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.