Faculty and administrators convened in Mills Hall on Friday, May 1 for their second-to-last meeting of the school year to discuss the College’s response to new federal reporting mandates, changes to various committees and policies and the hiring of seven new professors funded by the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity, among other topics.

At the beginning of the meeting, President Safa Zaki spoke about the College’s legal response to the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), a new federal reporting survey that significantly expands the amount of data about their students that colleges and universities are required to report to the Department of Education. The Trump Administration introduced the survey last August, framing it as a way to determine colleges’ compliance with the Supreme Court ruling that banned race-based affirmative action.

The deadline for institutions to submit the data was in March, which Zaki said was not nearly enough time to gather and report the seven years of retrospective data that the ACTS requires. In response, Zaki said the College coordinated with the Maine Independent Colleges Association (MICA) to join a federal lawsuit as plaintiff intervenors objecting to the implementation of the ACTS. Last week, the judge in the case granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction for relief from all reporting deadlines.

The original lawsuit that MICA and other institutions joined in April was filed several weeks earlier by 17 states, excluding Maine.

“The lawsuit argued that the timeline was too rushed; there was a lack of guidance on how to accurately complete the data fields, and a real risk of enforcement consequences if the government determined data was submitted incorrectly….” Zaki said.

Discussing the victory in the lawsuit in which the College participated, Zaki said she was thrilled for Bowdoin but disappointed that the judge in the case did not extend relief to all schools across the country.

“The judge was … asked to extend the relief nationwide. He declined, which meant that you had to have joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff to get this relief,” Zaki said. “That means, unfortunately, that more than 2,000 institutions remain subject to the ACTS requirement to submit their data to the federal government. This does not mean that the court case is over, only that the requirement is suspended for us while the case plays out over the coming months.”

Later in the meeting, Senior Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs Jennifer Scanlon, who is approaching the end of her tenure as a college administrator, presented a unified policy for course buyouts, which allow faculty with grant support to teach one fewer course. The College will now allow faculty to buy out of one course before their first post-tenure leave, and once between each subsequent sabbatical cycle. Scanlon said that Academic Affairs has also discussed the possibility of a formal extended sabbatical policy with the chairs of academic departments.

Professor of English and chair of the Committee on Governance and Faculty Affairs (GFA) Aaron Kitch introduced a series of new proposals to faculty committee structures that faculty will vote on at the meeting later this month. The first set of proposals would create two new faculty committees, one making permanent a new faculty budget committee that Zaki created on a temporary basis last year and the other formalizing a committee for health professions advising. Another proposal would increase the number of faculty serving on the Student Fellowships Committee to deal with the group’s enhanced workload.

The other two proposals from GFA would partially counterbalance this increase in assignments with reduced membership on two other committees, the Curriculum Implementation Committee and the Recording Committee. Appointed membership on the Recording Committee, which largely deals with academic policies and exceptions to those policies, would decrease from three active faculty members to two. Under the new proposal, the associate dean for curriculum would chair the committee instead of an active faculty member.

Some faculty members questioned the decision to reduce faculty representation on these longstanding committees, particularly the Recording Committee.

“I would argue that just because something is efficient, it doesn’t mean it’s the best idea, especially when it comes to keeping faculty involved in co-governance [of the College],” Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema Studies Allison Cooper said.

These motions may be revised by GFA but will be revisited for a vote at the next faculty meeting.

Members of the Committee on Teaching and Classroom Practice then presented on the work of their subcommittee on Bowdoin Course Questionnaires (BCQs). Committee members said that they are looking to eventually change BCQs into a new student survey metric, the Student Learning Questionnaire. The committee intends to pilot a new survey format next year that is less susceptible to respondents’ biases and more accurately captures students’ experiences in the classroom.

The meeting closed with an announcement from the Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee allocating seven faculty lines, or tenured faculty positions, funded by the Hastings Initiative. In addition to Anthropology, Neuroscience and Philosophy, which received new lines last fall, the following departments and programs have been allocated an additional line through the Hastings Initiative: Cinema Studies, Computer Science, Earth and Oceanographic Science, Education, Government and Legal Studies, Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies and Mathematics.

The next and final faculty meeting of the academic year will occur on May 18, with votes scheduled on the motions to change committee structures and membership.