileptic seizures throughout their entire life. It’s also possible that the athletes developed epilepsy along with CTE as a result of head injuries.

But the findings also complicate the diagnosis of CTE. It had been thought that tau at certain levels and in certain places was a clear indicator of CTE, which no longer seems to be the case. “A truly operational definition of CTE is currently not available,” Engeler and the other researchers wrote in their paper, which was published online in November in the journal Brain Research.

Engeler was by far the youngest and least experienced member of the research team,

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IStock

Madeline Engeler ’16

which included scientists from around the country. She plans to go to medical school next year. “I was so grateful to be given the responsibility to spearhead a research project and witness the passion the lab has for research and medical advancement,” she says. “I’m so excited our paper was finally published.”

— Lawrence Goodman

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VISITBRANDEIS The best way to learn more about Brandeis is to visit our campus just outside downtown Boston. For your convenience, we offer tours and information sessions on most weekdays throughout the year.

Additionally, we are open for tours and information sessions on select Saturdays and also hold weekend open-house programs in the spring and fall. All visits are hosted at the Office of Admissions in the Shapiro Admissions Center at the foot of campus. A complete schedule of visit opportunities is available at brandeis.edu/admissions/visit.

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