Meyer Koplow '72, chair of the Board of Trustees Budget and Finance committee and of the Presidential Search Committee, will address a special faculty-only meeting on Wednesday at 4 p.m. to discuss the University's need to align its academic commitments with its financial resources, according to a faculty e-mail sent last Wednesday. According to the e-mail, one item under discussion will be the recommendation agreed upon by attendees of a Jan. 12 faculty retreat to establish an expanded Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee to be appointed by the provost to help confront the gap between the University's resources and its academic offerings. Provost Marty Krauss wrote in an e-mail to the Justice that the new committee would be composed of members of the CARS committee, the Dean's Curriculum Committee, faculty representatives to the Board of Trustees and the chair of the Faculty Budget Committee. "Its charge is to make recommendations for reducing the academic commitments within Arts and Sciences," she wrote.

In addition to faculty representatives on various committees or entities, the retreat's attendees included University President Jehuda Reinharz and Board of Trustees Chair Malcolm Sherman. Faculty Senate Chair Sabine von Mering (GRALL) said the idea for a retreat grew out of a faculty workshop with Koplow regarding the University's finances held in mid-December.

At the retreat, "Mr. Koplow reiterated that the Board of Trustees expects that the academic commitments within the School of Arts and Sciences be reduced in light of our financial resources and that a plan to accomplish this be presented at the March 23 meeting of the Board of Trustees," Krauss wrote in the faculty e-mail.

"The goal here is to make this a more secure and comfortable community where people can concentrate on the excellence of the education and the research and not spend any more time -certainly not academy time-focusing on financial issues and worrying on an annual basis about the next budget cycle," Koplow told retreat participants, according to a University press release.

According to the press release, Koplow stated that the University "must stop relying on one-time solutions like suspending retirement contributions and across-the-board layoffs to address its financial needs, and instead focus on permanent solutions."

"Koplow won the respect of the faculty. Faculty really trust . that what he says is true," von Mering said.

With regard to the institution's long-term financial health, the minutes of a Dec. 3 Faculty Senate meeting with Board of Trustees members stated that as the incoming chair of the Budget and Finance Committee coming to the problem with an outsider's perspective, Koplow "was struck by the fact that the budget issues at Brandeis have been a never-ending saga," the minutes state. "On average, there is a 25 million dollar difference between what we have and what we need to operate each year, and it is easy to see the effects of this in the various facilities needs on campus that are not being addressed," according to the minutes.

In terms of the more short-term financial picture, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Apfel had projected a $9 million deficit for fiscal 2011 instead of $7 million in large part because of a slower-than-expected rate of faculty retirements and decreased fundraising as a result of the weak economy and Reinharz's resignation announcement.

Krauss told the Justice in November that the University had communicated with 43 tenured faculty in Arts and Sciences who will be 72 or older by June 30, 2015 to talk to them about their plans for the future. Faculty interested in an early retirement plan had until the end of December to express that intention.

Last week, Krauss said in an interview that eight faculty had expressed interest in the retirement plan. "We didn't get as many people interested as we had hoped," she said. "Our goal was 35. Some will come over the coming years as people think about their goals differently."

With regard to the CARS recommendations, Koplow stated that "while the work done by CARS was admirable, most of the recommendations are not being implemented," according to the Faculty Senate minutes. He suggested that it might be necessary to bring in "an outside evaluator to examine ways of generating revenue or making additional cuts, or both," adding that "inclusion of an outside perspective could generate new ideas or give more credence to the ones already produced in the CARS report."

In the areas of staffing levels and administrative efficiency, the Administrative Resource Review Committee, chaired by Apfel, has begun deliberating. Apfel wrote in an e-mail to the Justice that his office hadn't published any new estimates or projections since the end of last semester. "The idea of consultant assistance remains under consideration," he wrote.

Last January, the administration and the Faculty Senate Council had proposed widespread academic changes in the face of financial deficits, including replacing the currently offered 43 majors and 47 minors offered to undergraduates with a much smaller number of interdisciplinary meta-majors, increasing the size of the undergraduate student body by 12 percent, requiring a summer semester to be completed before junior year and decreasing the number of Arts and Sciences faculty by 10 percent.

At a special faculty meeting held last January, faculty voted to set up the CARS committee as a bottom-up, faculty-driven effort to consider those proposals or alternatives to respond to the financial challenges. Those discussions resulted in proposals for a faculty affiliations policy to mitigate the reduction of the faculty and new academic programs such as the Business major and the Justice Brandeis Semester to increase the University's academic appeal and increase enrollment through offering off-campus academic opportunities.

At the Dec. 3 Faculty Senate meeting, Koplow emphasized that Brandeis should focus on its strengths. "Koplow stressed that we are part of an institution of higher education whose values are not strictly limited to education," the minutes state. "A major pillar of this university is the mission of social justice, and this could be pushed more to the forefront and integrated into many of the programs."

"I think the initial CARS report was very effective. We were operating under different circumstances with different numbers," von Mering said. "When we put forth our recommendation, we knew we couldn't guarantee it would solve the problem but we had a good shot. At the time that was good enough."

The new effort will pick up from where the original CARS process left off, she said. "The fact that CARS is behind us means the data from the report is available so people don't have to start from scratch," she said. "Thirty-five faculty retirements were a wish list. We knew it was a gamble; it turned out it was not good enough to solve the problem."


-Alana Abramson contributed reporting.