In an e-mail to the campus community March 12, Chancellor Robert Holub disclosed his plans for reorganizing the system of colleges on campus. A move that was initially intended to help compensate for the significant budget deficit UMass faces in Fiscal Year 2010, it is also described by Holub as an opportunity to make UMass more competitive as a top public research institution. Holub said that the reorganization, which focuses on bringing related fields under the same administration, will increase cooperation between faculty in previously divided subjects and promote the creation of new programs and courses.
The greatest change that the campus faces is the creation of a new college of life sciences in the fall that will merge the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the College of Natural Resources and the Environment, and the Stockbridge School of Agriculture. The new college will also absorb the department of psychology from the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Currently being referred to as the College of Natural Sciences, the official name will be chosen by the new college’s faculty.
In addition, the department of Resource Economics will move to the Isenberg School of Management, Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning will move to Humanities and Fine Arts, and Communication Disorders will relocate to the School of Education. The School of Nursing will remain autonomous but will be administered by the College of Public Health and Health Sciences.
Although these are the only concrete reorganization plans Holub announced, he discussed more large-scale changes under consideration for the future. He has tapped several administrators to research the possibility of further mergers over the 2009-2010 school year. The largest change currently being discussed is the merger of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts into a College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
Holub is also considering merging the departments of Polymer Science and Engineering and Computer Science with the College of Engineering. Finally, he is reviewing the possibility of moving some departments and programs that will fall into the new College of Natural Sciences into the College of Public Health and Health Sciences, although he did not specify which.
If all of Holub’s proposals are ultimately carried out, this would be the new structure of UMass:
Click to enlarge.
Holub mentioned that he had considered the creation of a College of Arts and Sciences, a traditional structure used in many universities, but he does not believe it would be effective. Generally schools that have a College of Arts and Sciences have professional schools with a large percentage of the faculty. Because this is not the case at UMass, Holub believes that such a college would create an imbalance that would require more convoluted, expensive layers of administration, the very thing the reorganization intends to eliminate.
One final point that Holub discussed was the issue of a perceived divide between the north side of campus and the south. Traditionally, the north side represents the research sciences, while the south side commonly houses arts and social sciences. Holub said that he is “convinced that we must eliminate the perception of a rich and a poor side of campus if we are to reach our collective goals.” To this end, he is instituting a special fund for travel and research expenses for faculty who have limited opportunities to support their research and scholarship with external funding, as well as a minimum start-up award for any faculty member coming to campus. He plans to further research the issue of unbalanced funding, specifically whether larger amounts of research funding results in greater administrative support for teaching activities.
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