“We’ve had to make some difficult choices over the years in how we administer our program,” Freund said. “But we have intentionally made choices that enable us to scale more without substantially compromising on quality.”

Many professors emphasized that enrollment pressures can most easily be relieved by hiring more faculty for overenrolled programs. However, at an institution where resources are finite and the number of faculty is held roughly constant, the decision to hire more professors isn’t made overnight.

Adding just one tenure-track faculty line costs the college several million dollars in present value, the CPC reported in 2018. “We must move very cautiously when considering any kind of sustained expansion to the number of faculty at the school,” it wrote in its report.

The number of professors in the computer science department has recently increased from eight to 13, which has helped mitigate the worst of the enrollment pressures. “We’ve finally gotten some breathing room where we can actually take a step back and think carefully about how we want to move forward and envision our curriculum,” Freund said. “It’s hard to know whether 13 is the number that we ultimately land at … It could be higher, [or] it could be lower. That’s something that will be a continued, long-term discussion with the administration.”

The mathematics and statistics department regularly requests new faculty members from the College, according to De Veaux. “We’re not trying to be greedy,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s a zero-sum game. We’re all colleagues. It’s hard.” In 2018, the enrollment-to-faculty ratio for statistics was the highest of any program at the College by a wide margin.

Because hiring a new professor represents a significant commitment of resources, Bakija does not believe the College will allow his department to grow in the near future — but he believes it can make do with its current size.

Uncertain futures and educational ideals

Deciding which academic programs to prioritize, regardless of their enrollment, is an extraordinarily difficult task. Every professor interviewed by the Record emphasized that they were glad not to be directly involved with the decision-making process.

The College, then, faces difficult lines of inquiry moving forward. “Do we get driven by some sense of the faculty about what students should want to take, or do we get driven by the students and what they want to take?” De Veaux said. “There’s not a clear answer.”

These questions were once the domain of the Curricular Planning Committee, which was charged with considering questions about the College’s academic future and long-term curricular changes, though it had no authority over hiring and funding decisions. The CPC disbanded in 2020 and has not been replaced, though aspects of its work are now represented in the College’s Strategic Plan and the work of other committees.

The Record spoke with Professor and Chair of Religion Jeffrey Israel, who was a member of the CPC until it disbanded. “It’s hard to look at the pressures that the faculty in [programs] like computer science are under and think that’s a fair situation,” he said. “They have an enormous amount to do just to get through the day-to-day demands of managing student interest.”

But Israel said that, even while it existed, the CPC struggled to come to a consensus about what a fair system might look like. Still, he stressed the College’s obligation to establish and articulate its own educational priorities.

“Without some designated institutional body with its eyes fixed on educational ideals,” he continued, “the College is in danger of devolving into a merely reactionary stance, desperately trying to meet consumer demands under the cover of fashionable higher education platitudes.”

“We still lack the most fundamental resource needed to deliberate about [faculty] requests from a long-term curricular perspective: a decisive educational vision,” Israel concluded.