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To Members of the Campus Community:

This blog has been created by the Task Force on Reorganization for the purpose of providing a space for faculty to post comments and ideas about the alternatives being considered for the reorganization of academic units on campus.  We ask that you include your full name and department with any comments you post on the website.

The Chancellor has charged our Task Force “to provide advice about the proposal [he has] made on college reorganization and to explore as well the possibility of a College of Arts and Sciences, or any other alternative organizational structure that it finds appropriate for the campus.” The Chancellor’s charge to the Task Force and related information are available at:

http://www.umass.edu/chancellor/budget_taskforcemembers_020609.html

We take our responsibilities as representatives of the broader academic community seriously; and in doing so, are mindful of the guidance provided by the Faculty Senate, with particular attention to the following motions, which were adopted at the February 9 General Faculty meeting:

GF 09-01   That the Chancellor shall share his draft Strategic Plan with the Task Force on Reorganization and the Faculty, so that they can evaluate approaches to reorganization in light of that draft Strategic Plan.

GF 09-02   The Task Force on Reorganization shall be free to consider alternate reorganization plans, including no reorganization at all.

GF 09-03   That the Task Force on Reorganization consult with and seek advice from faculty of all ranks, academic deans, librarians, staff, and students; shall have access to all requested information; and shall provide for transparency in its deliberations.

GF 09-04   That the Task Force on Reorganization shall provide a preliminary report by March 6, 2009, but shall take whatever additional time is required to produce a thorough and complete final report.

The minutes of the Faculty meeting are available at:

http://www.umass.edu/senate/gfm/gfm_minutes_08-09.htm

We actively seek input and shared information from our academic community who are generating ideas and plans concerning how best to move forward in response to the proposed reorganization.  This blog is strictly for sharing ideas and information.  We do not have the capacity to directly answer questions or to respond to individual posts.  We will carefully consider the insights shared through this collaborative information-sharing medium.

We look forward to your valuable and constructive contributions.

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21 replies on “To Members of the Campus Community:”

Dear Task Force Members,

I believe Chancellor Holub’s proposal has merit for the following reasons:

First let me say that I am not put off by the prospect of a reorganization during hard economic times. Although many would argue that reorganizing with the “budget gun to our head” is the wrong time, motivated too much by expedience and cost savings, I would counter that if the reorg is done well, urgent times like these can /catalyze/ such a structural change. The key is making sure the reorg feeds the future growth of UMass, which is what I discuss below.

In general, I favor bringing together elements to create a College of Life and Physical Sciences. Here’s why …

The split into “life” and “physical” sciences is likely a vestige of Aristotelian teleology. Like all intellectual movements it served its purpose, but now it impedes further progress. We now know that fields that blend bio/chem/physics are providing the seminal breakthroughs elucidating the machinations of proteins, cells, and beyond, providing “rational design” of new treatments for disease. Also, biological systems understood through the phys-chem lens are providing inspiration for new renewable energy technologies (e.g., enzymes for producing hydrogen fuel), nanotechnologies, and the like. Energy, Nano, Biomed– these are all areas of state/national funding priority and UMass strength (e.g., the work of myself, Thayumanavan (Chem), Rotello (Chem), Gierasch (Biochem), Tuominen (Physics), Muthukumar (Polymers), Lovley (Microbio) and Leschine (Microbio) to name a few). We put ourselves in a /uniquely competitive position/ for future developmen — fundraising, faculty recruitment, center grants — by rebundling Life and Physical Sciences together. Conversely, we lose that competitive edge if we separate these into different colleges.

For these reasons, I strongly advocate the formation of a College of Life and Physical Sciences. Although the eventual composition of such a college remains a work in progress, it might look something like the present NSM plus Microbiology, Vet and Animal Sciences, neuroscience components of Psychology, and perhaps others.

This is not identical to but very similar to Chancellor Holub’s plan.

Sincerely yours,

Scott Auerbach, PhD
Professor of Chemistry
Adjunct Professor of Chemical Engineering

Jennie Traschen
Professor of Physics
At UMASS 20 years

I would like to add a comment to the mix about reorganizing funding for graduate students.
For many years it has been clear that not all/ most departments can not adequately fund
graduate students, in two categories:
1. quantity–enough TAs to provide adequate teaching support
2. competitive quality –if students we want to attract are offered more $ from other
schools, they will not come here.

What does this have to do with reorganization? Some of the funding should be
coming from the University level of administration.

Why?

Category #1 affects the quality of our undergraduate teaching, ESPECIALLY in our lack
of small group instruction that is part of a large lecture course. See the famous
NAS 2005 report on “Rising above the Gathering Storm”, an analysis of the current crisis in math/science education in the U.S.

Category #2 affe in cts the overall quality and quantity of UMASS research. To make a campus excellent in external reputation, improve its research profile. Graduate students are part of the foundation of a vibrant research program. Reasonable
comparables are UCSB and UMichigan.

By the way, these places also have tasty, nutritious food available ON campus, and
great coffee.

Sincerely,
Jennie Traschen
Department of Physics

The current College structure at UMass Amherst does not function effectively in the Life Sciences. There are at least two colleges, NSM and NRE, that have significant investment in life sciences which means that any initiative from faculty or departments must gain support from two Deans. In the best of circumstances, when Deans work well with each other, this “sort of” works but too often Deans have different agendas and this means death to any initiative that crosses college lines. The split of life sciences into two colleges has a tremendous impact on the education of our undergrads. I am the Honors coordinator for my department. I have advisees with SAT scores approaching 800 in Verbal and Math and routinely I have problems getting them enrolled in Bio 100 and Chem 111, the entry level classes necessary to progress in a timely fashion in any major in the life sciences. These students end up having to attend summer school to catch up. This is ridiculous and discouraging to students. Several students this year have become so discouraged that they are trying to transfer. Commonwealth College spends money and huge amounts of time recruiting these students and we thwart them during the first year by making it impossible for them to register for classes. This would not occur if the biological sciences were in the same college.

Similarly, the graduate training programs in the life sciences span two colleges. The heads of these programs have no real power and depend upon Deans to champion their cause. Again this depends upon good interactions between the Deans. During the past few years, the previous Dean of NSM was particularly recalcitrant and this had a profound impact on the MCB program and its ability to attract a permanent program director.

Lastly, as I am preparing a shared equipment grant in response to NIH stimulus funds, it strikes me as crazy that I will have to negotiate with at least two Deans and well as the VCR to garner institutional support. I also am working on a multi-investigator NSF application with a colleague in Polymer Sciences and the details involved in obtaining signatures on the IPF (an internal processing form) are truly Byzantine. It is really quite comical that one could spend more time on the various levels of INTERNAL paperwork than on the application itself. While I am not naïve enough to think that consolidation of life sciences will solve all of these problems, at least it has the possibility of uniting us as a group and providing us with the power to tackle the inherent problems in administration of our research efforts.

Therefore, as I think my rant indicates, I think it is critically important that Life Sciences be consolidated. The split that has existed over the past several decades blocks progress in our research initiatives and impedes the education of our talented undergraduates. I feel that it is imperative that we seize this opportunity to join together the Life Sciences community and allow it to develop into a much more effective and productive group of educators and scientists.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to provide feedback regarding the reorganization plans.

As an (interdisciplinary) social scientist with appointments in Sociology and Public Policy, and affiliations to Women’s Studies and Labor Studies, I feel most able to give feedback on the chancellor’s proposal regarding the creation of a College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS). I have specific concerns about the proposed CHASS, which would merge the College of Humanities and Fine Arts with the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. I deeply appreciate the excellent work done by colleagues in the current CHFA, have enjoyed opportunities to work with colleagues in that college, and look forward to future collaborations. Yet, the proposed merger is troubling to me for several reasons.

(1) Merging is unlikely to create stronger and more effective administrative capacities that will best support the intellectual development of faculty and students. Simply put, one size does not fit all. Large colleges – and the merger of CHFA and CSBS would make a very large college, particularly if we consider it in terms of undergraduate enrollment and majors – are often less flexible, and less able to provide targeted support to faculty and departments. One of the many strengths of CSBS UMass has been that we have deans and associate deans who understand the issues facing social scientists – our funding and publication structures, pressures regarding teaching and training students in the social sciences, the academic and public service issues inside and outside the university for social scientists, etc. Both deans that I have known and respected since my arrival in 1999 have worked effectively with my colleagues and me to craft approaches to the challenges faced by social science researchers. At the same time, they have worked to create stronger and more effective advising programs and funding for teaching initiatives, to make the undergraduate experience for our students the best possible one, despite the large numbers in our majors and limited resources. (As I understand it, the dean of CHFA has also developed programs to meet the specific needs of faculty and students in the arts and humanities). In my previous position at the University of Georgia, the dean was much less able to work with faculty and develop programs that met the needs of its faculty and students. While under a merged structure, “mini-deans” could be created, such an approach does not appear to be the best cost-saving measure.

(2) A second concern has to do with how the merger will work administratively. CHFA and CSBS have had very different college and departmental structures. At the same time, these are colleges with high student enrollments, and varied teaching loads. The proposal would place a number of disparate departments, which have had different criteria for tenure and promotion, and face different demands regarding research and teaching, together in one college. There are many unaccounted costs of transition, ranging from selection of leadership to resolution of differences in requirements for the undergraduate and graduate curriculums as well as personnel decisions. Department chairs, personnel committee members, and untenured faculty have all raised questions about how this merger will effect the day-to-day running of the college and departments, and whether the new structure will adequately support department chairs and faculty to develop the very best research and teaching.

(3) One of my major concerns has to do with research funding, and how RTF money will be used and distributed. Currently, 70% of RTF goes to the central administration, 10% to the Dean, 10% to the Department, and 10% to the PI. Since there are fewer funding opportunities for faculty in CHFA and CSBS, these two colleges have traditionally been resource poor, particularly when you take into account the large number of students we teach. As a result, our Dean has had to be very creative in order to effectively use funds to stimulate and strengthen research in our college. She has been amazingly successful at this effort, given the paucity of resources, but this RTF allocation would change dramatically with the new structure.

When Dean Rifkin became dean of CSBS, she asked Professor Doug Anderton to become the Associate Dean for Research and created a CSBS Research Council. As a result, CSBS created a transparent program to support research, including course releases for those developing research proposals, as well as seed grants for those working on research projects. During the same period, Professor Powers and others built the Center for Research on Families, which has created a remarkable interdisciplinary program oriented toward developing research proposals (supported by Dean Rifkin), and generated a wide array of proposals and funded grants. All of these efforts have been remarkably successful at ramping up the research initiatives in our college, and making us more aware of the specific funding opportunities available to social scientists. I have benefited from these programs a great deal; more importantly, many of my colleagues have also benefited. For example, my colleagues on the National Science Foundation Sociology panel, have joked that I could skip a day of the meetings, since so many UMass CSBS faculty submitted proposals, which required me to recuse myself due to conflict of interest). This is direct evidence of how the exceptionally important work of Dean Rifkin, Associate Dean Anderton, and Professor Powers to provide support for research initiatives in the college has blossomed, and increased the already strong reputation of our Sociology department, among others. As I understand it, Dean Martin has also worked with his Associate Dean Doyle to create effective programs for the CHFA faculty, targeted to their needs.

One counter-argument might be that the proposed merger need not change any of those programs. Yet, I truly believe that the proposed merger will have crucial and likely deleterious effects on this progress. First, the merger plans to take the department of Psychology, and therefore, the Center for Research on Families, out of the college, where it has played so important a catalyzing role. Support for CRF may be less forthcoming from the new Dean of Sciences. Secondly, by taking the well-funded and exceptional Department of Psychology outside of CSBS, the amount of RTF returning to our dean will be much smaller, making support for research funding through the CSBS research program smaller, and less able to support a wide array of proposals and seed grants. Thirdly, although CHFA certainly brings in their share of grants and funding, funding structures are somewhat different for the humanities and fine arts, and many prestigious grants and fellowships do not allow faculty to charge indirect costs to grants. This means that the college-wide dean’s RTF allocation per faculty member would become even smaller. These comments are not meant to suggest that CHFA or CSBS faculty are not productive, but simply to reflect the reality of current funding structures, and how they play out in our “70-10-10-10” system for RTF allocation.

At this moment, our Sociology department is poised to move into the very top tier Sociology programs in the country. Our research strengths have clearly been supported effectively and efficiently by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. I have doubts as to whether these programs will be supported as effectively under a different administrative structure. We should be supporting and encouraging all of our departments to be as productive as possible research-wise. I have seen no evidence that suggests that a CHASS model will provide the strong support for research that CSBS has.

In closing, I appreciate the important work you are doing in considering potential reorganization approaches. I strongly encourage you to focus the reorganization plan on how we envision creating the best possible research and teaching environment for faculty and students in every department and college of this university. One unintended consequence of this set of conversations has been how many of us have had the opportunity to reflect on the things we have most appreciated about our colleges. I hope that any reorganization recognizes the incredible strengths of some of our current configurations, and builds from those.

Joya Misra
Associate Professor, Sociology & CPPA

Some thoughts on college reorganization.
1. College reorganization should proceed from a set of goals or core principles
2. Saving $1.5 million is not a core principle.
3. If I were to set out core principles for the University it would be to support faculty research and teaching, support student’s education, and create structures that favor investments in excellence and strategic opportunities across the various disciplines which make us a University.
a. Others might prefer to include other important goals, such as support current employees or units, support the community, support student diversions (e.g. sports, concerts etc), recruit competitive graduate and undergraduate students, generate patents, etc.
4. There are also some core organizational principles that are independent of our particular setting.
a. Larger scale allows resource pooling, which allows for strategic investments.
b. Larger scale introduces administrative complexity. Organizations typically solve the complexity issue with
i. additional levels of administration (associate deans, two personnel offices one for departments 1-7 and another for 8-15) [Thus, administrative cost savings may be slight] or
ii. standardized rules (e.g. uniform tenure or distribution requirements) which may introduce bureaucratic rigidities.
c. Large scale increases social distance between top authority and core actors (e.g. dean and faculty, dean and students). Student anonymity, already the key pedagogical problem of the large research intensive university may be exacerbated.
d. Reorganization always leads to short-term down-terms in efficiencies. This is remedied by more resources or accepting declining productivity during the transition.
e. Merger can lead to difficult conflicts if units do not share subject matter, routines, cultures, and resource levels. Various outcomes are possible, absorption, conflict, compromise.
5. Mergers into very large colleges should be evaluated on our goals and what we know about organizations.
a. For any merger short-term down-turns in efficiency should be expected. These will require more resources and/or produce short-term downturns in research and teaching efficiencies.
b. The original life science college proposal (since abandoned) was based on a strategic goal of encouraging faculty synergies in a state political environment that seemed amenable to life science research.
c. The compromise NRE/NSM merger seems to have replaced this strategic goal with a more interdisciplinary physical-life science collaborative model. Because it pools more faculty lines and budget power in a larger college it also affords a greater ability to make strategic investments in faculty, department or research center projects. It is difficult to evaluate what it might mean for teaching and student support or potential conflicts over routines, cultures, or resource levels. If it is neutral than it might be a good idea on the strategic dimension.
d. The proposed HFA/SBS merger does not have any obvious synergies to counterbalance the inefficiencies created by merger and difference in practices, culture and routines that must be reconciled. It will produce increases in scale which will require attention to the social and administrative costs of scale. It will produce a college with more aggregate faculty resources, increasing the ability to reallocate to promising activity. Unless funds are kept separate and since SBS seems to provide higher support to faculty at the moment (in terms of start-ups, professional development, RTF returns, don’t know about GOF) a pooling of resources may tend to enhance HFA per capita faculty resources and reduce SBS per capita resources. Since both colleges are not well funded this merger will create a very large, relatively poorly funded, teaching college, unless some efforts are made to change the distribution of resources across the University. If Psychology was to leave the college resource problems would be exacerbated for those left behind. This does not appear to be a viable proposal without significant additional resources to the new college to preserve the research function and make the departments competitive nationally in terms of faculty support.
e. A College of Arts & Sciences has the worst scale problems, but on the dimension of values and strategic initiatives is attractive. Such a college would make clear that the University values the full range of faculty intellectual activity and would encourage the Dean to recognize excellence in all five areas (physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts). The ability to shift resources to areas of excellence would be facilitated. Complexity and social distance costs might be addressed with intermediate administration (e.g. Associate Deans, Physical Science college tenure committees, etc).
6. The decision not to merge or eliminate other units probably require the same reasoning.
a. Are there academic units on campus with low intellectual synergies with other units?
b. Are there colleges that are too small to produce flexible resource pooling? Does this matter?
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Sociology

As we think about the merging of colleges and restructuring, we should remember to factor valuable academic programs that are not housed in colleges.

One advantage of merging colleges is the potential to enhance interdisciplinary interaction among faculty. But some existing programs are already so interdisciplinary that they have never been housed in any particular college. These programs deserve attention and support throughout the restructuring process. These programs can also play an important role in branding UMass Amherst as a center of interdisciplinary thought.

Examples of such programs that are not in colleges are BDIC (“housed” in Commonwealth College but not funded by it), the IT Minor, the Entrepreneurship Initiative, and the Neuroscience and Human Behavior*** grad program.

From a budget perspective, they are disadvantaged in that they have no dean who can exercise discretion and shift funds around to them.

From a fundraising perspective, such programs are disadvantaged because fundraisers are generally assigned on a college basis and generally raise funds for the colleges they work for. Students who go through these programs often acquire an edge that serves them well in society–in short, they become wealthy. They become donors. But the fundraising system, grounded in the college framework, does not always insure that part of their donations return to the programs that positively influenced the alumni.

Ironically, then, some of the finest interdisciplinary programs are out of the loop. Campus restructuring should improve their position. Some ways to do this:

*Have fundraisers pay more attention to interdisciplinary and cross-college initiatives. Make sure that important programs that are not in colleges have fundraisers. Reassign alumni of interdisciplinary programs back to the programs as opposed to systematically assigning them to outside colleges.

*Appoint an adjunct to the provost, or an associate dean, responsible for reporting on integrative studies and free-hanging programs

*Provide a clear mechanism for the periodic review of the budgets of the interdisciplinary programs with a view toward fairness.

I will stop here to avoid being too long. Daniel Gordon, Professor of History and Director BDIC

***Note on the Neuroscience program. I’m not sure what it’s college status is: it draws on faculty from across campus. I do know it has no fundraiser. BDIC, incidentally, now has a fundraiser but has no dean who provides the budget; hence, it has no funding college. Some of the other programs mentioned have neither a dean nor a fundraiser.

In favor of the Arts and Sciences Model:

Tom Roeper
Linguistics Dept and member of the FHFA Visioning Committee

[These remarks reflect my views and do not represent the Linguistics
department or the Visioning Committee]

The architecture of a university must have a rationale. The architecture is either a shadow over possibilities or a source of sunshine that is inspirational. Historically Arts and Sciences are associated in most universities. It can be seen as an obsolete accident or a reflection of important values. In general it houses humanities, physical and life sciences, and behavioral studies. State universities like ours, importantly, also contain various applied disciplines which both derive energy and new initiatives from the Arts and Sciences, but provide an ever-present kind of reminder and critique of just what theoretical work must apply to.

No domain of knowledge has an inherently preferable
version of human nature, the world around us, or provides
a better source of blueprints for action. It is important
that we all acknowledge this, although it is natural for people
to have a primary faith in their own discipline.
To add some substance to those views, it is
clear that literary and historical analysis can deal with the subtleties
of human nature and the narrative of history in ways that
no other domain can. At the same time, it can create caricatures
and stereotypes which are damaging. Empirical social science
can provide important corrective information and insight.
The social sciences make important discoveries, obscure
to culturally biased intuitions, by taking measurements of
human behavior. And yet there is much that will not submit
submit to easy measurement. Theories like behaviorism, now
discredited, have had enormous impact on educational policy.
The physical sciences have changed our world and lengthened
our lives, but have produced dangerous products (atom bomb,
poisonous waste, questionable foods) whose future impact is difficult
for the inventors to measure. The sciences are incomplete forms of knowledge that are built upon a form of reductionism and determinism, which being incomplete may give us lopsided views of the world. The famous physicist Freeman Dyson recently commented that
the “future lies in non-reductionist biology” which suggests that
fundamental principles remain to be discovered.
Computational work has changed our lives but has been
ungoverned in many respects. The role of Computer Science in promoting the invasion of privacy through surveillance is in part the responsibility of every university in which it is present—the responsibility of the whole university, not a corner operating in secret. A great deal of energy was devoted to preventing secret research on campuses, but in reality much of the work is effectlively secret because it is presented in impenetrable ways and no one demands a transparent explanation.
Applied fields are on the frontlines of decisions that have practical
impact and therefore ethical concerns are ever-present. We need to
both listen to insights coming from those quarters and be ready to
assist in making decisions that affect society.
No human domain is without ethical implications and
without a need of cross-disciplinary explanations. Cancer is a
physical, psychological, and social phenomenon, as is AIDS.
We have courses that promote a broad view and professors
who seek to include many perspectives—but we have many
domains of inquiry where that approach is not followed.
One can hope that all segments of the university can grasp that they need each other in making very difficult ethical decisions about what research should be pursued.

In a university it is often left to the students to carry a
critical voice from one domain to another, rather than faculty
who often seem to insulate themselves in departments and develop
a rationale for existence which seems to be immune to outside
criticism.
Administrators—and federal agencies—are forever promoting
indisciiplinary activities, cross-college centers and various methods
to prevent the insulation of fields from one another. As each
becomes more internally complex, the distiance to what seems
to outsiders like a neighboring field appears vast to the insiders
and little contact occurs.

The design of the university should enable and promote our
mutual responsibilities toward each other’s domains of inquiry.
It is not just research but responsible research which it is our
task to engender. We need each other to help judge where
our fields of inquiry are going. Our students need these
perspectives to be articulated and discussed in class.

This ethical argument in favor of building a traditional
Arts and Sciences College. It can be argued just as well
at the pure research level.
My field of linguistics is deeply
involved in philosophical questions, it uses experimental
methods extensively, and it stands as an important scientific
model of the use of mathematical representations as
a basis for a scientific model. For instance, Dick Lewontin,
the biologist, once told me that he hoped that gene sequences
could be analyzed as a generative grammar.
The notion of modeling a generative, hence creative capacity,
with concepts like recursion, which have its origins in the work
of Bertrand Russell, may be very important for much of biology.
Computational biology and computational linguistics share a
great promise. The linguistics department will host an NSF-sponsored conference on recursion that brings together linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and biologists this Spring. Conferences are terrific,
but how easy would it be for a student, inspired by our conference, to pursue animal research, linguistic analysis, and psychological experimentation all at once at, for instance, this university? Would
the relevant faculty know each other?
Our work in language acquisition has led to inter-disciplinary
work with Communication Disorders and a 3million dollar grant which
led to a new assessment instrument. Such connections can be
easy for faculty to make in some sense—as far as conversation goes—
but myriad problems arise as soon as graduate students become
involved. What do you pay students who are working on the
same project, but whose departments have very different
stipends? How much should be expected of students on
projects varies enormously and conflicts can (and in my
experience have) arisen from the fact that students have
different kinds and degrees of support across the university.
These problems are not completely avoidable, but a supple
and aware administrative structure can help deal with them.

There are many reasons why it is comfortable and easy to
separate departments and colleges. There are many more—
scientific and philosophical—why the mission of the university
should explicitly embrace an administrative model that reflects
the shared values of a university.

This view is not iconoclastic. As Stephen Clingman has
pointed out there is an article in today’s New York Times
promoting the importance of the Humanities to sciences
and professions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/books/25human.html?_r=1

[If anyone is interested in my view of the benchmarks for ethics in science, I will send them a chapter from my book The Prism of Grammar [MIT Press 2007, paper 2009 on that topic.

Thank you for this opportunity to provide feedback on the proposed reorganization of colleges. First, let me say that I feel strongly that the timing is not right for college mergers in the coming academic year. We are facing a very serious budget crisis, as we all know well. And the current academic leadership (i.e., Deans) and administrative structures have best prepared us to deal with these budget crises. As a Department Chair, I know well that Deans set the priorities for the College in good and bad times, and they are in the best position to make critical choices about what needs to be eliminated in a time of crisis. To have to change leadership in the middle of a crisis is just not a good idea in my opinion. It adds to a lowering of morale and general feeling of uncertainty among the faculty, as well as a loss of faculty productivity because of the huge investment in time and energy on committees and in meetings to either consider or implement these mergers. So I would suggest that any approved mergers take effect no sooner than July 2010 to give us all time to work out the structures and weather the current crisis, as well as be in a better position to know what may come with the new leadership at the national level.
Second, there might be good reasons to merge colleges, but if we look to other institutions that have undergone such mergers, it is clear that there are initial costs, not immediate savings. What we need are short term and immediate savings now. And we need to start planning for future savings AND opportunities. Without access to the financial information for all the colleges, it’s not possible for me to speak to the specific cost savings of merging deaneries. However, unless some of the current deans retire, there will be no significant salary savings for the Dean’s positions that are eliminated because they will return to the tenured faculty ranks. Thus, I assume that the projected cost savings would be primarily staff and GOF, which could be addressed within the existing college structure.
So, what might be the strategic and forward-looking reason(s) to merge colleges? While we have a huge number of interdisciplinary programs, Centers and Institutes on campus, there may be some colleges that would benefit from a realignment of all or some departments. Right now in SBS many departments feel very much supported and engaged in our current college structure. Because anthropology really straddles/defies the biological-cultural, and scientific-humanistic boundaries, there may be some benefit to our particular department to moving to a College of Arts and Sciences that includes the current departments in HFA and at least some of the departments in NSM. From a strategic and academic perspective, I do not see any downside to such a college, and there would be perhaps more opportunities for a true marriage of the arts and sciences in our teaching and research.
If the goal is to take the building blocks of departments and put them together in ways that make the University cutting edge in terms of research, poised for serious outside funding, best able to serve our students, and able to break down disciplinary boundaries in ways that allow us to apply our teaching and research in engaged outreach efforts, then I suggest the following: this reorganization should be a year long process whereby each department is able to assess and express the opportunities, challenges, and possibilities in the field, so that a Task Force such as yours has all the possible information needed to make a long term recommendation that will make the University and Commonwealth stronger.

To Members of the Task Force,
First, let me say how beneficial it has been for me during my pre-tenure years as a political scientist to have a well-run College of SBS. The college has promoted my research by providing small grants, advice about seeking outside grants, and many opportunities to interact with other social scientists. The Dean and her staff have given the college an identity that focuses on pursuing top-tier research and quality teaching. The focus on seeking grants has also increased dramatically and we have re-connected with alumni who majored in the social sciences. Please see Joya Misra’s entry for a more articulate statement of the benefits of having the CSBS.

It is not clear to me what the true benefits will be from this re-organization – at least not from my perspective in the social sciences. The Chancellor mentioned budget problems. If the reorganization is to demonstrate to the Trustees and wider public that UMass-Amherst is doing what it can to cut administrative costs in times of bad budget, then surely there are better ways to do this. Re-organizing rarely generates short-term savings and it is questionable whether it will do so in the long-term.

My concern is that the re-organization is a strategy to improve the standing of UMass in popular rankings such as US NEWS & WORLD REPORT. From what I can tell, several universities appear to be moving toward a model in which money is invested primarily in the sciences and engineering which are fields that produce sizeable grants and generate many PhDs. An important indicator of quality, according to US NEWS, is how many PhD’s you produce per program. At the same time, other programs will be left to wither on the vine. By paring back on programs that do not produce many PhDs or raise significant amount of funds, the university rankings will automatically increase because the purged PhD programs will not be counted against the score. By default, the social sciences and humanities tend to fall in the latter category of PhD programs.

Regrettably, this plan will divide the university into a research campus in the north end and a teaching campus in the south end. I foresee the flight of considerable talent from the south if this is so, which would surely hurt cutting edge interdisciplinary initiatives such as Science, Technology and Society (STS). The loss of research talent in the southern campus will surely affect student perceptions of the quality of faculty and teaching at UMass, especially since these disciplines attract the most undergraduate majors. I urge the committee to think carefully about strategies that maintain the critical balance between research and teaching for programs across campus, and avoid plans that reinforce age-old divisions between the “hard” and “soft” disciplines — particularly in a world that needs the imagination and innovations that come increasingly from interdisciplinary work.

Cordially,
Ray La Raja
Associate Professor
Political Science

Arthur S. Keene
Professor of Anthropology
Thirty Years at UMass-Amherst

I have no objection to re-organization. Indeed, we may well need to reorganize right now. But I have yet to see a compelling rationale for this particular plan for re-organization. We have not been presented with a strong argument for how this might fit into a strategic plan, how it will make our departments better, nor how it will help us in fulfilling our mission. Nor have we been given, any reasonable financial data or modeling that demonstrate that such a reorganization would, in fact, save the campus a substantial amount of money. In spite of numerous requests to present sample budgets we have yet to receive anything but vague assurances that the plan will indeed save money and that it is the only thing that can save jobs. There have been many eloquent doubts and objections raised by the Deans and Chairs within the colleges affected by the proposed change and so I won’t endeavor to repeat those points here.

My greatest concerns have centered on the process, adopted in the name of fiscal emergency, which has been unilateral, opaque and disrespectful of a tradition of shared governance on this campus. It mirrors the process of emergency reorganization that is happening on other campuses which in at least some cases, is strategically designed to undermine the practice of shared governance (see Robin Wilson, ‘Downturn Threatens Faculty’s Role in Running Colleges” Chronicle of Higher Education 2/6/09). While I appreciate this particular opportunity to comment on the Chancellor’s plan, it seems to me that by working together, from the outset, we could have done much better. And that even at this late date, we could provide better feedback if the process were more transparent. In order to offer suggestions or a reasonable alternative to the Chanellor’s plan we need more information and we need more time.. While the Chancellor has welcomed faculty feedback on this plan, (a bit late in the game to my tastes) most of this plan was formulated without working with the faculty or the Deans and to date, the Chancellor appears to have done little to address the concerns of the Chairs and Deans that have been expressed from the time the plan was first publicly revealed. So, to repeat, my greatest concern is the absence of transparency in the imposition of structural change on the campus, the absence of detail necessary to evaluate the plan, the imposition of an atmosphere of crisis that demands that we make quick though not necessarily well reasoned decisions and the general disrespect for the well established traditions of shared governance on this campus.

Indeed – much of the information that we need to comment intelligently on the proposal has not been forthcoming in spite of many of us having asked on multiple occasions. For example:

SOME QUESTIONS:

Why does the Chancellor believe that the proposed reorganization will save $1.5-2 million. Several chairs have said that they can’t see how this is possible. We need to see the numbers. The Chancellor has said that such numbers will not be available until AFTER the reorganization is approved. This makes no sense to me.

How does the re-organization impact the proposed creation of the College of Life Sciences and vice versa? If the College of Life Sciences is being planned and if departments are going to be drawn from current colleges (or reorganized colleges) to create the new college, then shouldn’t this be considered in current reorganization plans?

How does the administration plan to make up the projected $46 million shortfall in next year’s budget. Can we talk about re-organization (proposed to save us $1.5-2 million) without talking about where the other cuts are going to come from? What other kinds cuts are planned and how much of it will come from personnel?

Are similar reorganization mandates being carried out on other campuses in the UMass system? Are we taking on a larger burden of the crisis than other campuses? Do the trustees have a commitment to maintaining UMass as the flagship campus of the system or is this part of a larger effort to rebalance the distribution of resources across the system?

And what about the stim money? Is our fiscal emergency as great as originally thought now that we know that there is another $317 million coming in from the Feds? How does UMass intend to use this money? Will there be a public discussion of how this impacts the budget plans. Chancellor Holub’s recent memo to UMass students suggested that using the stim to keep fees down or to prevent layoffs was not part of the plan (even though this is a specific desired use of stim money in the eyes of the Feds). So where do they plan to use the money? And given the influx of cash from the stim – how great is our anticipated shortfall really going to be next year? And do we still need to treat the “mandate” to reorganize as an emergency? Now that we know how much money is coming in – can’t we take a bit more time to study this and do it wisely?

Finally, I want to second Dan Gordon’s question of what happens to programs that are not based in colleges during this reorganization. What are the plans for programs like BDIC and Commonwealth College and Community Service Learning?

Dear Colleagues,

Before commenting further, I’d like to second Joya Misra’s eloquent statement of thanks to the task force for its hard and thoughtful work on this difficult issue.

I also appreciate hearing from the people who’ve commented so far on the possible benefits of a life science college, since those are arguments I hadn’t heard before.

If we *have* to reorganize, though, I see more value in the College of Arts and Science model than in the HFA/SBS merger with the natural and physical sciences in a separate college. Here, also, Joya has done a far more coherent job of explaining this position than I can do.

My addition to this discussion focuses on the claim that we have to reorganize, regardless of whether it really cuts administrative costs, because of the need to demonstrate to external constituencies that we are taking the crisis seriously. I haven’t yet heard any evidence that convinces me that an administrative reorganization will actually have this effect. When I’ve interacted with people in the education policy community in the state, or followed comments about UMass in the state’s media, I haven’t heard anybody say that our administrative structure is problematic. I bet that if we polled a sample of state legislators and asked them what we could do to demonstrate that we’re taking the crisis seriously and trying to cut costs, we’d hear few if any say that we need to get rid of a dean or two and maybe some sub-deans….we’d mostly hear the usual round of complaints about how we make too much money, have too much job security, don’t teach enough, waste our time on meaningless research, etc….

I want us to avoid a situation in which we take on the challenges of a reorganization, with certain short-term costs and uncertain long-term benefits, only to find that we haven’t saved much money AND that nobody “external” even noticed our noble gesture.

If there is evidence that a reorganization would in fact buy us some political goodwill, which could spare us worse financial cuts, attacks on tenure, or whatever other nastiness may be in store, I’d like it to become part of the discussion.

Kathryn A. McDermott
Associate Professor,
Education and Public Policy
Associate Director,
Center for Education Policy

GPS systems operate on triangulation – three receivers must pick up your signal before your location can be pinpointed. I think we have triangulation, and therefore a good readout of location regarding budgets and reorganizations, when colleagues in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences all agree that the reorganization measures proposed so far will not save much money. I feel safe concluding that the budget cuts provide the immediate excuse for discussing reorganization at this moment, but that the actual source of motivation lies elsewhere.

The Chancellor’s continuing emphasis on moving the campus into the higher ranks of public research universities suggests the source: desire to develop a structure most conducive to raising the campus’s profile in the national rankings of public research campuses. The current structure has been judged inadequate (for reasons that have never been fully explained), so the search is on for a different one.

Determining what structure will be most conducive requires understanding what characteristics and activities are regarded as the best indicators of research campus quality by those who design the scoring systems used for the ratings. The ratings system designers are an external group, so perhaps they are the unnamed “external constituency” expecting reorganization that has figured so prominently in the current reorganization discussions.

The sorts of things scoring sheet designers choose to emphasize do not of themselves dictate a particular model for organization. What they do instead is suggest concentrating the flow of campus resources in particular ways. The implicit directions about resources vary according to the scoring system (which itself reflects prior decisions about what is centrally important); however the score sheet that seems to be inspiring the Chancellor’s current proposals emphasizes such things as research grant support brought in, number of PhDs granted, publications and/or citation counts, and inventions patented. In the current era, this means emphasizing all the forms of natural science and applications of scientific knowledge to human problems and deemphasizing everything else.

Some aspects of the reorganization plan, most obviously the relocation of psychology into the new “College of Natural Sciences” (which, we should acknowledge, is consistent with the desire of many faculty in that department to be linked more closely with the life sciences) and perhaps the shift of Resource Economics into the School of Management, do appear consistent with a decision to separate departments into college-level clusters that will facilitate concentration of resource flows in directions most likely to yield the highly-rated activities.

However, concentrating the resources in certain areas is not identical to using them most effectively. Even the departments likely to gain from the current reorganization plan by being placed in a “research-intensive” cluster have no assurance that gains will follow because the plan does not address the problems of effectively applying resources to tasks. These have been discussed eloquently by earlier participants so I will elaborate. However I do want to highlight what I think is the key insight to be gained from those positive and the negative stories: colleges and departments are key units for certain aspects of campus life, but other, cross-departmental and cross-college, structures and networks are important for others. As connections among physical sciences and life sciences alter over time, as ethical concerns require closer collaboration across sciences, applied sciences, social sciences, applied social sciences, and humanities disciplines, there is no one “best” college or departmental structure. The “best organized” university will be the one able to combine departmental and college structures with cross-cutting networks able to respond to changing contours of knowledge frontiers. Thus the success of any effort to rise in the league table of public research campuses will require paying attention to both the college/department structures and to these cross-linking elements.

As we seek to raise our standing among public research campuses, we need to remain aware of two collective action problems. The first is the potential for a mutually-exhausting competition. If all or most public research campuses key onto the ratings categories and attempt to maximize their performance on the same highly-weighted aspects with similar efforts, campuses could end up in a situation where everyone has altered campus resource allocations and few, if any, have made notable advances in the ratings. Unfortunately, this cannot be taken as advice against trying; those who do not try at all will be left in the dust and see their best talents drained off to other campuses. It is a caution they even staying in place will require running harder. Second, there is no guarantee that the ratings categories will remain stable. As the raters or others notice that the ratings game is producing a set of lopsided universities, correctives will be applied. This may take awhile, just as it took the US political system a while to address the subprime mortgage mess, but it will happen. When it does, those who committed to structures designed to fit the old ratings system will have to stampede to reorganize so they can score high on the new criteria.

The campuses poised to deal with the next transition best will be those which did not align their structures so closely with the current scoring system that they have to redo everything. In a world of changing frontiers of knowledge and shifting ratings criteria, the best campuses are those with a robust organization – a set of institutional structures and processes capable of functioning in changing environments. Developing a robust organization involves activity that colleagues in engineering would recognize as being akin to “industrial engineering” – developing, implementing, evaluating, and continuously improving systems (structures and processes) that bring people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, and material together to produce the desired product most safely and efficiently.

By the standard of designing a robust system, the current reorganization plan is woefully incomplete for two reasons. It only addresses departmental and college structures, not cross-cutting ones, and it fails to address all the questions of designing effective processes that are equally important to campus success. So we are at the start of designing a reorganization, not anywhere near finished.

M.J. Peterson
Professor of Political Science
Affiliate, Science, Technology, and Society Initiative

To the many scholarly faculty members who have taken time from their busy schedules to narrate or generate a dialogue of constructive criticisms, some of us on campus are bewildered with the resolve of your written arguments. Yes, some are favorable to the chancellor’s construct of reorganization and others are just simply out of touch with reality.
This is painful for an undergraduate to write about but individual faculty members should shed their Ph.D.s and start reading the morning newspapers. In case minds are forgetful, this country is in a deep recession (or depression); the economic and governmental outlook is rather troublesome. Jobs and homes are disappearing instantly. People who once had good paying jobs and an address now find themselves destitute and applying for federal food stamps in droves and state unemployment claims at an alarming rate. This is a reality shot for those wishing to preserve the status quo.
May be the chancellor’s proposal is not statistically significance to put to a faculty vote, but at least he, like Jack Wilson, have their ears and balance sheets glued to the halls of the governor’s office and the legislative ante rooms. The folks on Beacon Hill will determine whether the UMass reorganization or restructuring is voluntary or involuntary. Keep this in mind when everybody is jockeying and posturing to retain their jobs or pleading for their favor departments to remain at full staffing. The time has come to cut costs and downsize. If America and the average family have learned the importance of employing means to restructure itself, I have full faith a university with a zillion degrees can accomplish this with ease.
UMass is a mammoth research institution that’s supported in large part by Massachusetts taxpayers and student fees (excluding graduate students). Now the State, as we’ve come to rely on it as a renewable resource, is just simply running out of money and, as such, cannot afford to sustain higher salaries, more “New Dirt” or more of the same old politics of the past. The time to take all those Ph.D.s and put them to good use is here- Now! Because if those who think thirty-years of service will shield you from what’s around the legislative corner, then I am correct in my assessment: the reality of the spiraling economic has yet to hit home-or on campus.
Take time (not much time) and think carefully about which way you want this great university to go. You have the power to make things happen. Its destiny is now in your competent offices. Do what you will with it, but do it before the State does it!
Brought to you by a undergraduate who supports Chancellor Robert C. Holub’s and President Jack Wilson’s efforts to save this great institution.

To: Task Force on Reorganization; Ernie May; Chancellor Holub; Dean Aelion; Dean McCormick; the University community
From: Shelley Velleman, Mary Andrianopoulos, Patricia Mercaitis, Jacquie Kurland, Frances Burns, Nathaniel Whitmal, Yu-Kyong Choe, Elena Zaretsky – Faculty, Communication Disorders
Date: February 28, 2009

Note: While the document below has been created with the explicit purpose of representing views perceived by the above to be common to all faculty in Communication Disorders, as expressed in formal and informal meetings and email discussions, it is not to be read as an official communication from the entire department of Communication Disorders. The faculty members whose names appear above have requested that their names be attached to this document.

The Department of Communication Disorders has met several times to discuss the upcoming re-organization of schools and colleges on campus. We have identified the academic structures within which we believe our department can continue to thrive and to make the maximum contribution to the university as a whole.

We would like to introduce ourselves to you and to explain our needs and preferences given our unique composition as a Department heavily engaged in empirical research, clinical application of evidence based diagnostic and treatment discoveries and clinical training. It is our hope that you will take this information into account as you formulate your restructuring proposals.
Department Mission: The mission of the Department of Communication Disorders is:
• To offer high-quality educational programs at the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral levels, integrated with a nationally recognized clinical training program for Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists, as well as continuing education, outreach opportunities and in-service training;
• To advance the knowledge bases that underlie our academic, clinical, and service programs by maintaining an ongoing effort in research in the normative processes of speech, language, and hearing and clinical studies in the pathologies of speech, language and hearing;
• To provide comprehensive evaluation and treatment services to members of the University and our regional community through the year-round operation of a Communication Disorders Clinic on the Amherst campus, as well as through faculty and student involvement in a variety of service activities in response to needs at the local, area, state, regional and national levels; and
• To embrace and nurture a diverse faculty, student body, and clientele, and to communicate and collaborate amongst ourselves, across campus, and throughout our intellectual and geographical communities to add breadth and depth to our knowledge, training, and service.
Degree Programs: The Department of Communication Disorders offers curricula leading to the Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in communication disorders, the Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in communication disorders with a concentration in speech-language pathology, the Doctorate of Audiology (Au.D.) degree, and the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree with a concentration in either speech-language pathology (SLP) or audiology (AUD). The department also offers students interested in pursuing professional preparation in audiology in addition to an advanced research degree in audiology the option of completing the academic and clinical requirements necessary for professional credentialing while concurrently enrolled in the Ph.D. program (i.e., the Ph.D. program with an optional clinical track). The M.A. program in communication disorders, the Au.D program, and the Ph.D. program with the optional clinical track are accredited by the Council on Academic Accreditation of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). The M.A. program in communication disorders with a concentration in speech-language pathology is also accredited by the Massachusetts Board of Education and is ranked 30th out of 146 ranked programs (with 84 unranked) in the latest U.S. News and World Report poll. Our graduate programs prepare approximately 80 students per year. Approximately 250 students are currently enrolled as majors in our growing pre-professional undergraduate program, which includes two sections per year of a large freshman-level general education course with a focus on diversity. Another, sophomore-level, general education course with a science focus is in the planning stages.

The Clinic: Maintaining our accreditation in these fields necessitates that we meet specific high professional standards both within our academic offerings and in our on-campus clinic, the Center for Language Speech and Hearing (CLSH). Through this Center, as well as through community and professional educational activities, we also provide valuable outreach to the local and national community. Over the past year, for example, we have provided 2,200 hours of speech-language therapy services and XX hours of audiological assessment within our on-campus clinic, not to mention the many more hours provided by our students in their field placements.

Research: Although we are a professional program, our faculty carry out extensive, primarily quantitative and empirical research. Areas of research range from early childhood to geriatric populations, from basic science to applied investigations. We have been successful in securing research funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as from private funding agencies such as Autism Speaks. Our total federal external funding (including training grants) for FY ‘08 was $441,000. Thus far, our total federal external funding for FY ’09 has been $404,000. This funding has included NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates monies that supported Black undergraduates involved in faculty research during the summers of ’07 and ‘08. It has also included a four-year $733k Personnel Preparation training grant from the U.S. Department of Education to prepare a subset of our speech-language pathology students to specialize in assessing and treating children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, the fastest-growing childhood learning disorder in the nation; a renewal of this grant ($797k) is pending (submitted October 2008). A Leadership grant from the U.S. Department of Education ($799k) to prepare speech-language pathology doctoral students to collaborate on research and academic programming with other special education professionals is ongoing.

Needs:
1. To be a welcome member of a School or College in which we will be respected, valued, and understood in our unique, complex identity as a department:
a. that grants undergraduate pre-professional degrees, graduate professional degrees at the master’s and doctoral level, and graduate research (Ph.D.) degrees,
b. that maintains necessary accreditation with our national organization for these programs and for our Center for Language Speech and Hearing,
c. that provides valuable outreach to the community, primarily through the CLSH but also through community and professional educational activities,
d. in which faculty carry out extensive, primarily quantitative experimental research, with NIH and NSF as significant sources of funding, and
e. in which some faculty are oriented to research, teaching and service for adult medical populations/settings and others are oriented to research, teaching and service for early intervention and educational populations/settings.
2. To have easy access to a full-time grant manager (such as Linda Downs-Bembury) familiar with both federal granting agencies (such as NIH, NSF, and DOE) and smaller, private funding agencies (such as Autism Speaks).

Preferences: It is the unanimous, strongly-held opinion of all Communication Disorders faculty that the proposed College of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Social Sciences is not an appropriate home for us, because it does not meet the needs delineated above, especially if Psychology will not be included in that College. The lack of other departments with preprofessional and professional preparation programs and the very different scholarly focus of most departments in such a school would yield a much less productive environment for us with respect to both teaching and research.

We recognize the benefits that our department has accrued through our membership in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and our shared interests with many other members of the School. However, we are concerned about the appropriateness of continued membership in this School as it undergoes as-yet-undetermined changes. In particular, CEPH accreditation already creates a focus within the School that often benefits the divisions of Public Health at the expense of our department and other Health Sciences departments. If the Health Sciences portion of the School is decreased through the loss of Kinesiology, this bias will be strengthened in a way that is not in our favor at the same time as we lose the Kinesiology faculty with whom we share a research perspective. Therefore, if Kinesiology is to be relocated out of the SPHHS, we would prefer to leave the School as well.

Therefore, we request that Communication Disorders be situated within the restructured Schools and Colleges of the university in the following order of preference:

1. In a public health/health sciences unit that includes Kinesiology. The following two scenarios would be appropriate fits for us:
a. A College of Health or a College of Health and the Environment that would include three fairly autonomous schools (e.g., Public Health, Nursing, and Health Sciences).
b. A School of Public Health and Health Sciences that includes Kinesiology (and perhaps Nursing) and in which Public Health would be an accredited program i.e., the school as a whole would not be CEPH accredited.
Either of these placements would permit us to maintain the research and administrative ties that we have developed within the SPHHS over the course of our long productive relationships with these departments, including the geriatric research interest group. The inclusion of the Department of Kinesiology would ensure the ongoing presence of a research perspective that matches that of our faculty. Either the autonomy of the School of Health Sciences in scenario A or the decreased accreditation needs of a program of Public Health in scenario B would better balance the needs of the Health Sciences departments within the College or School, thus making us feel more like equal partners within our academic unit.

2. In the School of Education.
The School of Education, like Communication Disorders, bridges theory with practice, engaging in focused empirical research while offering students clinical and field based experiences. The School of Education addresses the needs of those from birth through adulthood and is well acquainted with accreditation. It offers programs that are accredited by the National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), American Psychological Association (APA), and Council of Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP). While the School of Education is mostly a Graduate School, it does not preclude the inclusion of undergraduate programs, as it does offer education minors to the undergraduate student body.

Inclusion within the School of Education would meet our needs, given that:
a. we are a part of the education NCATE accreditation process in any case, as we qualify our graduate students for state licensure as school speech-language pathologists,
b. the other departments within the School of Education, like ours, share our joint missions of professional preparation, outreach, and primarily quantitative research,
c. Education students, like Communication Disorders graduate students, are required to participate in extensive off-campus training placements, so our needs in these respects would be well understood by our colleagues in the School,
d. the School of Education and the Department of Communication Disorders share goals of inclusion of and service to populations that are diverse linguistically, ethnically, racially, economically, and also with respect to learning styles and abilities, and
e. the research interests of many Education faculty overlap those of many, though not all, of our faculty.

Thank you for your attention to this document.

[This is the text of a letter sent by the CHFA Visioning Group to the Reorganization Task Force and the Academic Priorities Council. We submit it here as well.]

To the Chairs and Members of the Reorganization Task Force and the Academic Priorities Council:

We write to you as members of the ‘Visioning Group’ established by Dean Joel Martin in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the beginning of Fall 2008. Our charge then was to fashion a compelling vision for the humanities and fine arts in the 21st century, as well as a set of principles which could provide a compass for our college as we move ahead. This was a task we took to with a sense of responsibility and also excitement, as a rare opportunity to ‘think the future’ in our disciplines and in our college. Since then, circumstances have changed, and we face the prospect that our college as such may not exist after July 1st this year. Still, in both the old circumstances and the new, we have tried to play a useful role. To this end, as developments have unfolded, we have hosted three town-hall meetings for CHFA faculty and staff—first, to gain a sense of a collective vision of the future, and then also to work through our prospects in the college as merger plans were put before us. We also met with each department in the CHFA, and surveyed our students, both graduate and undergraduate. We do not claim to speak for our whole college, but with this record of consultation and consideration in mind, we now offer some thoughts on priorities and essentials as you yourselves consider the future before us.

• Our starting point is this. In a time of financial crisis the University of Massachusetts becomes more important, not less important. Our students depend on us, and so does the Commonwealth, as we represent a substantial part of the future of higher education in the State. It is our obligation to provide affordable opportunities of educational excellence for the Commonwealth. From this point of view we cannot overstress the need for vision at the heart of any restructuring on this campus. We have heard the financial argument; we have heard the political argument. But unless we have a sound philosophy whereby we understand any restructuring principles, we are putting at risk the principles whereby we exist as a campus. Any choices we make now will define us for many years to come. Whatever path we choose, it must direct us towards improving and enhancing the educational environment we serve.

• Any reorganization of academic units should be driven by a vision of what a university should be. We are, or should be, an integrated structure. Through our many and varied disciplines we bring our different talents, interests, and methods. We all contribute to the whole; we should all be responsible for the whole. This can create tremendous opportunities if we are thinking about structures which can enhance our mutual undertakings. From this point of view we are not against thinking about reorganization. Indeed, part of our momentum as a Visioning Group within the CHFA has been to consider prospects for interdisciplinary work, both within the college and beyond. Currently, there are a number of programs both in CHFA and SBS which work in that way, ranging from ISHA (which, as a CHFA group, has hosted many colleagues from SBS and the sciences) to Film Studies, to European Studies, to DEFA. Such programs need to be sustained and preserved. We can also imagine many exciting possibilities for connection across campus: for example, art and physics (color theory); philosophy and biology (ethics); archaeology in Classics and Anthropology. These are just a few examples, but the key point is this: it is considerations of what would make most sense in an academic light for prospective collaborations and connections that should be at the core of any discussion on mergers. Structure should follow strategy, form follow function. We need more thinking along these lines.

• By the same token, restructuring can also bring risk. One risk is that mergers, if done badly or too hastily, can bring division rather than linkage. For instance, one large encampment in a College of Sciences and another in a College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences can reinforce a ‘two cultures’ version of the campus. Instead, we should be thinking of versions of linkage and connection across our divides. That should be the test in any restructuring, to enable the collective dialogue on our campus to draw wisely from all sources of insight. Whatever approach we take to restructuring, it needs to streamline processes of communication between different elements of the university, looking for the ways we can become more than the sum of our parts. From that point of view we need to think about process as well as structure: what processes we can envision on campus which will reinforce and enhance our connectedness.

• A vision of the whole also means that we have to think about value, and how we understand it. One form of value, for instance, obviously concerns funding: how grants are brought in, who brings them in, and how they are disbursed. We understand that there are practical concerns around such issues. But there are other kinds of value too which equally support the collective enterprise of this university. So, for example, in our meetings with faculty and staff in the CHFA, and in our student surveys, we have been impressed at the levels of dedication we have found. In both our creative and interpretive work, in our commitment as members of communities from the local to the global, we have extremely high standards. There is a prevailing sense of ethics and integrity, a thoroughgoing dedication to our students, a fundamental respect for human value and creativity in all cultures and groups. Our research record shows awards ranging from Pulitzers and Guggenheims to other forms of recognition internationally. If we have a particular orientation, it is towards a principle of connectedness as such. We point out these things not in a sense of competition with other disciplines or colleges. Rather, we know that equivalent kinds of commitment and achievement exist across this campus in every setting. Let us look then for the ways that we reinforce one another, and recognize that value is created on this campus in many forms. The campus needs each of its constituent parts; we all support one another both financially and in other ways. If we are thinking about structures, let that sense of support, synergy and mutual responsibility be at the heart of it.

• In this light, we have some points of understanding regarding any notion of restructuring. Organizational structures need to be both durable—not driven by current trends that may pass—and flexible to enable interdisciplinary groupings around specific research agendas and interests. Any new organization of colleges should consider all colleges; it should also consider all deaneries, not solely the ones with departments and faculties. Any new organization of colleges should make it a priority to foster and enrich research equitably in all colleges. Any new organization should provide sufficient resources for each college to maintain its teaching and advising missions while not sacrificing its research mission. In this we have to weigh costs as well as benefits. Thus, it is not evident that savings of $1.5 to $ 2 million will result if each of the new colleges are to be provided with sufficient and equitable resources to support the new administrative structures, as well as support research, teaching, and advising.

• We are also therefore concerned about time. Any reorganization that is going to achieve goals of supporting and enriching research, teaching, and service both within and across disciplines requires a good deal of thought to articulate goals, consider alternative structures, systematically assess the merits of various models, and plan for implementation. Viewed in terms of undergraduate and graduate students, any reorganization should serve to enhance their curricula, course experiences, and advising/mentoring. Such a process cannot be accomplished in four or five months. If we skip thoughtful consideration of the model and move hastily to implementation, we will create even further instability in a system already under stress—instability that will be visited upon our students. The university should therefore allow time for a responsible review of models for reorganization—weighing existing structures against alternatives, including costs and benefits, and in relation to a broad vision of the university. Perhaps we can commit ourselves to restructuring, but allow time for the thought that is needed. We could then identify a timetable and focus all of our energies on the larger budgetary issues we face, not just the projected $1.5 million proposed from restructuring.

• We end with an appeal which reinforces our fundamental points. Even in a time of crisis, let us have a vision which makes sense in terms of our basic undertakings on this campus. All of us, in every college on this campus, have staked our careers and our futures here. We want to see our university do well, be respected, produce good work and good degrees for our students. If mergers will not work, let us have the courage to say so. But if they are to work, it will only be because they are based on sound intellectual, academic, and pedagogical principles, as well as a philosophy of what organization and structure mean in the larger scheme of things. Let our decisions be made with a sense of respect for all, and an appreciation of the range of attributes all of us bring to this campus. Respect and vision can imbue any model with hope and pride, and it is that vision, hope and pride that need to be restored at this time.

We thank you for your time and attention, and the hard work you are doing for our university.

With all good wishes,

The CHFA Visioning Group

Stephen Clingman (English/ISHA, Convener), Jeff Cox (Music and Dance), Anne Herrington (English), Barbara Krauthamer (History), Shona Macdonald (Art, Architecture and Art History), Tracie Reed (Art, Architecture and Art History), Tom Roeper (Linguistics), Amanda Seaman (Asian Languages and Literatures, LLC), Tony Tuck (Classics).

Dear colleagues,

I cannot match the eloquence or insight of others who have posted here. They have also thoroughly aired the issues, so I will resort to two suggestions as to how the university might reorganize itself, called “Plan A” and “Plan B”. Although I make a number of quite specific suggestions below, I do so with great reluctance because I know that we will have to live for a long time with whatever reorganization we adopt. I make them nonetheless as a means of stimulating discussion of how to make the alternative we choose work best. I’m by no means confident that any of these specifics would amount to best practice, but still hope that proposing them will lead us to discover what that practice is.

Plan A: The Arts and Sciences model. I favor this model over the alternative because it is the only one that fosters solidarity between faculty. Our history has been one of repeated economic challenges, which have left us wounded but not mortally. The wounds have not been mortal because we have not been divided during tough times into winners and losers. However, I fear that if the Chancellor’s proposal for reorganization (Plan B) is adopted, it will at last inflict that mortal wound, by bringing about the division we have escaped before now. It would do so in two ways. First, it joins units that want to be together into the new CNS, while forcing units that don’t want to be together into the new CHASS. Second and equally corrosive, it concentrates the wealthy into one college and the impoverished into another. On what larger stage has that happened recently, and how has it rent the social fabric there?

Now to brass tacks. How would or should a College of Arts and Science work? The old CAS was at best a loose federation of the present-day HFA, SBS, and NSM, with one dean nominally in charge of the whole enterprise but with great autonomy in the individual colleges. I suggest we consider a closer federation, consisting of HFA, SBS, and the expanded NSM+NR suggested by the Chancellor. The federation will be closer than formerly in three essential ways. First, the new CAS will have a single administrative staff rather than separate staffs for each of its constituent colleges. Second, the position of executive dean would a position of genuine authority – first among equals – that rotates among the deans of the constituent colleges, with each serving in this role for a term of 2-3 years – if any of them lasts long enough, they would have more than one term as executive dean. Third, RTF that currently flows to the individual colleges would instead flow to the new CAS, where its distribution will be determined by the three deans in consultation.

What are the virtues of this arrangement? First, a common administrative staff, though larger than that of any one of the present colleges, would be smaller and thus less costly than the sum of their staffs. Moreover, it would remove those barriers to cross-college cooperation that other posters to this blog have complained of. Second, the authority granted to the executive dean would be great enough and the term long enough to make the position appealing, but it would not be so grand as to duplicate the provost’s role – this is apparently a concern of the Chancellor’s. Third, by pooling the RTF that would ordinarily go to the individual colleges, the new CAS would have the resources and the flexibility to use them necessary to ensure the success of all its constituents. The RTF that presently flows to the departments and PIs would not be redirected, so they would retain this resource to further their own ends.

Plan B: The CNS and CHASS model, AKA the Chancellor’s proposal. For the sake of discussion, I will simply assume the structure the Chancellor has proposed. To make this proposal work, something dramatic needs to be done to prevent it dividing us into winners and losers. A dramatic move would be to redirect RTF from CNS to CHASS; an even more dramatic one would be to allocate the curriculum fees as well to the colleges in proportion to the number of student class hours each delivers. Neither reallocation is motivated by a concern for equity, but instead by recognition of the resources the units need to achieve their research and teaching goals. You will notice that I view Plan B as largely a source of difficulties that need to be solved by redistribution of wealth. Given that the present SBS and HFA cost less than they bring in, while grant-supported research requires a subsidy from the University, such a redistribution is in any case long overdue. The virtues of this plan, aside from satisfying the desires of those in the new CNS and the modest and uncertain administrative savings, are otherwise hard to discern.

Best regards,
John Kingston
Linguistics

Dear Professor Fountain and members of the Reorganization Task Force,

Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback regarding the proposed merger
of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) with the College of
Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA) or, alternatively, with other units to create a
College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). We write as a group from the perspective of
our membership on the SBS Instructional Quality Council to voice our concerns
about any such merger and its potentially deleterious effects on teaching,
learning, and advising of students. Many of us have additional misgivings, as
well, about what these mergers would mean for the support of the research
mission of SBS and its members. But, we will limit our comments to the realm of
the experience of the undergraduate student, as that is the most central focus
of our council.

We’d like to highlight some of the SBS initiatives that have provided critical
support for teaching and learning and have made great strides in improving the
quality and availability of advising of undergraduate students in the College.
SBS has offered grants to support innovations in teaching and has offered
support (both material and otherwise) in the creation of first-year student
seminars meant to launch a successful academic experience at UMass as well as
upper-level seminars designed to provide capstone opportunities and facilitate
the transition between undergraduate study and post-graduate possibilities.
These grants are not massive in size, but they have made a distinct and positive
difference in teaching and learning in the College, and they demonstrate the
commitment to providing the best possible undergraduate experience–from
beginning to end–in the College. Currently, SBS is the largest college in terms of number of undergraduate majors, students taking our courses, and General Education offerings. A merger, particularly with HFA, would produce a behemoth that would likely dwarf other colleges, and increasing the strain on the effective delivery of courses and services.

In the area of advising, SBS has devoted considerable energy and resources to
making sure students have knowledgeable, approachable, and regularly accessible
individuals to help them navigate their majors, College and University-level
requirements, and the numerous enriching opportunities available while they are
enrolled at UMass(internships and co-ops, Study Abroad, student and campus
organizations, etc.) and beyond (with information on careers as well as graduate
school, law school, and other forms of continued study). After much research and
careful consideration, SBS has determined that a highly effective advising model
at the departmental level is a full-time faculty member who would both teach and
perform the duties of Chief Undergraduate Advisor so that students can get the
quality advising that they need to succeed. SBS has made this happen, even at a
time of budget reductions, for a number of departments in the College and is
invested in continuing on this trajectory in the future. SBS has also planned
for a new Advising Center that would provide further College-level advising for
students in all of the majors in the College. These advising initiatives have
been held up as a model of excellence at the University level. They have already
made a drastic difference in students feeling connected, informed, and
well-poised to succeed in many departments and programs in SBS, and with their
continued growth, would spread these successes to other areas of the College.

As members of the Instructional Quality Council, we feel quite strongly that
with these initiatives and others not listed here, SBS has been on an
outstanding path toward ensuring that our undergraduates have the tools they
need to excel as students and as citizens in the world. We see the merger of our
College with others as needlessly disruptive to this progress, and we have seen
no evidence to the contrary that would persuade us to favor of a proposed
merger. In the case of a merger with HFA, we would also worry that the massive
student demand that would stem from combining some of the largest majors on
campus would further threaten and diminish the quality of the teaching,
learning, and advising experiences of the individual undergraduates enrolled
within such a potentially unwieldy structure. Without the necessary resources to
support advising, for instance, students feel lost in the crowd, disconnected,
and often dissatisfied, an experience that would presumably be magnified in a
huge college created by the proposed merger.

Finally, SBS has made considerable gains in terms of impressing upon students the notion that they are part of a College through its convocation, other gatherings, and brochures and publications. Such efforts have benefited our undergrads as they make their way through their majors by helping them understand the scope of the college, its activities, and where they fit. This will serve SBS well after students graduate in terms of future post-graduate development activities, but will represent a lost opportunity if a merger occurs.

Thank you, once again, for taking these observations and concerns into account
in your deliberations and recommendations. We do not stand in opposition to
change. We simply feel that in the absence of any assurances of continued
resources and support as well as in the absence of any academic vision that
would be achieved in the proposed merger, we have much to lose and little to
gain.

Sincerely,
The undersigned members of the Instructional Quality Council of the College of
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Barbara Cruikshank, Robert S. Feldman, Karen List, Michael Sugerman, Tammy Rahhal,
Erica Scharrer, Wenona Rymond-Richman

To the Task Force and all other readers of this blog:

Thank you all for taking the time and energy to consider and respond to the proposals put forth by the Chancellors office. After reading the comments above, it is clear to me that there is broad agreement on a few issues:

1) there does not seem to be a coherent rationale for the proposed mergers. A number of the comments above propose possible rationales, but the only one coming from the administration is that there will be a financial savings. As Keene and others have pointed out, no one has produced any data in support of that claim, and numerous department chairs have stated that no such savings would accrue from the mergers.

2) the proposed mergers would, in at least some of the cases, make it more difficult to raise funds to conduct research. The Deans of SBS and HFA have both spent a great deal of energy building college-specific support systems for research. Those systems would be diminished or dismantled in a merger of the two colleges leading (probably) to a decrease in funding, research, and publication.

3) the proposed mergers would have a negative impact on undergraduate teaching and learning. The Dean of SBS, in particular, has developed a number of avenues by which teaching and learning are supported within the college. This is, in part, because SBS has the lion’s share of undergraduate students in the university. Merging SBS with HFA will create, as La Raja pointed out, a large teaching college on the south end of campus.
I fear that the combined CSBS and CHFA would be demoted to n enormous college with the mission of teaching Gen Ed classes to UMass science, technology, and engineering students.

Though it occurred before my time here, I’m sure that one of the reasons that the old College of Arts and Sciences was dismantled was that its size made it unwieldy. The proposed mergers either replicate that outdated administrative behemoth or create other ponderous organizations. The many interdisciplinary successes at our campus are, in part, the result faculty working hard to cut against the administrative grain and work with colleagues in other departments and colleges. I agree with MJ Peterson that the best way to respond to changing academic, fiscal, and political landscapes is to develop systems that encourage and sustain interdisciplinary communication and cooperation. This kind of structure will be more easily designed with smaller, rather than larger, building blocks. Building new administrative boundaries will not move us forward (during a fiscal crisis or otherwise); building the means to traverse the existing boundaries, though, would be a step in the right direction.

Michael Sugerman
Assistant Professor, Anthropology

Dear Colleagues

Chancellor Holub’s stated priorities include maintaining and enhancing the status of professional accredited programs at UMass. Recently, I learned that UMass maintains accreditation in about 30 programs. The accredited programs can be clustered as follows:

ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN
Architecture
Landscape Architecture
Regional Planning

HEALTH RELATED
Communication Disorders
Public Health
Psychology (see also science)
Nutrition
Nursing
Audiology

MANAGEMENT
Hospitality and Tourism Management
Accounting
Management
Marketing
Sport Management
Finance and operations management

ENGINEERING
Chemical Engineering
Civil Engineering
Computer Systems Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Industrial Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Environmental Engineering

ARTS
Dance
Music
Music Education (see also education)

SCIENCE
Forestry
Psychology
Chemistry

EDUCATION
Education
Music Education (see also arts)

[My apologies if my list is incomplete or if my headings are not quite accurate]

There will be obvious opportunities for savings and enhanced research/teaching opportunities if similar accredited programs are clustered together.

My particular interest is the “Environmental Design” cluster.Over 60 universities have accredited programs in Architecture and Landscape Architecture. (An accredited degree is typically required to enter these licensed professions). Of those, only about six–including UMass– house those programs in different colleges (and many of those “holdouts” are trying to bring the programs closer together).

The accreditation standards are similar for Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Planning. At the national level, there has been some discussion about bringing the 3 accreditation boards into one umbrella organization–similar to ABET in engineering

The typical model is to house Architecture, Landscape Arch, and Planning together in the same school or college, sometimes with related arts and/or related sciences.

Environmental design is not one of the sciences, social sciences, arts or humanities. But, together the environmental design programs are some of UMass’s most prominent programs. Notably, Academic Analytics ranked UMass “Architecture, Design, and Planning”, 8th in the country in its recent Faculty Productivity Index (as published in the Chronicle for Higher Education).

Best

Steve Schreiber
Art Department
Architecture+Design Program

It’s difficult to add anything substantive to the many detailed and thoughtful comments that have been posted here regarding the deleterious impact this proposed merger would have on the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, but I write to echo those concerns and objections. There may well be aspects of the proposed mergers that may make some sense for some of the units involved, and that may also have the significant benefit of saving money, which is of course a paramount concern in the current crisis. But the proposed SBS-HFA merger makes neither programmatic nor financial sense in either the short- or the long-term.

I have no reason to doubt that the Chancellor is trying to do what he sincerely believes is in the best interests of the University. But his motivation is not the issue; the issue is the plan that is on the table. As far as SBS is concerned, it seems clear that a merger with HFA would have a broad range of negative consequences; it is difficult to see any benefits in it for the University or for SBS.

I am not intrinsically opposed to the idea of a merger in principle. But the Chancellor has not made a credible or convincing case for it, and neither has he acknowledged the serious problems it would likely create. Although our existing organizational structures are working very well, I don’t think faculty would resist change in a knee-jerk way if a good argument were made to justify it. But as yet, no such argument has been made.

The primary internal argument that has been made in favor of the merger is that would save money, but we have still not seen any concrete indication of exactly how that would happen. As many have noted, it is highly likely that a much larger college with a massive number of students would end up costing far more than it saves, while decreasing administrative efficiency. If this merger is needed to deal with our very real budget problems, then we need to be told in explicit detail where and how money will be saved. But the connection between our financial challenges and this proposed merger has only been asserted, not explained. The Chancellor has even seemed to suggest that money will be saved because he will subsequently cut the budget of the newly-formed college. If that is indeed the case, then why not just cut our budgets now and save us from the pain of this highly unpopular merger?

The Chancellor has tended to downplay the extent to which the proposed merger would be disruptive. On the contrary, it would take a great deal of time and effort to figure out how to adapt many existing policies and procedures to the new structure, and many of those adaptations would likely be contentious. Questions of how to deal with such issues as existing college-level requirements (e.g., Global Education, which took several years of discussion to develop) and procedures for handling personnel actions (such as tenure and promotion) are vital and significant, and would need to be carefully and extensively considered. This would not be quick or easy. The advising implications alone are daunting and in and of themselves would require significant additional resources.

The Chancellor suggests that new “synergies” would be sparked by the merger. But right now, there are already many active and productive collaborations between our two colleges (e.g., the Film Studies Program, the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, among many others). Rather than foster new collaborations, the merger could actually work against them, if faculty in the new structure find themselves competing for even scarcer resources from a single source. Indeed, the forced nature of the merger could actually lead to more people protecting their own turf than coming together to collaborate as distinct, coherent, and independent units.

One consequence that I believe has not been mentioned is that the merger would directly reduce the number of SBS students who graduate with high/Latin honors. Honors designations are now made based on the relative grade distribution within each college (with the top 25% graduating Cum Laude), rather than on the basis of an absolute cutoff. As a result, fewer SBS students would qualify. Currently, for HFA students, the top 25% earn GPAs of 3.644 or higher. In SBS, the 25% cutoff is 3.468. (Of course, there are various possible explanations for the mean GPA difference between the two colleges.) Mathematically, the 25% cutoff would be higher in a merged college than it presently is for SBS, and as a result, fewer SBS students would qualify for Latin Honors, even given the same level of academic performance.

Although business/corporate models should not be looked at as a template for how universities are run, it is noteworthy that numerous large, consolidated media industries (the corporate arena with which I am most familiar) such as Time Warner and Viacom that were created out of massive mergers are now choosing to divide into smaller, separate, independent spin-offs. The resulting merged structures turned out to be top-heavy and constrained, the expected “synergies” did not emerge, and the various pieces of the whole are proving to function more smoothly and productively when they become smaller and more manageable. It is curious that we would be looking to emulate a presumed “leaner and meaner” business model that business itself is moving away from.

As many have noted, the proposed merger would likely turn us into an even-more-underfunded, service-oriented teaching machine that would severely undermine and undervalue our contributions in research (and outreach), and that would undercut the substantial and impressive progress we have made on so many fronts in recent years. It would not only lower our morale and our productivity; it would also surely create the need for another layer of administration that would end up costing far more than it saves in both funds and efficiency.

I have not reiterated or spoken to all of the numerous objections and concerns that have been laid out in other messages on this blog, but I do share them all.

There seems to be growing support for an “Arts & Sciences” model (more or less akin to what we discarded some years ago) as an alternative to the Chancellor’s proposal, based to some extent on the observation that it is a very common institutional structure. That may be appealing and compelling. But is there any evidence that such an alternative would either serve us better than our current structure or save any money?

Hearty thanks to Jane Fountain and the Task Force for giving us this opportunity to voice our opinions, and good luck to you all in your deliberations.

Michael Morgan
Department of Communication

Dear Colleagues:

Thank you so much to the Task Force and its members for making this blog available. While I am not in one of the “affected” colleges I, as much as everyone else in the UMass community, will be affected by a reorganization and negatively so by one done in a rash fashion. My comments below are mostly addressing the latter possibility.

First, this Task Force is expected to produce a preliminary report by tomorrow, March 6. I note, however, that in the general faculty meeting of February 9 the following motion was adopted:

GF 09-01 That the Chancellor shall share his draft Strategic Plan with the Task Force on Reorganization and the Faculty, so that they can evaluate approaches to reorganization in light of that draft Strategic Plan.

This motion also appears in the Reorganization website and therefore I assume the Task Force has been guiding its analyses through the Chancellor’s draft of his Strategic Plan. Yet, as faculty I had not seen this plan until yesterday and, as far as I can tell, very few faculty had seen it. The copy I received was almost “underground”. Moreover, reading this document as an organizational scholar, I found little in it that would bridge the generalities it describes with a reorganization plan based on very concrete actions and the very important issues raised in comments posted in this blog so far.

In fact, I consider the document called Strategic Plan, or at least the version I have, to be a very early draft of something that could eventually be translated into a set of goals a reorganization might fulfill, but the current document is quite far from that. What exactly are the goals? And what is the overarching vision for the whole campus these goals would aim to fulfill? A reorganization must thus work in the direction of those goals.

Not having clear goals for the campus as a whole, which should precede a reorganization, I see no point in trying to decide a restructuring which affects all of us based on moving around particular units at this point in time. I have written about this some weeks ago in a message the MSP sent to all members. Some colleagues have asked me to post that message also in this blog. I am not doing it now because I do not want to take your precious space and your time. But, given the above, I hope the Task Force is seriously considering now the option offered by the second motion adopted by the general faculty meeting:

GF 09-02 The Task Force on Reorganization shall be free to consider alternate reorganization plans, including no reorganization at all.

That is, that tomorrow’s report does not support any reorganization –i.e., restructuring- until a clear strategic plan and goals for the whole campus are established. In my view, it is these that the reorganization task force with the aid of the campus community will need to clarify first –for the whole campus- before an actual restructuring plan is recommended.

Thank you so much,

Marta B. Calás
Isenberg School of Management

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