In a sharp and unexpected departure from a policy that has defined his tenure, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby formally announced last month that he is temporarily putting the brakes on the rapid growth of the Faculty.

While many professors had been aware of the move for at least several weeks, the broader picture surrounding the slowdown remains unclear, shrouded by what some professors have called a communication gap between University Hall and department chairs.

Each year since he started as dean in 2002, Kirby has taken the stage at Faculty meetings to commend departments and his staff for enabling the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to grow at a rapid rate, outstripping the aims set forward early in his three-year tenure.

But last Tuesday, Kirby rose before the full Faculty again, to announce that its growth would be slowed, for now, “to allow our financial resources to catch up.”

“I’m not talking about a freeze of any kind,” Kirby said at the meeting, “but a more moderate plan of growth.”

According to a chart provided by University Hall (see chart at right), the administration is only projecting an increase from 700 to 703 senior and junior professors between January 2006 and January 2007.

This modest growth is an abrupt shift from the first three years of Kirby’s tenure, when faculty growth averaged just over 21 hires per year.

At the Faculty meeting, and in a letter to all of FAS on Sept. 23, Kirby referred to the faster-than-projected rate of Faculty growth over the last six years as the chief reason to bring expansion to a near-standstill.

In conversations with department chairs, however, Kirby and fellow deans are said to have pointed to other budgetary pressures—most notably, higher-than-expected construction costs around campus and the delay of the University-wide capital campaign—as necessitating a year of pause.

Yet according to many department heads, it is not the rationale given for the slowdown, but the sudden nature of the move, that is most vexing.

“A number of my colleagues didn’t hear a thing from University Hall until it was a couple of weeks ago, when we were told, ‘Hey, guess what, we’ve got a surprise,’” said Leonard van der Kuijp, the chair of the Sanskrit and Indian studies department. “There’s not a lot of transparency.”

A LONG SUMMER

Department chairs said they submitted proposals for new faculty searches to University Hall in the spring, expecting answers by July in order to advertise for open positions on academia’s usual timetable.

Given Kirby’s emphasis on growing the Faculty throughout his three-year tenure, chairs expected the great majority of their search requests to be approved, they said.

So it was with “a sense of fair optimism” that History department chair Andrew Gordon sent a letter proposing seven new faculty searches to University Hall in the spring, expecting an answer by mid-summer in order to advertise new posts and form committees to evaluate candidates.