The Arts and Sciences Reimagining Cornell Task Force Report, released on Nov. 6, outlined potential plans that could alleviate the college’s financial burdens as well as improve the quality and efficiency of its teaching and research.

“Last winter there were too many questions. Now there are clearer things to work on,” Dean Peter Lepage said.

President David Skorton and Provost Kent Fuchs are now considering the suggestions made in the report and gathering input from the community. The report is currently available for review in the Dean of Faculty office during business hours. The final strategic plan will be released in May 2010, University officials have said.

According to the report, the Arts College is already very lean with, only 10 percent of the budget devoted to administrative costs. Thus, making a 15- to 18-percent cut would mean eliminating faculty even if every single staff member is laid off, said Associate Dean Walter Cohen, chair of the faulty committee that drafted the report. Fortunately, new cost-savings opportunities in non-academic spending — which neither Cohen nor Lepage could precisely identify at the moment — will give the college some “breathing room,” Cohen said.

“We are not preparing for doom day, but we are not in growth mode either,” he said.

Although Arts and Sciences is not the highest ranked college at Cornell, its reputation is highly correlated with the overall ranking of the University, according to the report. Therefore efforts will be made to maintain the high standard of education that the college offers, the report said.

Across-the-board reductions are discouraged by the committee report because the ranking and quality of some departments are more crucial than others. Since reductions must be made, departments may need to “abandon” the notion that they must fully cover every aspect of their discipline, and full disciplines may be eliminated through consolidation, the report said. Biology, chemistry, economics, government, history, literature (both English and foreign, which is a “significant change” from the draft report, Cohen said), mathematics and physics are among the task force’s prioritized departments. In addition, less emphasis will be placed on graduate fields with nationally declining enrollment.

The report offered several budget cut scenarios. With a 15-percent cut, one-fifth of the departments will shrink by more than 25 percent, and 90 percent of the departments will shrink by more than 10 percent. With a 20- or 25- percent reduction, up to four entire departments will be closed.

Arts and Sciences does not have sufficient infrastructure to accomodate more students in the fall and spring semesters, but the report said that a higher enrollment in the summer could increase tuition income by 14 percent if the classes are staffed by current faculty. The so-called “Dartmouth Plan” of adopting the quarter system would “overcome vacancies and insufficient use of campus resources during the summer term” since the summer term would be transformed into a full quarter, according to Prof. Theodore Lowi, government, who has been teaching at Cornell for 50 years.

“Selling University credits during summer has always been a fraud, even though good people teach [the classes],” Lowi said.

To offset negative effects of budget cuts, the college may consolidate departments into larger units to better facilitate faculty hiring and quality control. Some proposals include a joint ethnic studies group that combines small departments with interdisciplinary departments that are filled with solely joint-appointed faculty, such as Science and Technology Studies and Asian Studies.

In terms of faculty quality, the committee suggests a formal procedure to track and facilitate faculty development. Reviews will be conducted yearly by department chairs prior to third year and tenure reviews, in which junior faculty members will be evaluated on their research potential, teaching, public services and “other” accomplishments. Long term associate professors who are stalled in rank as well as full professors with downsized research may be asked to take on a heavier teaching load. Endowed teaching professorships of three to five year terms named for a single donor are also considered.

Since the current job market in academia greatly favors employers, the committee urges the college to resume faculty hiring, so as to seize this opportunity to secure competitive professors. At the moment there are six faculty searches in Arts and Sciences for this academic year, while in past years usually 30 to 40 took place.

Teaching is also another key aspect in the report. The committee proposes that departments create four to five year long-term “rolling” teaching plans and a “bifurcation” of classes sizes — creating more classes with either more than 75 students or 15 to 20 students — should replace the current model of lecture courses of 40 to 50 students. Smaller discussion courses with the size of freshman writing seminars give students more individual attention, and large lectures could be beneficial to undergraduate education if “the best scholars compete to teach them” when the University provides sufficient incentives.

“Although most humanities courses are writing intensive, larger lectures are still possible, such as Prof. Ellis Hanson’s Desire course,” said Prof. Jonathan Culler, English and Chair of the Romance Studies department. “In Romance studies, there are no larger lectures because people need to [practice] speaking [foreign languages]. More classes in English may be designed to attract [more] students.”

Lepage and Cohen stressed that since the initial report was made available to faculty members in August, the committee worked hard to consider all faculty input “line by line”. Although still mentioned in the final report, the Literature, Culture, and Languages unit modeled after Stanford’s course structure — which was included in the initial report and explained in detail in the appendix of the same report — will no longer be an immediate consideration due to lack of faculty support and financial justification.

“Such consolidation will never expand back into full departments. The economy will recover in time but once this kind of structural change is made, these departments will not return to their current status,” stated Stephanie Li, Ph.D. ’06 in an e-mail. Li studied undergraduate Comparative Literature at Stanford, where the department is hosted under the division of literatures, cultures and languages.

Although foreign languages and literatures were not among the prioritized departments outlined in the August report, this is merely a “rhetorical shift” that does not represent a change in the opinion of the committee or a reflection of divided goals between the committee and faculty members, Cohen said. The report merely added what “should have been said the first time,” and “the area of agreement [between the committee and faculty members] is high,” he added.

The College of Arts and Sciences is in financial peril, but it will still aim to increase educational quality, Cohen said. For example, the large lecture courses could begin “right now.” Although this change would not cost or save money, it would improve the college’s curriculum and therefore is a change worth considering, he added.

“We will be working with a smaller budget for at least several years, and we are not prepared to decline in the quality of education. If we are inspired, we might even improve a bit,” Cohen said. “[We will] at least erase the financial constrains. Teaching and education will not be 10 percent to 15 percent worse [at the end of the process].”