Reaction to the 1st recommendation

Thanks to all who have mailed or posted comments on  the first recommendation. (Especially to those who said nice things!)

• "One query from a supposed social scientist: wouldn't Mass Comm have more synergies with English than with the social science folks? I'm assuming that split is designed to even out the numbers between colleges, but it did seem a tad unusual."
  
  It was actually at the request of the Mass Commers. They wrote that "Mass Communications scholarship and faculty research are primarily informed by the scientific method, including positivist and interpretive approaches, typically employed in the social sciences."

First recommendation to Drs. Sethna and Hoff

We've posted our first recommendation to Dr. Sethna and Dr. Hoff on the task force web site:

sites.google.com/site/andstaskforce/home/recommendations

We welcome any questions or comments, whether to the blog, by email, or in a meeting.

The nature and role of the task force

From recent comments, I don't think I've been clear about the nature and role of the task force.

First, we are not a committee-representative-of-faculty, a representative body in the sense of "persons who represent the views of the A&S faculty."

• We weren't selected by the A&S faculty or given our charge by them. 
• The task force was created by, and we were asked to be on it by, Dr. Sethna.

Second, this work is not part of shared governance. The UWG Policies and Procedures Manual gives the President, not the faculty or the Faculty Senate, the authority to determine organizational structure. It is not something to put up for a vote of faculty. We are asked only to make recommendations to Dr. Sethna on how he should carry out that authority, given his decision that COAS will be split up. He, of course, may accept or reject our recommendations.

Third, our job is not to consider the wisdom or the timing of splitting up the COAS. Our task is to develop implementation plans and procedures for:

• Division of the A&S budget
• Governance structures
• The names of the new colleges and their membership
• Facilities allocation
• Other relevant issues    

Fourth, we have been and will continue to be guided by what we learn from faculty, staff, and administrators, but the recommendations have to be ours. Thankfully, as we've worked on our first recommendation - what colleges to create and which departments should be in which colleges - we've been able to get a lot of input and craft something that reflects that input fairly well. 

Fifth, so we can keep on track, get more timely feedback, make mid-course corrections as needed, and finish up by mid-October, we will make interim recommendations at least every month, sometimes more often. Our first recommendation, on the structure and membership of the new colleges, should be out in the next few days.

• Are we acting in good faith? I believe that we are acting with honest intention, without any intent to defraud or to act maliciously, with the good of UWG in mind. 
• Are we rushing to make decisions? Not to my mind. There's so much work ahead, we'll have to be efficient to finish by mid-October. 

Timing

"Seems like the committee is pretty far advanced in its deliberations and in the construction of a draft plan to give to Dr. Sethna. Is my impression of this correct?"

• That's sort of right. We plan to make our recommendation this week on the division of the colleges and on which departments go in which colleges.
  
  That's just the first step, though. The bulk of the actual work comes after we know who goes where. Budgets, staffing, scheduling processes - all the details that we don't think of much but ensure that we get paid, receive our meager travel budgets and operating funds, have staff support, etc. - has to be worked on. We've started gnawing on them, but that stuff will take a lot of time.

"Many faculty are still away; none of us is under contract yet."

• Actually, about 75% of tenured and tenure-track COAS faculty were on contract this summer, so most people have been around.
   
• We've had pretty good participation so far. We've had open meetings for faculty and for staff in which good questions were raised. We met with the COAS chairs, and twice with the arts chairs.
   
• Besides, very few people are out of reach of the internet these days. This blog has gotten a good flow of comments, and we've also heard from people by email and face-to-face. We've heard a variety of thoughts on both big issues and implementation details.

Placement of the arts and Mass Comm

We've posted proposals from the arts departments and Mass Comm about their placement after the split on the task force web site.

• The arts propose that they be in a School of the Arts within the humanities college.
• Mass Comm would prefer being with the social sciences, but could live with a separate college for them and the arts.

Given the improbability of a fourth college, creating the School of the Arts and putting Mass Comm in the social sciences college would make sense. 

Class scheduling

Class scheduling is one of those issues that we don't think about much, but that bites our behinds when it doesn't go smoothly.

In the COAS we have a workable, though sometimes cumbersome, procedure:

• Departments have classrooms that they "own." 
• Some (mostly special-purpose spaces like labs) are for their exclusive use. 
• Many may be used by others if the department doesn't need them. 
• Each department schedules its rooms. After a specified date, shareable rooms that aren't booked are opened up to other departments, first-come-first-serve.
   
• Certain rooms, like lecture halls, are not owned by a department. They are open to all, first-come-first-serve.
   
• A designated staff member in the dean's office works with departments to resolve conflicts. 

The same procedure should work after the reorganization, except that it isn't obvious who should be designated the resolver of conflicts. 

• Should a staffer in 1 of the colleges assume the task?
• If so, what should we do to forestall actual or perceived bias in favor of that college?

A School of the Arts?

An interesting suggestion is to create a school of the arts within the college of humanities.

• Note that those aren't proposed names. They're just labels to give me a way to talk about the suggestion.

The idea is twofold:

1. A separate identity for the arts could offer increased opportunities for growth, recruitment, fund-raising, and external relations that would help both the arts departments and the University as a whole.
    
2. A school of the arts could offer those enhanced opportunities at much lower cost than would a standalone college of the arts, since many administrative and clerical functions could be performed at the college of humanities level.

This makes a lot of sense to me. What's your reaction?

Responses to comments and questions

We've gotten some interesting comments on this blog.

Thoughts:

• "Why is the committee's timetable not published on any of the sites being set up?"
  
  It's in the letter from Dr. Sethna that's posted over on the website. We make monthly reports and finish up mid-October. Since our first task is to recommend the division of departments into colleges, that recommendation should be in our first report later this month.
   
• "Why are we worried about extra expenses of a fourth college when Dr. Sethna is not worried about it? He's initiating the split and stated publicly that three or four colleges would be the ideal for him."
  
  In the task force meeting with Dr. Sethna on June 22, he said that going to 4 colleges rather than 3 would require major justification. I believe his words were "there is a very high bar."
  
  In any case, we should all worry about expenses. Budgets are tight, and I can't imagine the state getting that ol' time higher ed religion any day soon.
   
• "Moreover, the cost issue is not only raised in reference to a fourth college (out of A&S) but the second and third (and fourth)."
  
  As I understand it, cost concerns did not motivate the decision, but we - all of us, not just task force members or administrators - do have to think about them.
   
• "...there are those of us in COAS who are not participating in this process because we believe that it is a rigged game."
  
  " I think it's time to STOP, THINK, and ASK why you see it as your job to consult constantly with Dr. Sethna to see if, before you put something in the proposal, he'll accept it."
  
  We are operating within a set of constraints, and we only recommend while Dr. Sethna decides. That's definitely so. The task force could make recommendations that have no chance of being accepted, but that's strikes me as pointless: better to engage and do what good can be done.
   
• "Dr. Sethna doesn't need a team of people to push his agenda on the college."
  
  His agenda is to break up COAS. That's happening. I can't speak for the other task force members, but my thinking is that we should deal with what is as it is and try to make the best of it, to do as little harm as possible. I am a pragmatist (in the ordinary sense of the word). In this situation, I believe that "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." I hope that does not compromise me, but people will have varying opinions about that. I do myself.
   
• "Do the 6 of you have special qualifications that allow you to dictate what should happen to all of us?"
  
  Nope. We just agreed to be on the task force.
   
• "Committee, why can we not put in the proposal EXACTLY what the faculty say they want."
  
  Actually, faculty members have different wants and opinions. There are plenty who are in favor of the split, and others who really don't care all that much. Those who aren't angry, of course, are less likely to post to the blog, but they're out there.
  
  Even if there were no faculty members in those camps, I still wouldn't think it helpful to make recommendations that are DOA. (There's that perhaps not-very-admirable pragmatism again.)
  

Update and more comments

• I met with Diane Williamson in RCOB and Kimily Willingham
  in A&S to talk about staffing in those colleges. I can't see how
  a college can get by without at least a dean (who teaches 1
  course per year), an associate or assistant dean (who teaches
  1 course per semester), and 3 staffers: a budget person, a
  scheduling/facilities/records person, and a staff assistant/
  receptionist. That would be pretty tight, but probably doable.
  
  For those of you with administrative experience, do you
  agree?
   
• Thinking about staffing brings us back to money, of course.
  Several comments have asked about funding. As we learn
  more about which departments go where, we'll be able to
  figure out costs. Remember, though, that the split was not
  motivated by or dependent on funding considerations, so
  our job is to find out what it will cost, not justify the
  decision based on its cost.
   
• So far, we've looked at faculty numbers and credit production
  hours by department to come up with department sizes. They
  track each other pretty closely, with some departments with
  peculiar pedagogical needs as outliers.
  
  Eyeballing budget numbers, they correlate pretty well, too.

Response to comments

Thanks for the comments. Keep them coming.

Some thoughts on what you've posted so far:

• "it's redundant to say 'Humanities and the arts' for the college name."
  
  These aren't meant to be college names, just headings for the groups.
  It seemed to make sense to list both words since there have been
  suggestions to put the arts in their own college.
   
• "...why not develop colleges that mix disciplines that have some
  common interests..."
  
  We've kicked around some ideas like that, but couldn't come up with
  any that satisfied the constraints and made sense for all 17 departments.
  We're open to ideas, though, so suggest some groupings.
   
• "The history faculty are the best ones to determine which college
  they should belong to..."
  
  As long as we can satisfy the constraints, the alignments are fluid. A
  problem is putting 2 big departments like English and History into the
  same college and not having it much larger than the others.
   
• "How does Mass Comm end up in Social Sciences according to one
  scenario and in the arts in another?"
  
  I gather that Mass Comm is in a variety of colleges at different universities,
  depending on the type of research and courses the particular departments
  focus on.
   
• "Models for colleges like ours suggest that we either have one college or
  just two."
  
  We looked at lots of schools, and there are many different setups. Most
  have one or two, but a good number have 3 or 4.
   
• "Why are we constrained to three minimum?"
  
  That's one of the constraints set by Dr. Sethna.
   
• "the distribution above is predicated on splitting Mass Comm and Theater.
  Is this something that department wants?"
   
  From what I've heard, yes. Anyway, that's been in the works since before
  the split of A&S.
   
• "Since Mass Comm and Theatre may be splitting, what about Geosciences?"
  
  We wondered about them, too, so asked Dr. Hollabaugh when the task
  force met with A&S chairs. He said that they have no interest in dividing.
   
• "If English and Philosophy split..."
   We asked about that, too. They seem to be OK with their current structure
  for now.
  
  
• "Has anyone done an actual cost analysis of this restructuring?"
  
  Not that I know of. The task force will look carefully at budgets and
  expenses over the next few months. 

Welcome

 This blog is a virtual place for discussing the work of the task force charged
with planning the split-up of the UWG College of Arts and Sciences.

• We on the task force will post our ideas, proposals and questions, and,
  as we develop them, our recommendations.
  
  
• We don't plan to save everything up until mid-October, the due date
  for our report to Dr. Sethna. Instead, we'll regularly post what we're
  doing and what we're recommending.
  
  
• We hope the A and S community - faculty, staff, students, and friends -
  will give us feedback and suggestions.
  
  
• What are we not considering?
• Where are we off-track?
• What are we doing right?
  

• You may either:
• Sign your comments by logging in with your Google or OpenId
  ID.
• Post anonymously.
  
  
• Please keep comments PG-rated and avoid libel, defamation, calumny,
  aspersion, abuse, flames, and ad hominem arguments.

Posted by Will Lloyd

First task: college structure and membership

The first task of the task force is to recommend to Dr. Sethna the structure
and membership of the new colleges.

There are 3 constraints on the structure:

• The new colleges should be roughly the same size.
• The must be at least 3 colleges.
• Creating a fourth college would require very convincing arguments
  that show both the benefit to the University and how the increased
  expense could be offset.

The most obvious solution is to use the current model for assigning
responsibilities to the 3 associate deans.

• Humanities and arts
• Art
• English and Philosophy
• Foreign Languages
• Theater
• Music
   
• Social sciences
• Anthropology
• History
• Mass Comm
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Sociology and Criminology
  
• Sciences
• Biology
• Chemistry
• CS
• Geosciences
• Math
• Physics

That alignment groups departments sensibly and creates reasonable spans
of control, with five departments in one college and six in the other two. It
also gives each college similar faculty sizes:

• Humanities and arts: 110
• Social sciences: 85
• Sciences: 88

Those counts are based on the 2009-2010 UWG phone book, so may
be off by a few, but they are in the ballpark. (You can see my spreadsheet
at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Amw-XUxBPBF8dDNSRjFsZTcwNWZhSlNtdkhmMFlmQ2c&hl=en&authkey=CP-b3uEE.)

I've heard two other proposals:

• Move History to Humanities and arts.
• Create a fourth college for the arts, which might include Mass Comm.

These make some sense, and would probably work best in tandem. The
problem, of course, is the expense of the fourth college. Where would the
extra several $100K come from?

What do you think?

Posted by Will Lloyd