This shopping period has been wild for anybody hoping to take a Brown CS course. In response to unprecedented enrollment demand, the Computer Science department instituted enrollment limits on “almost all” of its courses this semester, which has left students scrambling to enroll in CS courses they want to take or, worse, need to take to finish their degree. Enrollment prospects have been even more grim for non-concentrators, and RISD students didn’t even get the memo. Fortunately, enrollment has stabilized, but as noise about the situation continues, it’s unclear how many students are exiting shopping period satisfied with their CS enrollment. While the CS department clearly owns substantial blame for this mess, we can’t understand the department’s failure without also acknowledging that the University put it in an unmanageable situation.
Perhaps the rollout of enrollment limits was doomed to fail from the beginning, since department leadership made the decision to enforce the limits without consulting students, UTAs, the faculty of the department or even the department’s two directors of undergraduate studies. This begs the question: if neither the department’s faculty nor its undergraduate studies directors were involved with this decision, then who did make this decision? And why did they do so without consulting anybody? It’s clear the department, or at least its leadership, acted improperly, but the University is also responsible for setting the department up for failure.
In President Paxson’s August 29th letter outlining the University’s priorities for this academic year, rather than including a much-needed initiative to expand Brown’s Computer Science Department (possibly into a School of Computer Science, given the concentration’s rapid growth in the past decade), she paid lip service to a University effort to advance the use of AI in administrative and academic activities (whatever that means). The letter didn’t mention the department once.
This unwillingness to acknowledge the department’s needs has led to evident strain. Any student who has taken a Brown CS course can confirm that the department has become concerningly reliant on UTAs. Lines at TA hours are often unbearable, and TAs themselves have long voiced concerns about being overworked. While the department’s finances are not public, some professors have suggested the department is underfunded. If the University doesn’t see that the department is in need of relief, it must have its head in the sand.
Some might reference the University’s recent declines in financial growth as the reason for its inaction. Undergraduate tuition isn’t expected to significantly increase any further and endowment returns are expected to shrink from the last decade’s averages, making future departmental budget increases more difficult to attain. But if President Paxson really wants to make AI research and application a priority for Brown, then the University has no choice but to support the only department that will make that happen. As long as Brown’s finances are competently managed, the University should never have a reason to underfund a department to the point of dysfunction.
So as students sit through the CS courses they have (or haven’t) ended up with as the result of a bizarre and poorly decided enrollment process, they can thank the University for putting the CS department in its current situation by neglecting its obvious needs. If the department ever wants to grow out of its current state, the University must come to the table.
Mike Woodilla ’27 can be reached at mike_woodilla@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
