Sections

Students participating in the Fall Justice Brandeis Semester (JBS) will now be allowed to live on-campus despite JBS’ initial mission to alleviate overcrowding by moving participating students off campus.

JBS Program Manager Alyssa Grinberg said the change in housing is the exception to the rule and will only be in place for the upcoming fall semester. The change will only effect the Environmental Field Semester, the single JBS program running in the fall.

As such, the JBS Web site has not been changed, and still states that students participating in JBS programs during the academic year will be required to find housing off-campus.

Last spring, the original Committee Academic Restructuring Steering (CARS) created JBS in order to both earn revenue for the university and relocate students off-campus to prevent overcrowding.

Prof. Brian Donahue (AMST), one of two professors teaching the Environmental Field Semester, said the change was made in order to encourage students to apply.

“The administration was informed of the difficulty students were facing having to find housing in Waltham for only one semester, they decided to lift the policy [forcing students to live off-campus] to make it more accessible for students [to participate],” Donahue said.

He added that many students were not going to participate in the program due to the housing restriction. Neither Donahue nor Grinberg were willing to release the number of students that applied to the program as well as the number of students who were considering not applying due to the previous policy.

However, Donahue did say enough students have been accepted to the program for it to run as planned.

“We’re really pleased with the group we got and were still taking applications,” he said.

Web Services and Mobile Applications and Health and Society, two other JBS programs that have a fall component, will still require their students to live off- campus.

The fall component is not required but recommended and can be completed outside of the Waltham area “and really anywhere in the world,” Grinberg said.