Questions and comments sent after the COAS meeting

Several interesting questions and comments have come in since the meeting.

• Where does IDS belong?
  
  Very good question. Aran McKinnon, the director of IDS, is contacting interdisciplinarians to see when we can meet to think about this. Do you have any suggestions about where it should be housed?
    
• What about DSW (discipline-specific writing)?
  
  Another good one. Inter-, cross-, and multidisciplinary activities don't have an obvious home.
   
• Can we be assured that the money to pay for all this won't come out of COAS?
  
  We can be certain that it won't come out of the COAS budget, because there's not enough uncommitted money to take from it.  In a broader sense, though, money spent on one thing can't be spent for something else.
   
• "[O]n the budget, this was a very legitimate concern as the split will almost certainly add several hundred thousand dollars to the overhead of Academic Affairs. Hopefully Dr. Sethna is prepared for this..."
  
  Yep. The only things the task force can do are to identify costs and to try to hold them down while not hurting the colleges' ability to do their jobs.

• "I believe the split that was proposed is as relatively fair and closely aligned to 'perspectives' as we can possibly get."
  
  I sure hope so. All the feedback we've gotten on the recommended structure since we posted it has been good.
  
  Are we ready to move on to the next tasks?