UNIVERSITIES are impractical places. The common measures of profit and loss don't apply, or at least shouldn't define. These are sites where arcane knowledge is preserved, unpopular ideas protected and even nurtured until someday, perhaps, they enter the mainstream to bear strange and unpredictable fruit. This is why we put up with their excesses, their preposterous politics and exorbitant tuitions: We cut them a little slack because we know without this freedom they can't carry out their mission to pass on and add to what's best and most creative in our civilization. We grant them a kind of universal tenure so they can attend to something more essential than the bottom line.
In return, these institutions must demonstrate a profound reverence for those ideals.
But by opting to close the Rose Art Museum and sell off its collection, Brandeis University has forfeited this most basic responsibility.
In the real world, money gets tight; assets are sold. Companies seek to be lean and mean; they streamline and downsize in order to compete. This is the new frugality, a business model we've grown ever more accustomed to in recent months. But we expect those who run our universities to be guardians, not managers. Treating its cultural treasures as mere commodities to be auctioned off when times get tough is a betrayal of trust. It not only deprives the community of vital resources but, more importantly, cheapens the entire notion of a liberal education by reducing these cultural artifacts and the ideas they embody to cash equivalents. The message it sends is that even here, capital is king and ideas expendable.
Many years ago, as a student at Brandeis, I often passed the Rose on my way to class, the wide expanse of glass enticing passers-by to come inside and take a closer look. How much time did I spend in the museum? Certainly not as much as I should have. But I was thrilled just knowing it was there, just as I was thrilled that nearby were labs where basic scientific research was conducted, and blackboards scrawled with incomprehensible equations. That's what universities are - hothouses where we grow those exotic blooms that can flourish nowhere else. The museum is no mere ornament, but the embodiment of that ideal. To trade those timeless values for timely infusions of cash is to sacrifice something essential to expedience.
Later, as an art critic, I came to appreciate the unique place the Rose occupied not only in campus life but in the region's cultural landscape. Commercial galleries came and went with each market gyration, while the city's major museums concentrated on popular blockbusters or exhibitions of old masters. It was the universities that held those shows where box office and commercial viability mattered less than intellectual heft. Brandeis, MIT, and Harvard exposed Bostonians to art that otherwise seemed orphaned in a city that prided itself on its cultivation but often acted as if painting died with Monet.
The Rose still has a unique place in this community: It fills an essential gap in the artistic narrative, between the magnificent collection of Impressionists at the MFA and the contemporary scene now admirably chronicled by the new ICA. Nowhere else in New England is the story of postwar American art told so powerfully. If the Rose is allowed to close its doors, there will be a yawning chasm at the center of our artistic life.
But the issue is larger than this. My undergraduate days are long behind me, and now I have a daughter old enough to apply to college herself. What should I tell her about my alma mater? When push comes to shove, will they cherish the life of the mind, or will each financial downturn be accompanied by a similar rush to jettison whatever isn't nailed down? By acting as if the enlightenment and stimulation that art provides is extraneous to its core mission, Brandeis undermines the very notion of a liberal education, which, after all, is the only reason it exists in the first place.
Miles Unger's latest book is "Magnifico: the Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de' Medici."
