At the last faculty meeting on April 4, six lines for new faculty members were announced by the Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee (CEP). These lines will allow the departments or programs to which they are allotted to hire a tenure-track faculty member starting in the fall of 2026. The six departments and programs chosen to receive a line are economics, education, environmental studies, mathematics, neuroscience and psychology.

The creation and distribution of the six lines began with the College’s most recent capital campaign, “From Here,” through which they raised over $500 million. The new positions will be funded from a pool of $96 million dedicated to the College’s academic programs. After the funds were raised, the CEP requested proposals from departments and programs wanting new faculty lines or the reauthorization of lines from retired or previously visiting professors. These proposals were due last fall. Upon evaluating the proposals, the CEP made initial decisions regarding where the lines would be allocated. Decisions were then evaluated by Dean of Academic Affairs Jen Scanlon and President Safa Zaki before being finalized.

Each proposal included data and information justifying why the department or program needed a new line, as well as what they planned to use it for.

Associate Professor of Economics Daniel Stone spoke on the economics department’s proposal, which listed desirable fields within the subject and prioritized macroeconomics for the new line. Stone also explained the process of talking about the proposal with the CEP.

“[The CEP] invited me and a few other members of the department to answer a few questions about the proposal. We did that, and then we waited, and then we heard the decision,” Stone said.

When discussing what to include in its proposal, the environmental studies program intended to hire someone who would add something new to the program while building on the expertise of current faculty. This, combined with student interest, resulted in the program deciding on digital and computational methods as a broad focus for how the line would be utilized.

Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies Matthew Klingle discussed the interdisciplinary nature of the program and how it influenced this proposal.

“Environmental studies is a program. It’s not a department. That’s an important distinction, because what it means is that we are, at our core, interdisciplinary,” Klingle said. “The key thing we wanted was someone [who] could teach classes that would use digital and computational methods using computing, statistics [and] technologies such as geographical information systems.”

The psychology department’s proposal emphasized its consistent over-enrollment in its classes, which limits how many specialized courses the department could otherwise offer. Professor in Social Sciences Samuel Putnam spoke about how the additional line will help address this problem.

“All of us are specialized in our area, and I couldn’t teach a social class or a clinical class,” Putnam said. “There are some people out there whose training is such that their research or their emphasis kind of straddles a couple fields…. We’ll be searching for someone like that.”

The neuroscience program plans to utilize its line in a similar manner as psychology. The department is also currently facing over-enrollment issues, particularly in its mid-level lab courses that are required for the major and cross-listed with psychology. Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Hadley Horch spoke on her solution to this issue.

“I believe that the idea is to hire someone on the neuro-psych side of things…. It could be some sort of a clinical model, even in an invertebrate or of disorders and fruit flies,” Horch said.

Differing from the wider breadth of application psychology is looking for, the mathematics department aims to use its line to create more specialized classes. Professor of Mathematics Mary Lou Zeeman is retiring next semester, making this line particularly useful for the department. Associate Professor of Mathematics Jack O’Brien explained how the department is looking to move forward with this line.

“We had some interesting conversations about what we needed to do in terms of what would reach students and what was going to be necessary for the department…. We have a pretty clear sense that we’d like to engage somebody who is thinking about a problem of social importance that is going to speak to applied mathematicians, pure mathematicians and statisticians,” O’Brien said.

The departments and programs will begin hiring searches in the upcoming academic year.