The Centers and Institutes Review Committee has begun to gather information about the 24 centers and institutes at Brandeis that report to the Dean of Arts and Sciences or the provost, committee chair Prof. Susan Birren (BIOL) said at last Thursday's faculty meeting. Birren said that in addition to the committee's charge of investigating how the centers can maximize academic and fiscal contributions to the university, she hopes that the committee's report can contribute to transparency so community members can understand "what the [centers and institutes] roles are in the University and how they can interact with the components of the University."

Centers and institutions at Brandeis include the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.

The committee plans to collect information about teaching and scholarship connected to the centers as well as their interaction with students in addition to budgetary information. The committee intends to give an update at the last faculty meeting of the year and complete a report by the end of the semester.

She said that the committee has created a survey to send out to the centers and institutes over the coming weeks. Regarding the financial information "the question is not only what are the centers and institutes spending money on [but also] what are the constraints of that money," she said.

The committee is working with the President's office to collect "information from the original donors' agreements that set the constraints of these funds."

In addition, she said that the committee would talk with faculty and the departments about their interactions with centers and institutes. While the committee will not examine in detail centers and institutes at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the committee will communicate with those responsible for centers at the Heller School to share insights.

The committee is also working with the Development Office, Birren said. "These centers exist not in isolation but as part of the development priorities of the University," she stated. The committee intends to give tailored recommendations to individual centers, she said in response to a faculty question. "Individual centers are remarkably diverse," she explained. "We decided that general recommendations that cover all the centers would be significantly less useful."

While the Brandeis 2020 committee had expressed interest in receiving the information from the committee early, Birren said that the large amount of data the committee intended to collect made this difficult.

In a presentation at the start of the faculty meeting, University President Jehuda Reinharz noted that Brandeis has 35 centers and institutes overall, compared to an average of 100 for the top 25 research universities.

He pointed out that donors who often initially give money to centers very often give money to other aspects of the University later.