Brandeis University, facing a sharp drop in donations and student enrolment, has sacked the Lydian String Quartet in a cost-cutting measure. All four musicians – Professor Joshua Gordon, cellist, Prof. Julia Glenn and Prof. Clara Lyon, violins and Prof. Mark Berger, viola – will lose their jobs at the end of the current academic year.
The Lydian String Quartet has been a fixture at Brandeis for 44 years. With its disbandment, the music department will lose one-third of its teaching staff.
Brandeis has been a noted hotbed of anti-Israel and anti-semitic agitation in the past year. It has dropped in U.S. News and World Report rankings from 35 to 63rd place. Brandeis’s president resigned last month.
University Provost Carol Fierke urged the faculty to help, saying the most helpful thing they can do is to ‘recruit or retain one student.’ Desperate times, desperate measures.
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