The new Faculty Workload Committee will examine the distribution of workloads among Arts and Sciences faculty in an effort to implement a recommendation made by the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee last spring, Provost Marty Krauss and Faculty Senate Chair Prof. Sabine von Mering (GRALL) wrote in an e-mail to faculty last Wednesday. Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe will chair the committee. Its other members are Profs. Marc Brettler (NEJS), Bulbul Chakraborty (PHYS), Jerry Cohen (AMST) and Richard Parmentier (ANTH). The committee held its first meeting last Wednesday.

"As we strive to deliver our ambitious curriculum with fewer faculty, it is imperative that the workload be shared," states the final report of the CARS committee, which was released last April. The report notes that the Faculty Handbook designates the responsibilities of faculty as teaching, advising, scholarship and creative activity and service.

"While the number of courses taught is specified in each department, expectations regarding the other activities are more qualitative. Nonetheless, if a faculty member's contributions in any of those areas are significantly and consistently below expectations, there should be an adjustment of responsibilities in another area to compensate," the report states.

The report recommends that the dean of Arts and Sciences work with the Faculty Senate "to develop a policy for adjustment of teaching loads and other work responsibilities for faculty whose contributions in any of our areas of responsibilities are below expectations."

The Committee's Web site states that "the purpose of this review is to determine what (if any) changes in policy and practice are needed to ensure equity and to achieve the multiple missions of Arts and Sciences." It also states that it will include recommendations for a post-tenure review process within Arts and Sciences.

Krauss wrote in an e-mail to the Justice that post-tenure review refers to reviewing faculty after they have received tenure. Brandeis does not currently have a "formal system" for post-tenure review, she wrote. "The exact nature of such a review, should we develop one, would be discussed/deliberated by the Faculty Workload Committee."

The Committee is expected to make recommendations by Feb. 1 to the Faculty Senate, the School Councils and the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee for review before submitting the recommendations to the provost.

"The CARS committee had a number of recommendations that it gave to the provost, and most of these recommendations have become purview of the Dean's Curriculum Committee," von Mering said. "But there were two things that were not assumed by the DCC, and one was the faculty workload issue and one will be the centers and institutes review, which is not an Arts and Sciences issue, so that's going to be taken care of in a different way," she said.

With regard to centers and institutes at Brandeis, the CARS report had recommended analyzing to what extent centers and institutes could alleviate costs of core University functions or could contribute more to the University's core mission, as they are often the beneficiary of funds with very specific requirements.

Krauss declined to comment on what plans exist to address that recommendation.

Von Mering said that an initial idea for addressing the workload issue was to revise the CARS committee and reestablish it to consider the issue. "But the DCC pointed out that the workload's issue goes further than what CARS had sort of touched upon, and so that's why this new committee was formed, which has a member of the DCC and a member of CARS," she said. Parmentier was on the CARS committee and is a member of DCC.

In addition to the concerns raised by CARS with regard to faculty workloads, "there's been discussion about ... what should the University do if a faculty member is no longer meeting all the expectations with regard to scholarship, teaching and service," Krauss said. "Right now we don't have any particular policies to address that."

Teaching loads differ to some extent by discipline, Krauss said, depending on the competitive norms of individual disciplines and the degree to which faculty are more likely to have external research grants that pay for them to conduct research. "The sciences in general have a lower teaching load than the social sciences, humanities and creative arts because they have labs to run and a lot of their teaching is done in the lab," she said.

Krauss said that the members of the committee are knowledgeable and well respected and that they were familiar with workload issues due to their administrative experience. She added that it was an issue she had been interested in for a long time.

"There is inevitably a certain amount of overlap between workload issues and issues about managing the curriculum," Jaffe said. "We recognize that these two issues connect, and that's part of the reason why we made sure to have someone on the workload committee who is also on the Dean's Curriculum Committee



-Nashrah Rahman contributed reporting.