Shihab Moral

The College is embarking on a new donor-funded hiring initiative to add nine new faculty positions to academic departments with high student demand over the next two years.

Two positions will go to the Department of Computer Science and one to the Department of Digital and Computational Studies. The Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee (CEP), which reviews line—or faculty employment slot—applications and makes recommendations to the academic affairs office, is currently reviewing departments’ applications for the other six positions and will likely announce the recipients next semester.

This initiative represents the College’s attempts to confront the larger challenge of distributing academic resources amid a dramatic shift in the popularity of different departments—a trend happening at Bowdoin and nationally. While fields like computer science and neuroscience have seen rapid growth in the number of majors, enrollments in many humanities disciplines have declined. Bowdoin’s Common Data Sets document this trend.

Most or all of the new positions will be allocated to areas of “overwhelming student demand” that outpaces current departmental capacities, according to Dean for Academic Affairs Jennifer Scanlon. However, some Bowdoin faculty said adding the new positions will not be enough to keep pace with the rush of new majors. Some think that departments with declining enrollment should, in some cases, not have their faculty lines renewed when professors leave the College.

“There’s a couple of departments that need more faculty, maybe ten [additional] faculty overall. So across ten departments [with declining enrollments], each would lose one faculty member,” Laura Toma, chair of the computer science department, said in an interview with the Orient. “I think that’s a small percentage…. That doesn’t mean the department disintegrates, but rather that it aligns with how the world is changing.”

For many faculty in declining departments, this approach is unacceptable. In interviews with the Orient, they said their disciplines are central to a liberal arts education and that cutting lines from their departments would only cause their enrollments to decline even further.

“If you starve a department of faculty, you risk starving it of life, and that means enrollments will likely go down,” Page Herrlinger, the chair of the Russian department, said. “If a department is well-resourced, it is more likely that students will want to seek out those classes and the other things that a department will provide in the form of lectures and events.”

There is no public data showing the change in the number of faculty lines in each department, but faculty interviewed by the Orient generally agreed that the number of lines in each department at the College hasn’t changed significantly over the past decade.

To some faculty in high-demand departments, a stable number of lines paired with an increasing departmental student-to-faculty ratio is, effectively, a decrease in that department’s capacity to effectively teach and carry out other responsibilities.

“I do think that hiring has been disproportional in the sense that, in the past, the lines have stayed consistent in departments, even though some departments are losing majors and some departments are increasing majors,” neuroscience professor Erika Nyhus said. “Neuroscience has historically been increasing majors since our program even started, whereas our number of lines has stayed mostly consistent. Other departments are still staying steady at ten lines or whatever it is, and yet their number of majors is going down.”

The Orient interviewed 14 faculty from 11 departments and Scanlon about their perspectives on shifting student interests and what they mean for Bowdoin’s approach to the liberal arts.

UNDER PRESSURE

The faculty from high-enrollment departments who argued in favor of increasing their lines all pointed to the drastic effects of outsized demand on their workload. Manuel Diaz-Rios, chair of the neuroscience program, said that when neuroscience faculty go on sabbatical, the remaining professors can be left with upwards of 40 advisees.

“This past year, we had two faculty on sabbatical,… and I was taking close to almost 50 student advisees, which is pretty much unheard of in the College,” Diaz-Rios said. “And I’m also doing research; I have students doing honors theses in my lab, students doing independent studies…. So it can be quite stressful that I feel I may not be giving my best sometimes because I’m a little tired.”

Isa Cruz

Nyhus, the neuroscience professor, shared similar workload concerns and said it is why she believes it is sometimes appropriate to cut lines in other departments. The program gained a fifth line in 2019 but has not grown since. It will gain another position in fall 2026 if the College approves its application for a new line.

“I think it’s important for the liberal arts to have all departments represented,” Nyhus said. “But I also do get frustrated when we have such high demand and it’s not acknowledged how much pressure that puts on us, not only in the courses we’re teaching, but in how many advisees we have and how much additional interaction with students we have.”

But other faculty said that working in a small department is taxing, too, in ways that one couldn’t discern by only looking at enrollments. Jill Smith, chair of the German department, said that the three faculty in her department have to create a large number of upper-level classes to ensure German majors can take enough different classes to complete their majors.

“One of the things that we have to do … is give the sense that we’re bigger than we are by having a really large repertoire of courses,” Smith said. “Creating a class is a lot of labor.… So when [faculty] talk about their course load, they may have larger classes, but they may be teaching that large class every year.”

Language departments, which generally have a lower number of majors and minors than Bowdoin’s other departments, have to offer a vertical curriculum, in which there is a specified order of coursework based on previous academic experience. Russian professor Reed Johnson said that this obligation compounds Russian faculty’s workloads, even though some of those classes have few students.

“It’s very hard to compare enrollments across disciplines, and ours is like a pyramid,” Johnson said. “We only have a half-dozen or so people in the whole college that are even eligible to do fourth-year Russian. But it has seemed like a priority to offer these students a path to proficiency, even though that’s very labor-intensive.”

The chairs of the other most popular departments at Bowdoin—government & legal studies, economics and mathematics—all said they also have high workloads but essentially agreed that enrollment should be just one of many factors in line allocation decisions. The mathematics departments and the economics department both submitted applications for the College’s new lines, though the government department did not.

EXISTING LINES: HERE TO STAY?

When a faculty member retires or leaves their department, that department must submit a lengthy application to the CEP in order to keep that line and hire someone new. The application asks the faculty to explain and reflect on enrollments in their departments, the demographic diversity of the students in their courses and the development of their discipline, among other trends.

Scanlon said that when the CEP doesn’t approve an application at first, the department is usually allowed to improve the application, re-submit it and, in some cases, eventually have the line renewed.

“It may be that there are parts of the proposal that the committee finds are underdeveloped,” Scanlon said. “There are times when CEP will say no and then the department is likely to come back at a certain point.

Isa Cruz

Scanlon said enrollment doesn’t singularly influence the CEP’s decisions.

“In recent years, we have not said no [to a line renewal application], permanently, on the basis of enrollment,” Scanlon said. “Most humanities departments are on the smaller side, so taking a line can effectively cripple a department.”

Toma, the chair of the computer science department, which has 6.5 tenure-track lines and will have two more next year, thinks that low-demand departments should sometimes lose lines. Even with the faculty joining the computer science department next year, she said, Bowdoin will still have fewer computer science professors than many of its similarly sized peer institutions, like Williams, Middlebury and Carleton.

“Other colleges have embraced computation as being something that’s an important and necessary skill in this day and age quite a bit faster than Bowdoin,” Toma said. “I can see how it’s difficult for some departments that have been historically very large to shed a position or two, but I think it’s really important that the young generation understands computation. And everyone who comes to Bowdoin wanting to take computation should be able to.”

SUPPLY, DEMAND AND THE LIBERAL ARTS

But many faculty believe high enrollment in computer science and other STEM departments is partly a result of students’ desires for high-paying jobs and not always driven by genuine passion. Allison Cooper, a cinema studies and Romance languages professor, said that to only follow student demand would change Bowdoin from a liberal arts school into a vocational one.

“Do we, as a liberal arts institution, want to develop a curriculum for the 21st century that caters, effectively, to student demand, which is in turn based on the market in the United States—for labor, essentially?” Cooper asked. “I think it would probably be very silly to ignore the market, and obviously, the College has an obligation to provide opportunities for students. But at the same time, if you follow that logic all the way through, to the end,… we would be betraying our roots as a liberal arts college in a significant way.”

Hadley Horch, the chair of the biology department, shares Cooper’s view and has tried to dissuade students from majoring in biology when it seems they’re only doing so for a sense of job security.

“I have some students who really love to draw, or really enjoy their GSWS courses, and I’m really encouraging,” Horch said. “And the question is, ‘What kind of a job can you get with that?’… And I believe that there are all sorts of amazing jobs you can get with any degree from Bowdoin.… But there’s unfortunately not these big pathways with runway lights on them. Med school, and the pre-med pathway, is a giant lit runway.”

Over the past year, a committee of faculty, staff and students has led an initiative to increase the number of majors in the humanities by changing students’ notions of what jobs they can get with a humanities degree.

Other STEM faculty endorsed these efforts and agreed that students sometimes major in their departments because they believe it promises postgraduate stability. But they also think it’s unfair that students interested in their departments may be unable to fully explore them due to overwhelming enrollment.

“The problem with having such high demand is that there are students that aren’t getting into certain courses until their senior year,” Nyhus said. “We would love for our (neuroscience) students to be taking our labs their sophomore year, but they don’t get in until the end of their senior year.”

Toma was adamant about the vitality of the computer science discipline to a liberal arts school like Bowdoin, saying that computation skills are not only a worthy subject in their own right but also enhance students’ abilities to do work in other fields.

Jeova Farias, Toma’s junior colleague in the computer science department, agreed that their department is not oppositional to the liberal arts ethos, but in line with it.

“We teach students not just how to write code, but also how to read code, how to understand data, how to provide or create data, how to make data be more easily visualizable and also how to interpret those visualizations, if necessary,” Farias said. “So, in a sense, I think as we progress in society, it seems that data literacy is becoming just as important as textual literacy.”

Scanlon said she believes the interests of faculty and students affiliated with departments of all kinds are important.

“Student demand is really important because we want our students to be able to pursue the things they want to pursue, and we want our faculty to have enjoyable and enriching professional lives,” Scanlon said. She added: “A simple metric of, ‘just follow student demand,’ would change the College over time. And what we want to do is make sure that students recognize how enriching it is to their lives to experience the fullness of the liberal arts.”

Editor’s note on December 6 at 8:40 a.m.: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the economics department applied for one of the six new lines. The department actually applied for two lines, not one.