Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe has chosen the faculty and student members of the Dean's Curriculum Committee, which will seek to implement the adoption of a new curriculum with fewer faculty members in the Arts and Sciences as recommended by the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee last semester. This plan is part of a larger response to budget pressures in which the University plans to reduce its faculty by 10 percent over five years while increasing the number of undergraduate students by 12 percent. For example, the CARS report projects a decrease from 26 to 22 total faculty in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and 29 to 26 faculty in Biology.

Jaffe selected faculty for the DCC over the summer based on recommendations by the school councils for the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, sciences and faculty from interdepartmental programs. "I wanted people . who would be knowledgeable about the University and have a broad perspective on more than one department or program," Jaffe said. The faculty representatives are Profs. John Burt (ENG), Jane Kamensky (HIST), Judith Eissenberg (MUS), Lizbeth Hedstrom (BCHM) and Richard Parmentier (ANTH). The student representative will be Supreetha Gubbala '12, Student Union director of academic affairs. The committee will have its first meeting Aug. 30.

Jaffe said that the DCC will oversee a process taking place this December during which all Arts and Sciences departments will make two projections for their three-year curriculum plans instead of one; one projection will be based on the department's current faculty size, and the other will be based on the new target size as specified by the CARS report.

The CARS report was released April 20, and a revised version with some corrections was released in May. The decision to form the DCC was made at a January faculty meeting.

As recommended by the CARS report, the DCC will also oversee a more systematic approach to the curriculum plan update, with each department establishing its own curriculum committee to make recommendations.

According to Jaffe, the University aims to implement the CARS recommendations during the 2010 to 2011 academic year.

While students, therefore, should not see many changes resulting from CARS this semester, Jaffe said some evidence of last year's budgetary challenges is visible in the number of new faculty hires and courses for first-year students.

There are fewer new faculty members this semester as a result of last year's hiring freeze, according to Jaffe. In an e-mail to the Justice, Jaffe wrote that six out of 18 faculty searches were completed last year and of these six, two were hired to start next year. "In addition to the four new hires, we have four people who were hired last year but delayed until this fall, resulting in eight new long-term faculty starting this fall," Jaffe wrote. He declined to comment why the four faculty members who were hired before the 2008 to 2009 hiring cycle had been delayed. This semester there are six new professors and assistant professors, compared to last year's 15.

Jaffe said that some new faculty members were hired before the freeze took effect and that others were replacements for faculty who departed.

Despite the economic challenges, new professors, who were all hired as part of the hiring cycle of 2008 to 2009, are eager about their positions.

Prof. Elizabeth Brainerd, who was hired prior to the 2008 to 2009 hiring cycle, said she was drawn to Brandeis by her joint appointment to Economics and Women's and Gender Studies. "It fits in really nicely with my research, and I'm really impressed with the quality of the WGS program," she said.

Brainerd added that she is not very concerned about the financial situation. "All universities have gone through a really difficult year. . I'm not sure it's really worse at Brandeis than everywhere else," she stated. "I'm not concerned about the long-term viability of the University at all," Brainerd said.

Hired during the 2008 to 2009 hiring cycle, Prof Chandler Rosenberger (IGS) said that the University's financial situation does not faze him. He stated that Brandeis has a "much stronger endowment than Boston University," where he taught previously. "In some ways Brandeis is in very solid shape for the long term," Rosenberger added.