Senior administrators and the Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities agreed on a modified process for the consideration of proposals by the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee, which will be released later this month, Provost Marty Krauss announced in a campuswide e-mail sent April 2 and at the faculty meeting last Thursday.The new process will have Krauss presenting an initial report of the CARS recommendations to the community May 4 and presenting a final report at the May 14 faculty meeting. The May 4 announcement was originally the final report. CARS recommendations will be released April 20, according to Krauss.

The CFRR "wanted to be sure . that if people wanted to have a comment on [the May 4 report], that wouldn't be considered the final report," Krauss said. The final report would be binding on the issues that she is authorized to make decisions about, she said.

Chair of the CFRR Prof. Aida Wong (FA) said that the committee had been concerned about the transparency of the deliberation process of the CARS proposals. She said that with the timeline change, "the faculty meeting will still be a forum for discussing [the proposals] . rather than having the deliberative process [for the CARS proposals be] independent of the regular governing procedure."

CFRR had also asked for an enumeration of the criteria for the restructuring so that faculty members could "have a common ground to assess the merits of the forthcoming recommendations." Wong said.

According to the April 2 campuswide e-mail, Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe stated at the meeting that CARS had considered eight criteria, including a program's contribution to the University's multiple missions, its contribution to the undergraduate experience, its excellence compared to similar programs at other schools, the extent to which it is required, its distinctiveness regarding the Brandeis profile and the extent to which it contributes to other programs.