Provost Marty Krauss decided May 7 to support most of the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee's final recommendations, concluding that the University should maintain African and Afro-American Studies, Classical Studies and American Studies as departments while increasing interdepartmental collaboration among all academic programs.The proposed recommendations will serve as a new basis for the Brandeis curriculum as the University seeks to decrease its faculty by 10 percent, primarily through departures or retirements if possible, over five years in order to save $5 million from the School of Arts and Sciences faculty budget. According to Krauss, the University is developing a voluntary retirement plan that would contribute to the reduction of faculty.

The CARS committee originally recommended in its initial report released to the Brandeis community April 20 that those three departments be turned into interdepartmental programs so that faculty from other departments could make up for faculty reductions. Many students protested, and faculty members voiced their objections to the proposals at the April 23 faculty meeting in conjunction with a faculty resolution.

"The logic of reorganizing those departments as programs was that it would make it easier to share the faculty resources across other departments in those programs," Dean of Arts and Sciences and chair of the CARS committee Adam Jaffe said. "The new approach is that everybody is going to be doing that, so in theory, [maintaining the departments] shouldn't matter," he added.

On May 4, the CARS committee also published a supplemental report in response to feedback from the community that recommended maintaining AAAS and Classics as departments and provided three options for the future of AMST. The report suggested that AMST should either become an interdisciplinary program starting next year, reorganize into an interdepartmental program over five years or remain as a department but increase collaboration with other departments.

The report also suggested that all majors should have affiliated faculty from outside the department offering the major, Jaffe said. According to the report, affiliated faculty would commit to teaching in a major at a minimum frequency and would vote on curricular issues but not on tenure cases.

The supplemental report also recommends that all majors create curriculum committees to figure out "what courses should actually be offered in any given year over a three-year cycle," Jaffe said, to ensure that necessary courses are still offered after faculty reductions.

Jaffe said departments currently make these decisions individually to update their three-year curriculum plans each December. In fall 2009 he would "ask each curriculum committee in addition to their actual . plan to construct a hypothetical plan [with fewer faculty and more affiliations] that will be a process for stress-testing the faculty numbers" to determine if the new target sizes are viable. A new committee, the Dean's Curriculum Committee, will oversee this process, he said.

Krauss described the details of a voluntary retirement plan. "We're hoping that some faculty will think carefully about whether or not they feel now might be an appropriate time to enter into a retirement agreement because they recognize that the University needs to implement this plan," she said.

In a May 4 e-mail to faculty that Krauss forwarded to the Justice, Krauss offered two options for voluntary retirement plans for faculty. Part of the plan could involve professors retaining tenure while teaching less than full time and still retaining their benefits and receiving a proportional salary, an option Profs. Silvia Arrom (HIST) and Rudolph Binion (HIST) have already taken. Binion said he had been feeling "worn out" working full-time and chose to work half-time. "It's exactly what I wanted. . [I have] time to catch up on other work," Binion said. Another option would be a fixed-duration transition agreement under which faculty would reduce their workload substantially before agreeing to retire at a specified date within five years. Their salaries would be reduced less than their reductions in workload would.

Krauss called the deliberations on the CARS report "an amazing process ... that really sought community input. ... I think we did more in four months than most other universities would have done in decades," she said. Due to the widespread faculty reduction, "there's a certain degree of demoralization that everybody was feeling," she said.

"We're sorry that we had to fight with the tenacity that we fought with to defend our department," Prof. Stephen Whitfield, chair of the American Studies department, said. He acknowledged that attrition would be necessary given the financial situation.

Prof. Wellington Nyangoni (AAAS) supported the final decision. However, he thought the process was flawed because it did not allow the departments to come up with ideas for improvement.

"I understood the first proposal, where they were coming from," AAAS UDR Daevid Devallon '09 said, but "I felt that the [department's] legacy would be compromised or even lost" if it had become an interdepartmental program.

Krauss said she is unsure if the measures will be enough to address the deficit because of uncertainties about the economy and the retirement plan.