The administration and the Faculty Senate Council have suggested a major overhaul of the undergraduate academic curriculum to account for a sustained $10 million gap in the University's budget beyond fiscal year 2010, according to a Jan. 14 faculty e-mail sent by Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe and Faculty Senate Chair Prof. William Flesch (ENG).The proposal calls for replacing the current 43 majors and 47 minors offered to undergraduates with a much smaller number of interdisciplinary meta-majors, increasing the size of the undergraduate student body by 12 percent, requiring a summer semester to be completed before junior year and decreasing the number of Arts and Sciences faculty by 10 percent. The curriculum changes will begin with the students entering in the fall of 2010.

Jaffe explained that the necessity for more deep-seated change became evident at the start of planning for fiscal year 2011, which will likely feature a decrease in revenue and gifts to the University. "Under the most likely scenario we have a more or less permanent gap between costs and revenue of something like $10 million a year," Jaffe said.

The University needs to spend a portion of its endowment each year to balance the budget, Jaffe said. He added that due to a Massachusetts law, Brandeis could not access funds in its endowment that have decreased beneath their original value due to the fall of the stock market.

Flesch said he had suggested that the administration lobby the Massachusetts legislature to change that law. The University can only access its reserves to make payments, Jaffe went on to say. "If the market continues at its current level, sometime in academic year 2010-2011, those reserves would be gone," he added.

Both Jaffe and Flesch emphasized that no details of the proposals are set in stone. "None of the details have been worked out," Jaffe said.

The Faculty Senate Council consists of Flesch and three faculty elected by the Faculty Senate each year.

Jaffe said the number of meta-majors available is up for discussion, with proposals ranging from having five to having between nine and 12 of them. "One possibility is that we wouldn't have minors at all, that you'd have this broad major which might be something like life sciences with a concentration in biology," he said.

Flesch added that the proposed change in academic structure could benefit faculty because they will no longer be under the restrictions of their departments. This may allow them to teach more subjects about which they care more strongly. "If I want to teach a course on the 20th century novel, it's much more easy for me to teach Proust if there's a meta-major in the 20th-century novel than if I have to teach a course on the 20th-century English novel," he said.

The proposed increase in future undergraduate classes to raise revenue gained by tuition is closely connected to the new required summer semester, Jaffe explained. "We want to have more tuition-paying students each year, without having significantly more on campus at any one time," he said.

In the new model, each student come for eight semesters, but one of those is a summer semester. With about 800 students, the number Jaffe expects to be on campus during the summer, a portion of students would not be on campus during the fall or spring because they would already have completed a summer semester, Jaffe said.

Dartmouth College is another institution that has a year-round academic calendar requiring student residency the summer after sophomore year. Flesch said the idea for a summer semester was originally suggested by the faculty as a way to use the University more efficiently in the summer.

Jaffe said the proposed decrease in faculty would occur in multiple ways. Some faculty might choose to leave "as we close programs and eliminate some majors." There would be incentives for faculty to retire early, he explained. "The restructuring will create a curriculum that requires fewer faculty," Jaffe said. Flesch explained that there would be less need for multiple faculty with similar specializations. Also, the University's faculty-to-student ratio would be closer to 1:10, Jaffe said, rather than the current ratio of 1:8. Jaffe said the University would not abolish tenure or lay off tenured faculty.

The new curriculum would need to be described in general by this spring so that the Admissions staff could begin marketing it to current high school juniors, Jaffe said.

Professor Irving Epstein (CHEM), Chair of the School Council for the Sciences, said he was skeptical about turning six science departments into fewer meta-majors but thought the potential for summer and interdisciplinary research was interesting. He added that many faculty thought that "a month is probably too short a time to make major changes in the curriculum and have them come out right."

The Jan. 14 faculty e-mail also said that there will be a special faculty meeting on Thursday at 3 p.m. about the proposals.

Jaffe said that he and Provost Marty Krauss plan to meet with their respective student advisory committees this week to discuss the proposals.