The Dean's Curriculum Committee focused its discussions on faculty affiliations, the formation of curriculum committees for every academic department and the possibilities of streamlining majors at its first meeting last Wednesday, according to Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe. All three issues will be under further discussion at a department chairs' meeting this Thursday, according to an e-mail Jaffe sent to the faculty. Committee member Prof. Jane Kamensky (HIST) suggested that faculty affiliation guidelines "would formalize and recognize some of the ways faculty already participate in each other's units." She said the committee talked about ways department chairs could recognize the service of affiliated faculty in their annual performance reviews.

The committee also discussed rules for low enrollment courses and the re-evaluation of the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee's departmental faculty target sizes and reviewed the success of the effort to increase the "efficiency" of the overall curriculum, according to Jaffe's e-mail.

Jaffe explained that the committee is an advisory group that aims to help implement ways to continue delivering the curriculum with fewer faculty members as recommended by the CARS committee. "It's not a committee with handbook or legislative authority," Kamensky said. She added that the committee would routinely offer summaries of the meetings, which will take place every two weeks.

Last year, the CARS committee recommended that faculty should increasingly teach classes in departments outside their own to counteract the negative effects of a smaller faculty. CARS also recommended that departments form curriculum committees to help create three-year curriculum plans under both the old and new target faculty size. In addition, CARS suggested that departments re-examine whether the curricula for majors and minors can be more flexible.

Jaffe wrote that he will discuss a possible policy for increasing the workload of faculty who are not contributing on all three dimensions of scholarship, teaching and service with the Faculty Senate. In addition, he will discuss revamping of the teaching of statistics with the relevant departments, dually listing courses in the course schedule in more than one department or program with the University Registrar and examining the Independent General Education Requirement with the Student Union and the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee.

Kamensky said she thought that eventually, "one of the DCC's roles would be helping to mediate among departments if the Department Curriculum Committees come up against each other" about how to split a faculty member's time between two departments, for example.

Drawing on her own experiences, Kamensky noted that she currently teaches as a core faculty member in the Women's and Gender Studies program. "I don't get reviewed by Women's Studies. We don't have that mechanism, ... so it would be wonderful if, ... in addition to writing a page each about the faculty members whom I chair in history, I also wrote about the wonderful service that [faculty from other departments] render to our graduate program," Kamensky said

Student Union Director of Academic Affairs Supreetha Gubbala '12 said her role as a student representative on the committee was very important. "[Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences Elaine Wong] or [Jaffe] will turn to you and just ask you, 'Where do students stand on this?' and a lot of times that happened when we were discussing the CARS recommendations," she said.

Gubbala said that she pointed out at the DCC meeting that the "streamlining of major and minor requirements would be something that affected students right off the bat." She added that she thought the IGER would be important to first-year students working on fulfilling their requirements.

"It was very useful to have a student perspective on which of these relatively arcane issues was and wasn't important," Kamensky said.