Students and faculty expressed resentment with the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee's proposal to convert the African and Afro-American Studies department to an interdisciplinary program and worried about threatening the status of a department established 40 years ago in the wake of the Ford Hall takeover. Last Sunday, the Union Senate passed a resolution, drafted by East Quad Senator Jenna Rubin '11 and Senator for the Class of 2011 Lev Hirschhorn, to oppose making the AAAS department a program.

In 1969, students took over the Ford Hall building and presented a list of 10 demands to the University, the first of which was the establishment of an African and Afro-American Studies department. Today, students as well as former and current faculty fear that changing the department's status to a program could jeopardize the institution's symbolic significance.

"I think that it's a bad decision on the part of the University to change the AAAS department to a program," Hirschhorn said. "There's a dangerous symbolism in that action," he added, referring to the implications of eliminating a department that the University established in order to increase minority representation.

Prof. Ronald Walters, the founding chair of the AAAS department at Brandeis, decried the proposal as a significant threat to the status of African American studies here. "The dismantlement of the [AAAS] department will also dismantle much of the significance of Ford Hall as that historical beginning to students in that setting today," he wrote in an e-mail to Nathan Robinson '11.

Prof. Ibrahim Sundiata (AAAS), who served as chair of the AAAS department in the 1990s, said that he doubts the proposal's merit, particularly since Brandeis was one of the first American universities to establish an AAAS department.

"The [students who took over Ford Hall] in the 1960s wanted [the AAAS department] for a very good reason," Sundiata said. "AAAS would . interface with other departments, but as an equal department. Now, [the University] is going in a sense backward because a lot of [schools] are still fighting . to get their programs as departments."

Walters, now a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland at College Park, saw the proposal as the culmination of a continued absence of University support for the AAAS department.

"It is my view, admittedly from a distance, that the department has suffered from the lack of vigorous University support since [its founding], such that the number of faculty that I originally instituted is what exists today," he wrote.

Prof. Wellington Nyangoni, chair of the AAAS department, voiced his disappointment with the proposal at the faculty meeting. "I think the [faculty] meeting went well," he said, after faculty voted not to change the three targeted departments to programs.Still, CARS committee members maintain that the AAAS department would be more successful as an interdisciplinary program.

Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said the committee felt that AAAS faculty members "could be used more effectively if they were combined with other departments and the majors were presented as programs."

Faculty with relevant research and publication record and teaching history could join AAAS in order to strengthen the program offerings, according to CARS committee member Prof. Steven Burg (POL).

Burg said the University intends to add another position to the AAAS faculty as part of the proposal to change the department to a program. Prof. Robin Foer Miller (GRALL), another member of the committee, wrote in an e-mail to the Justice that three members of the AAAS faculty already have joint appointments in the History, Politics and English departments.

Burg also commented on students' concerns about the department's symbolic role. "The world has changed since the time AAAS was founded 40 years ago. . The president of the United States is a black man. The symbolic politics is not as powerful as it would have been 40 years ago," he said.

Kaamila Mohammed '11, co-President-elect of the Brandeis Black Students Organization, worried that "to get rid of the [AAAS] department would send a message to the . student body that these issues and this subject matter is not valued as much. A lot of people say that turning a department into a program is the beginning of a slippery slope."

Although Robinson, an AAAS major, worried about preserving the "unique history of the AAAS department," he said he was "not entirely opposed to the idea of turning the AAAS department" into a program.

The change "may be beneficial if the University continues to offer a wide range of classes," he said.

Village Senator Avi Rhodes '09 voted against the resolution to oppose making the AAAS department a program.

"I fear that if we leave AAAS as a department on its own without [making] it a program, it may suffer because right now there [are] very few majors," he said. Converting AAAS to a program, he added, will "allow them to come under the wing of another department. ... Right now, unfortunately, we don't have the funds to have an AAAS department."

"Probably every faculty [member] finds this distasteful," Burg said.

"CARS finds this distasteful. We'd rather not do this, but we don't have a choice.