Although the art world boomed along with the financial industry during the past 15 years, many institutions showed signs of failing long before the recent financial collapse. Over the past couple of years, a number of museums have experienced unprecedented crises. Fisk University tried to sell from its collection of modernist masterpieces given to it by Georgia O’Keeffe, the National Academy of Design sold two of its mid-19th century masterpieces to pay for operating expenses, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles almost went bankrupt and even considered selling its collection until arts patron Eli Broad came to its rescue with a $30 million gift. Trustees ponied up another $20 million, giving the museum, which has a superb collection of post-World War II art,  a second chance.

But the recent decision by the President and Board of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its collection overshadows all the other crises. The Rose has one of the most unique collections of post-World War II art in the country and arguably the best collection of 20th and 21st century art in the Boston area. It owns Andy Warhol’s “Saturday Disaster,” one of his greatest works; a gorgeous 1950s “landscape” by Willem de Kooning; one of the best of Motherwell’s Spanish Elegies; an iconic Roy Lichtenstein cartoon painting; an early “gray” Jasper Johns painting; a Rauschenberg “combine” painting - the list just goes on and on and on up to Cindy Sherman, Philip Taaffe, Thomas Demand, Roxy Paine, Dana Schutz and Fred Tomaselli

The university’s President, Jehuda Reinharz, and his board cite financial reverses experienced by the university as the reason for reaching such a drastic decision. Although Geoff Edgers at the Boston Globe (www.boston.com), and Randy Kennedy and Carol Vogel at the New York Times (www.nytimes.com), bloggers Tyler Green and Lee Rosenbaum (”Culture Grrll”) on www.artsjournal.com and Judith Dobrynski on Tina Brown’s www.thedailybeast.com have traced the numbers, which range from a deficit of $10 million to $79 million, something smells fishy to me. You don’t shutter a highly respected museum, sell off its collection - estimated to be worth in excess of $350 million - eliciting in the process a cacaphony of denunciation on the internet and blogosphere, and risk destroying the university’s good name,  for such a relatively small amount of money. Even in these recessionary times, when many of the wealthy are looking at drastically reduced portfolios, a $79 million deficit should be something that can be dealt with rationally. But Reinharz, who has a reputation for liking to live the good life, and his board are not acting rationally - they have reacted hysterically.

No, the rape of the Rose suggests that the $79 million is just the tip of the iceberg. Why am I suspicious?  Ever heard of Bernie Madoff? Well, Brandeis did. One of the university’s most generous donors, Carl and Ruth Shapiro, were among Madoff’s biggest dupes. They admit to losing close to $500 million from both their Foundation and their personal holdings. And they used their influence among the Jewish communities in Boston and Palm Beach to bring other victims to Madoff to feed his Ponzi scheme. Many of those investors were donors to Brandeis along with other charities, Jewish and secular. (The Shapiros were also major donors to Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and they were the biggest donors to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in its history.) Their daughter Rhonda Zinner is Brandeis’s Treasurer. Do you think she might have directed at least some of the university’s funds to the financial advisor who had - at least on paper - helped to make her parents and their friends so wealthy?

(Full disclosure time: I worked for Rhonda Zinner, then Rhonda Segal,  and her then-husband Thomas Segal, at the Thomas Segal Gallery in Boston for about 4 years in the late 1970s. At that time I met both Carl and Ruth Shapiro several times.)

You might not be able to tell from what I’ve written what a fury I am in about the disgraceful actions of Reinharz and the board. I am a Brandeis alum, class of ‘69, and the Rose Art Museum, then one of the few museums in the country devoted to contemporary art, was instumental in the development of my interest in art and my subsequent career as an art critic. The highlight of my 4 difficult years at Brandeis - being a college grad in 1969 on an activist campus was no lark - was the seminar on the New York School I took with the Rose’s director, William Seitz, who had been a legendary curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To think that other students might not have the opportunity to discover the visual culture of their times at the campus museum makes me very very sad.

And angry.  I believe that Jehuda Reinharz should be fired by the board for his gross mismanagement of the university’s endowment. If John Thain can be fired for his incompetence at Merrill Lynch, then Reinharz should be too. And after he is fired, the board should then resign en masse. A board that would vote for such an action is not capable of being trustees of anything. And after the clearance of the greedy, self-serving and stupid crew that has come close to destroying what was once a great university, a new group  should be brought in to deal with the mess. Chastened, the university might do well to look back at the values of the visionary Jews who founded the university in 1948, a time when the fate of European Jewry was fresh in everyone’s minds, and to the example of Justice Louis Brandeis, after whom the university was named.

What’s happening at Brandeis is shameful. Not just because it shows a lack of appreciation for art and the role cultural expression has in the life of a liberal arts college, but because it reveals how low the university has sunk during the Reinharz regime and how vulgar its values are now. At the national level, this is a time for renewed hope; it looks as if Brandeis University is also in need of a deep cleansing and a rebirth. With the Rose Art Museum still there as one of its prime assets.