Faculty Cuts Five Committees

The Faculty Council moved Wednesday to eliminate five standing faculty committees, some of which were dormant—part of Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith’s larger initiative to reexamine all standing faculty committees.

The Science Center Executive Committee and the FAS Standing Committee on Benefits, which were dissolved, have not met for years.

Former FAS Dean Jeremy R. Knowles originally founded the FAS Standing Committee in 1995 in response to the University administration’s intended one-percent reduction in its contribution to faculty pension funds, which had not been discussed with faculty members beforehand. The aim of the committee was to provide an avenue for communications about staff and faculty benefits.

But after a University-wide committee was founded a year later, the FAS committee grew irrelevant and soon stopped meeting, according to science professor Gary J. Feldman, a founding member of both the FAS and University-wide committees.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the Standing Committee on Faculty Research Support, the Standing Committee on Privacy, Accessibility, and Security of Records, and the Standing Committee on the Administration of the Bowdoin Prizes—which will be reconstituted as a prize committee—were all eliminated.

FAS spokesman Robert P. Mitchell said that Smith is reexamining whether all these faculty committees need to exist not only as a clean-up operation, but also because they can be time-consuming for professors. Smith could not be reached for comment yesterday.

There are currently 63 FAS committees listed on the Secretary of the Faculty’s Web site—but most of those eliminated Wednesday are not even listed on the site.

The Faculty Council also moved for one class to count for SAT/UNSAT for the General Education curriculum. This policy will still need to pass a Faculty vote to be implemented, and it will go before the full Faculty next Tuesday.

The Council passed a significantly revised Handbook for Students, which includes the minimum SAT Subject Test score of 700 to fulfill the foreign language requirement. There is also an entirely new section on the Gen Ed curriculum, which will be fully implemented this fall and required of all incoming members of the class of 2013.

As of Wednesday, 51 Gen Ed classes have been approved to be offered next year, with 168 total classes next year counting toward the new curriculum.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.