EDITORIAL: Money-saving tactics key

Less focus on restructuring

By:

Posted: 5/19/09

On May 4, the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee released a supplemental report retracting its original suggestion to reorganize the American Studies, African and Afro-American Studies and Classical Studies departments into interdepartmental programs. Although there are several reasons that the revocation of this proposal was wise, we feel that the most troubling thing about the entire process was the CARS committee's failure to investigate the monetary results of the changes it initially wanted to make. The committee should not have had to wait for the community to question how much the University would save because of the proposed changes; rather, the committee should have investigated the money issues first before officially proposing any major restructuring at all.

Granted, the committee's research was excellent. The CARS report provided a detailed overview of each department's structure and assets. The rationales for transforming AMST, AAAS and Classics into interdepartmental programs were clear but lacking: Despite the details on how to broaden the disciplines and cut their resources, there was no hard evidence that substantial savings would result from these alterations. Why should such a drastic proposal pass without such crucial information?

Such important reports as this need solid plans with concrete answers to the question of how the University can successfully combat its budget deficit now and in the next few years. The theory behind the proposals to restructure AMST, AAAS and Classics was that these newly revamped interdepartmental programs would share faculty and cross-list courses. However, after the proposals failed, 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." If the University intended to use its resources like this in the first place, why bother to propose such major changes? The University should channel its efforts into researching more specific money-saving tactics rather than ill-considered mass restructuring plans in order to really be productive.

Another specific instance of CARS' oversight appears in Section 3 of the Supplemental Report of the CARS Committee. The report acknowledges several departments' analyses of its suggestion to reduce their respective target faculty sizes. The departments explained to the committee that these reductions would harm undergraduate or graduate curricula. CARS' response to these concerns is to make no change; the committee claims in its report that it does not "have the time for the analysis and conversation with the affected departments that would be necessary to get these [analyses] right." This is not the appropriate way for CARS to conduct its research for the academic restructuring process. The committee should not have to wait for the departments to prove it wrong. The committee's task is to make reasonable suggestions based on meticulous analysis.

This is not the first time we have witnessed major backpedaling due to poorly conducted investigations. In the case of study abroad, the University paid no attention to merit scholars' admissions letters guaranteeing them the right to transfer their aid to their preferred study abroad programs. The University soon reversed that decision because the community pointed out the tremendous flaws in its research. Likewise, the CARS committee's proposal to convert AMST, AAAS and Classics into interdepartmental programs sparked similar outrage and mistrust in the Brandeis community. In the future, the University must ensure that its committees do proper research before proposing major changes.

After the April 23 faculty meeting, when the CARS committee's proposal to restructure the three affected departments was rejected, Prof. Marc Brettler (NEJS) said, "[Changing] the three departments into programs is not a prudent idea. It's clear and it was stated at the meeting that it's not going to save money." This editorial board concurs. If saving money is truly this University's objective, then the first consideration when proposing radical changes to Brandeis' cherished curriculum must be analyzing these proposals' monetary effects.