The faculty passed a resolution last Thursday against the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee's recommendations to reorganize the African and Afro-American Studies department, the American Studies department and the Classical Studies department as interdepartmental programs, according to faculty and administrators who attended the meeting.The faculty also rejected a proposal that would have enabled students to design their own general education requirements and voted to have an additional faculty meeting to discuss other parts of the CARS proposals this week before Provost Marty Krauss makes initial decisions on the report May 4.

The faculty meeting was closed to students so faculty could speak freely, Krauss explained Thursday. According to faculty attendees, the bulk of the meeting's discussion concerned the proposal regarding the three departments, with all three department chairs speaking out against the plans. Prof. Ann Koloski-Ostrow (CLAS) spoke first, followed by Prof. Stephen Whitfield (AMST) and Prof. Wellington Nyangoni (AAAS).

"I thought we should go on record as opposing the diminishing of those departments, Prof. Gordon Fellman (SOC) said on Sunday regarding the introduction of the resolution. Krauss said she thought the wording of that part of the resolution was ambiguous. "I'm not entirely sure what the thrust of that resolution was."

Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said Friday the CARS committee would meet again this week and did not rule out changing the recommendations.

Jaffe said that the concerns expressed about each of the departments were somewhat different. "I think in all three cases the claim was made that this was a discipline; it's not really an interdisciplinary field," he said. "With respect to American Studies, there was discussion [that] it's much bigger than the other two in terms of the number of [student] majors and also the historical role played by the Brandeis American Studies department," he said. "With [AAAS], there was a lot of discussion about the symbolism and its historical origins in Ford Hall, and with respect to Classics there was a lot of discussion that at many of our peer institutions Classics is a department and not a program."

"[Changing] the three departments into programs is not a prudent idea," Prof. Marc Brettler (NEJS) said after the meeting. "It's clear and it was stated at the meeting that it's not going to save money."

Prof. Jane Kamensky (HIST) said she heard "very little support for [the departmental] recommendations and some strong, impassioned and very well-articulated pleas against them." Kamensky went on to say that Jaffe told faculty at the meeting that the recommendations "had not been costed out yet" in terms of how much they might save. She also stated that members of the committee seemed to disagree at the meeting as to whether or not the report recommended decreasing faculty not replacing faculty in the affected departments. Regarding recommendations for the History department, "We are the department that has shrunk the most in the period of the University growing . we stand to shrink more severely in the report, so I can't say it's a very happy outcome for the History department, but I don't think it's a happy outcome for anybody," she said.

Jaffe pointed out Friday that 90 percent of the Arts and Sciences budget is faculty salaries and far more than half of those are of tenured faculty. "[Cost savings] are only going to come about from retirements or resignations of tenured faculty," he said. "So the whole CARS report is an attempt to, in general, create a more effective structure . so that when we do have departures, we continue to effectively deliver the curriculum with fewer faculty. There's no way to tie any of the specific proposals to specific cost savings because that's not the way the budget of the University works."

Prof. Richard Gaskins (AMST) said Thursday that he emphasized at the meeting that faculty would need to vote to establish interdepartmental programs even if the faculty handbook does not require a vote on eliminating a department. He stressed that this meant that faculty outside the affected departments would also need to consider the merits of the proposals in order to vote on establishing the new programs. He added that he had given the opinion that paragraphs in the report which suggest difficulties existing currently in conducting interdisciplinary work within departments are "vastly overstated and, as applied to Brandeis, just plain wrong." All three departments "interact extensively with all other departments on campus."

The faculty also rejected a proposal by the CARS subcommittee on University Degree Requirements and Advising that would have allowed students to design their own degree requirements, a program the report says would help attract more students. According to the proposal, students with high academic achievement could submit a proposal for alternative ways they could fulfill University requirements by, for example, replacing part of the writing intensive requirement with a writing portfolio or by allowing a student from Asia to demonstrate global experience by taking a course in American or European thought instead of a non-western class.

Fellman said he did not think the
proposal was "very well thoughtout in terms of its larger implications for our educational program." He added that he was worried that students would no longer need to take a foreign language and that the proposal seemed like a "marketing gimmick."

Jaffe said Friday that the committee "felt it was a good compromise between the view that we have an obligation as faculty to say what we think students need to do . but on the other hand, we'd like students to take ownership of their own education and be active in deciding what they want to study and how." He added that he was disappointed the proposal didn't pass and would hope to address faculty concerns next year before reintroducing the proposal.