Monday, July 19, 2010

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?

5 comments:

  1. Might this be inconsistent with the stand alone model of School of Nursing? What about a School of Psychology within the College of Social Sciences (Psychology offers compelling reasons for consideration - such as large # of majors, a PsychD, etc.)? Solution: Make Nursing a College?

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  2. Other universities have both schools outside any college and schools within a college. UGA, for instance, has independent schools of Ecology; Forestry and Natural Resources; Law; Public and International Affairs; and Social Work. It also has schools of Art and Music within the College of Arts and Sciences. This appears to be a fairly common model for the arts.

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  3. But UGA has about 40K students and huge numbers of majors in the arts (also lots and lots of faculty in these divisions). We have a quarter of that population, MANY fewer majors, and many fewer faculty, too. To me, this kind of division only makes sense where there are the numbers to support it. Why not a college of humanities and a school of the arts?

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  4. Wait, I misread and was thinking about another message I got on email. My apologies. A school, in a college, makes more sense than a stand-alone college of the arts.

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