The Committee for the Support of Teaching will hold a series of diversity workshops for faculty beginning Feb. 4 that will analyze case studies of controversial classroom situations in order to prevent such situations from arising in the future. There will be four workshops, focusing on religion, gender, sexual orientation, and race and ethnicity, Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said. Each workshop will be led by faculty members, and some scenarios to be studied will be based on actual experiences.

"[The workshops are] going to deal with situations involving stereotyping people or lack of tolerance or controversial views being expressed that might be upsetting to people," Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said

According to Jaffe, the workshops were not in any way inspired by the allegedly racist remarks made by Prof. Donald Hindley (POL) in his Latin American politics course last semester, even though one of the aims of this program is to "try to forestall situations happening where people feel harassed."

The CST sponsors a workshop every year.

"I think there was a general recognition that diversity is a fair value in Brandeis and something that we could all focus on more in the classroom," said Prof. David Cunningham (SOC), a speaker at last year's workshop.

With regard to the faculty's sensitivity to diversity issues, Jaffe said he doesn't think Brandeis is worse off than other institutions.

Jaffe admitted that there have been several incidents in the past, involving both students and faculty members, in which offensive statements were made. The workshops will not be mandatory, but all faculty members and graduate students who serve as teaching fellows are encouraged to attend, Jaffe said.

There have also been discussions about similar workshops for the students, including several talks with the Student Union, but Jaffe said that at this time, nothing substantial has come from these discussions.

Cunningham said last year's diversity workshop was extremely popular and drew a large crowd of faculty members. Jaffe, however, rejected the idea that last year's success motivated the CST's decision to hold another workshop on diversity this year.

The CST runs workshops continuously, said Jaffe, on areas like teaching writing or using PowerPoint. But whenever the committee meets to discuss possible topics for upcoming programs, diversity is frequently mentioned as a possibility.