Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe intends to ask department chairs to give an update on their progress in meeting the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee goals when they submit their annual curriculum plans in December, according to a summary of the most recent Dean's Curriculum Committee meeting sent to faculty Sept. 10. The e-mail contains the suggestion that departments will be asked to describe their progress on such issues as affiliation of faculty, streamlining of curriculum and review of classes with low enrollment.

"I'm going to be asking the chairs -in some way, that we'll be working out over the next few weeks for information on how that's going," Jaffe said.

The DCC's task is to advise Jaffe on ways to continue delivering the curriculum with fewer faculty members, as recommended by the CARS committee last semester, including having faculty affiliated with departments outside their own, forming curriculum committees for each major and examining ways to reduce major requirements.

"For this year, some of these reports will be, if not hypothetical, they'll be projective, like we hope to be coordinating with Sociology and have this course that both of our students will take," said Prof. Richard Parmentier (ANTH), a member of the DCC.

"The dean wants to know what your planning perspective is rather than accomplishments," Parmentier said.

Both Parmentier and Jaffe said that department chairs would not be making recommendations about the departure of faculty since those decisions are not under their purview.

Instead, Parmentier said that during the CARS implementation process over the next five years, the DCC would be advising Jaffe on decisions such as replacing a retired or departing faculty or responding to a departmental request for a new position.

"We might advise the Dean ... that there's a request from History and a request from Latin American Studies, and they ought to get together," Parmentier said.

Jaffe noted that the University has created incentives for faculty to voluntarily retire early or reduce their workload and is not hiring very many new faculty.

He said that that there have been talks about the retirement plan but declined to offer specifics.

"What we're trying to figure out is what other kinds of indices will demonstrate that a department is taking seriously the CARS plan," Parmentier said.

"The Dean is saying let's configure our courses in the most efficient way we possibly can so that when the faculty size changes, it'll be within a planned curriculum, not random."

"One way you might want to think about [the dean's recommendations for the chairs] is to think about CARS from the curriculum [perspective] rather than personnel," Parmentier said.

"[The idea is to] have the curriculum motivate the dean's planning for faculty-rather than starting with what faculty do you have, let's start with what courses do we need to teach," he said.

Parmentier said this was the traditional approach in curricular planning.

Offering a humorous example, he said a department could state that "We need someone whose research has to do with green people on Mars, and the dean would say, 'well what courses motivate that request?' In that sense, "CARS is actually going back to basics," Parmentier said.

"Arts and Sciences starts with the curriculum, and then the faculty are arranged and hired to teach that curriculum," he said.

The DCC also discussed changing the language of its recommendations on affiliated faculty to clarify their voting rights, based on feedback from department chairs.

"The CARS plan cannot change the faculty handbook. . The Faculty Handbook governs all of our activities," Paramentier said. Among the areas where the Faculty Handbook specifies the role of members of the department is in the area of tenure and promotion.

Requests for new courses would go to the School Councils and the DCC, Parmentier said.

"Some innovation is good but maybe in the CARS era every innovation isn't going to be possible."

He said one of the main differences in this year's curricular process compared to previous ones would be that that "a second set of eyes" in the form of the five senior faculty on the DCC would be looking at the proposal reports that come in Dec. 1.

In terms of other changes recommended by the DCC, departments have also begun forming curriculum committees.

Parmentier said that in the Anthropology department, the department chair, the undergraduate advising head and the director of graduate studies will sit on the curriculum committee.

He added that there would be a faculty member with archeology expertise on the committee in the event, as none of the other members had expertise in this area.