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Tuesday, August 25, 2015

UT Reorganization Reorganized!


44 comments:

Anonymous said...

New colleges formed a couple of years back are being sensibly collapsed back into the fold. The new bureaucrat/deans cost too much money for doubtful effects.

Anonymous said...

Not all of them, NSM is staying as is, some form of YouCollege will remain as will the Honors College

Dave Tucker said...

I too have heard about everyone from the old Arts and Sciences being reunited into one big happy family. The problem is we were never one big happy family. Some got resources and others did not. Some of us tend to look back on the old Arts and Sciences as some gilded age. It wasn't. In a smaller college gaining access to the dean is much easier and I believe makes the dean more responsive. When we were a part of Arts and Sciences some had access; some did not. Our department, Communication, usually saw the Dean once a year when he/she pretended to care about what we had to say. They would come to a department meeting; dutifully take copious notes; and, then depart with very little every happening. Also, given the way administration works, how much in the way of savings will there really be? Change for the sake of change is silly.

Anonymous said...

Many colleagues from LLSS and NSM have no interest in rejoining with COCA especially due to Tucker and other unproductive complaining faculty from that college.

Not to worry at least from those in NSM as that college has been way to successful plus eliminated the foreign language requirement - never going back to former A&S!

Anonymous said...


Will someone please turn off the damn oldies station blaring on the third floor of U. Hall and get on with the business of advancing the university instead of refighting and relitigating ancient, unproductive, irrelevant battles concerning the now-defunct CAS.

Anonymous said...

The biggest problem with the splitting of A&S was that the money was just split down the middle and half given to each "new" college. This obviously caused a lot of initial problems for LLSS, since it was by far the bigger of the two. This also pretty much showed that the division was punitive and spur of the moment, because any normal idiot would have realized that you don't divide the funding that way unless you want to punish the larger new college and simply issuing a fiat in which you forbid the usage of "A&S" anymore wasn't really a solution, unless you were king. And it's good to be king.

Polly Glot said...

Anonymous 4:36 PM Remind me why English-speaking faculty and students on Mount NSM can persist in their splendid isolation from the rest of our multicultural campus in this age of globalization without feeling an urgent need to appreciate and promote foreign language fluency? The NSM College now actively discourages its intellectual obligation to promote foreign language proficiency as part of its degree requirements. Do you think you are doing your students a favor? When A&S College is rebuilt, you will be a part of it. Otherwise you will in the long term lose your humanity, and in the short term even more of your common sense.

Anonymous said...

Isolation? What other colleges at UT, besides LLSS, have a foreign language requirement?? Business, Engineering, Health Sciences certainly do not. How many peer institutions to UT, MAC schools and mid sized public universities in the midwest have a foreign language requirement?? Yes there are strong reasons to have the requirement but many colleges (including top academic schools), programs and graduates are succeeding fine without one.

And the poster is dreaming if they think A&S will ever be rebuilt or NSM is part of any college reorganization. Dreaming.

Anonymous said...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Arts and Science was broken up for all the wrong reasons. The result however has been a blessing in disguise. We have more access to our Dean, our Dean is more responsive, our Dean understands our discipline better, and the Dean is more in tune with the various departments.

It would be huge loss to go back. It won't happen. It shouldn't happen.

Get over it.

Anonymous said...

There are faculty in LLSS that would readily advocate for a substitution between additional math or a foreign language requirement.

Jerry Miah said...

Anonymous 11:21, Your dean is on the chopping block. 30% of the current ravenous population of deans and administrators on the main campus hired by Jacobs Inc. to punish tenured professors will be history in four months. They will become feral critters and Cajuns will hunt them down and toss them in a steaming jambalaya. Meanwhile A&S College will rise from the ashes and prosper again under one megadean who will take a pay cut: "As is once was, so shall it be again." This is Biblical. Stand in the way and you will burn in Hell (and down their EVERYONE sweats out eternity becoming fluent in ALL the foreign languages ever spoken on Earth beginning with Arabic and ending with Zulu). Then they -- and you -- will start over again.

Anonymous said...

Arts and Science is gone. Accept it. Move on. There are more important issues and opportunities ahead. The storm is over. Its moved on to Akron. Let's mourn those we lost, and work together to build a better future for our students, our community, and ourselves.

The future looks bright. We have a President who sees her role as a fund raiser, not a budget cutter. We should all support her. She talks about education, research, and community involvement--all of the things the last administration ignored or worse. The time has come to bury our dead and look ahead to the future.

Anonymous said...

Bury our dead? Agree, But we still have Zombie Deans shuffling around moaning, "Brains, brainnnnns, brains.'

Marshall P. Lan said...

Anonymous 2:12 I don't know which tribe you hail from but in the civilized world the victorious survivors of an egregious wrong will first turn their energies to righting the wrong before moving ahead. They rebuild. A&S College, a success story until its mindless destruction by Jacobs Inc., shall thus be rebuilt for practical and symbolic reasons.

Anonymous said...

Many faculty from the former A&S have no interest in a re-merger, a message they should communicate to the new President, as I am sure the three Deans are doing. Those looking to remove the 3 new Colleges and their Deans should think more clearly about the alternative: 20+ Departments in a College all looking for attention and resources from a new Dean from outside UT, I say be careful for what you wish for. The few vocal supporters for reforming A&S are only interested in a means to get back at Jacobs, while not considering the impact such a move would have on their colleges and the faculty and students within them, most of whom are thriving under the new colleges. If the new President is truly focused on building community partnerships, engaging alumni and attracting donors, efforts by the new Colleges in these areas should be recognized as a strength whereas reforming A&S provides none.

Anonymous said...


Well, I’m saddened to see that greed has become a top priority on the third floor of U. Hall. (“Chief of staff added as Gaber continues to reshape cabinet,” The Blade, 8/30/2015)

$205,000 for a chief of staff, truly a new breed of fat cat at UT these days? When did 2800 Bancroft become 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and in need of an H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to direct traffic in and out of the president’s office?

And a half billion dollars to an executive vice president to administer what is probably the smallest university-owned teaching hospital in the country, a facility that among other things has no inpatient pediatrics unit, does not deliver babies, does not operate an air ambulance service, has only a very modest organ transplant program and regional outpatient clinic operation, and these days rarely wins any national patient-care awards.

Gawh, he even makes more than UT’s head football coach. Holy NCAA!

Doesn’t the new president realize the optics of these obscene salary jumps that she and the trustees have blithely approved? Doesn’t she understand that thousands of Toledoans and northwest Ohioans are still struggling paycheck to paycheck six years after the 2009 economic meltdown? Are we to believe that UT awash in money these days and can afford these mega salary increases?

How unfair and morally bankrupt for UT to suddenly find dollars to enrich administrators already making very comfortable salaries who do not teach or do research while offering non-existent to puny raises to those at the low end of the pay scale, those who mop the floors in U. Hall, clean the restrooms in the Student Union, cut the grass in front of the Law Center, and insert lines and tubes in UT Medical Center patients—people who do the university’s real work and fulfill its mission.

Or to those who have been bundled off to outsourcing companies and to students who sink deeper into debt to pay for a UT education.

In the end, if the new president is a rainmaker and brings in big cash via good relationships with government officials, grants from donor organizations, and mega donations from alumni; improves student retention and graduation rates; and advances UT’s national academic reputation, then yes, she and her administration will have earned their colossal salaries and perks.

In the meantime, however, Gordon Gekko is alive and well and has taken up residence at 2800 Bancroft.

Anonymous said...

8:20 AM very well said.

Anonymous said...

Not saying that the position is a necessity, but googling up the title will show how many other universities maintain a chief of staff - I was surprised to see that many do. Time will tell if the endemic Jacobs-era bloat will be trimmed elsewhere, but summoning up G. Gecko one month into the new president's tenure is over-reaction. If you question the need for the position, ask rather than indulge in cheap anonymous shots. The overriding problem of the Jacobs regime - aside from hubris - was a lack of dialogue. Let's work to change that now that we have a president who seems to listen.

Anonymous said...

Deans!? The only dean that ever liked me died. The rest? Pah!

Bloggie said...

The new deans won't like being relegated to the status of mere mortals. Look for some elaborate self-justifications.

Anonymous said...

Current Deans have already been relegated to the status of mere mortals as they have basically no authority or control over many key issues including most importantly faculty hiring and budgets. They simply are gatekeepers in keeping the doors open day to day. That has been the case for several years and increasingly has not changed much over the last year and currently. Faculty have to come to realize and understand that all the Deans have very little true power or ability to drive change in their Colleges for upper administration oversees all the important and significant business and directs Deans what they can and cannot do.

Anonymous said...

We see. They were only following orders.

Anonymous said...

Let's game out the reorganization:

Collapse the Social Justice and Human Service College and send social work and school psychology over to the Health Sciences College. Higher education administration and counselor education go the College of Education. Legal specialties heads over to the College of Adult and Life Long Learning. Criminal justice goes to a newly reformed College of Arts and Sciences (comprised of LLSS, COCA and NSM). NSM disciplines frown as they must again be put under the yoke of the dreaded foreign language requirement. A change in college rules to allow an extra math for a language substitution buys their silence. However, exiting from this college will be psychology. They go to the Health Sciences College. Economics goes the College of Business (where they get big big pay raises). Also, streaming from the College of Arts and Sciences will be a significant number of criminal justice majors who decide that a foreign language/extra math requirement makes a business degree look very appealing. Criminal justice faculty smile about the smaller class sizes.

The Honors College and You College are shuttered. You College goes to Adult and Lifelong Learning. Honors College disappears and is transported through a portal to Akron.

This plan saves 5 dean spots and likely several deanlets. Deanlets are assumed because if you have a dean, you must have at least a couple of deanlets. The former deans and deanlets get to return to the classroom and this solves some of the faculty shortage (at least for a few years). The new/old College of Arts and Sciences would have 3 deanlets to assist their dean. All regular staff stay on because we have already cut them to the bone in previous reorganizations.

Of course, if we really want to get aggressive, we can put the education programs and criminal justice programs over in the business college given privatization trends in those fields.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 10:32. Brilliant! Plus you are tapped as Consigliere (President whisperer) to advise Dr. Gaber and hasten the retirement of this onerous blog.

Anonymous said...

Good try.

1. Shut down YouCollege and don't admit any freshmen with less than an 18 ACT.
2, Shut down the college of Social Justice and Human Service. Move Counselor Education, Higher Education and School Psychology to the College of Education and move Criminal Justice, Legal Specialties and Social Work to Languages, Literature and Social Sciences.

Saves two deans and gets rid of unprepared students in YouCollege that are dragging the U down. Tell them to go to Owens for a year.

Add an assistant dean to Education and LLSS.

Anonymous said...

Why do I even bother reading this? Most poster here don't give damn about UT, our students, other faculty and staff, or the community. All they seem to care about is re-fighting lost battles. A+S is gone. The majority of us are very happy with the current structure, which by the by the way is working quite well.

Limit enrollment to students with an ACT > 18? We should embrace those students, provide appropriate remediation and support, and get them up to speed to succeed. That's what a great metropolitan research university does. It embraces its community and serves its needs.

One final parting thought. If you continually spend your energies fighting the ghosts of Jacobs then ultimately Jacobs will have won.


Anonymous said...

No way UT is going to close down YouCollege and see 700+ students leave and go to Owens, that would represent an immediate 3-4% drop in undergraduate enrollment (plus UT would need to drop its open enrollment policy). YouCollege can be reformed/restructured into a new model and with better leadership, resources and more staff, work to serve those students so they can succeed as freshmen and move into majors after 1st year.

And in response to the previous post, Honors College is also not going anywhere as the millions invested and several hundred students is too much of a commitment made by UT, like YouCollege the Honor College needs better leadership, staff and resources and closer working relation with the other colleges in order to be more successful.

Anonymous said...

VP for Enrollment Services and Learning Ventures resigned yesterday effectively immediately, so far no official news on why or replacement

Anonymous said...

It *would* be nice to revert to the old definition of a college as a collection of departments instead of whatever random entity just got the label slapped on it. Then Honors becomes a "program" the way it used to be when Dave Hoch and then Tom Barden made it an attractive destination for good students.

Anonymous said...

The number of colleges at UT will be reduced, that's for sure, by as many as 6 or even 8. How that will be done is what's in question. In some cases, it will be simply a matter of renaming them. But count on some colleges be combined.

Jerry Miah said...

Here's an idea worth considering! "College of Arts and Sciences"

Anonymous said...

Or, we could provocative and use what has become a dirty word: humanities. We could have the College of Social Sciences, Art, and Humanities, and leave the other sciences behind. If they don't want to be interdisciplinary and global, then they can remain monolingual and isolated in their labs. If they don't want to think about the ethics of what they do, they don't need to take philosophy. No need to talk about the beauty and intricate design of cells or crystals; no need to talk about the economics or politics of scientific discoveries. NSM can concentrate on entrepreneurship, patents, and subsidizing their departments on their own.

Anonymous said...

Someone explain to me what was so great about the College of Arts and Sciences?

I've been in an Arts and Sciences department since the days Dean Cave. I don't remember the good old days being so good. I remember a parade of incompetent, lying, backstabbing deans since Cave retired (McNall was the exception).

I remember a series of top-down authoritarians. I remember having virtually no access to the deans. I remember dean who were out of touch with their departments at best, or more commonly deans showing complete apathy and disdain for some departments.

Yes this new structure was forced upon us by an evil, petty tyrant, but it is working. Survey the faculty (all of the faculty). I'm sure the current structure would prevail by 3:1 margin over re-forming the old A & S.


Anonymous said...

NSM
Law
Medicine
Engineering
Social Sciences, Arts, Communication et al
Business
Pharmacy
Human Services
Education
Health Sciences
Nursing

At a minimum looks like 10 or 11 Colleges with current ALT, YouCollege and Honors College turned into programs led by Directors and "housed" within existing academic college. Given that UT, unlike many state universities, already has four traditional "professional" schools (Law, Engineering, Medicine, Business), getting number of Colleges down to as low as 8 is not an easy task.

Roberto Moses said...

The Kantian logic for structuring a highly successful Arts and Sciences College (that comprises Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences Departments, programs and centers) is proven economical and efficient:

http://krieger.jhu.edu/

To Anonymous 7:12 Your personality conflicts with specific deans following the success of Dean Cave seem petty and irrelevant. An Arts and Sciences College led by a wise dean who does not tolerate fools, and has earned the respect and support of tenured faculty and the university president can, with the help of a few dedicated associate deans, accomplish lofty academic goals of the college without alienating the majority of the remaining campus stakeholders (students, alumni, staff and the community).

Anonymous said...

To Anon 9:56: You may be right about what a "wise dean" can do, but Arts and Sciences has not had one of those deans in over thirty years. I have little faith in us finding such a special person. It takes a very special person to successfully lead such a large, diverse, and complex college. Just look at the last three deans A & S had. Can you honestly say that any of them were remotely qualified, or did a remotely acceptable job? Interestingly of the last three deans, we had a scientist, a social scientist, and artist. By any objective standard they each failed.

It is much easier to find a highly qualified scientist/mathematician to run NSM, an artist to run the College of Arts and Communication, and social scientist/linguist to run LLSS.

Anonymous said...

The problem is that many posters are describing the roles, responsibilities, authority and independence of a Dean position that has not existed here at UT for at least a decade with centralized control of colleges by the upper administration (a trend also occurring nationwide). Experience and personality may also play an important role in how a Dean functions today, but make no mistake there is no clear indication that anything is going to change here that will clearly empower Deans, current and future ones. Until I see clear evidence that all Deans are given the ability and freedom to run their colleges, with staff and faculty, including budgets, personal matters, strategic planning, recruitment, etc. I hold out little hope that any Dean of any College is going to be successful in advancing that College and having the support of their faculty.

Anonymous said...

Instead of arguing ad nauseam about academic management structure, I think faculty would be better served trying to figure out how to make their programs attractive to more students. Remember, tenure guarantees a job, not a paycheck. If there are no students, there'll be no money for salaries and, actually, no need for faculty.

Anonymous said...

I agree strongly with anonymous 2:04p as our focus should be on improving programs, providing best education for our students, and efforts towards recruitment, retention and graduation and not on the whether we personally like or dislike a Dean ("they did nothing for me/us") and college structure, which again has little impact on students, they do not care or even know about colleges as their aim is to complete their degree. How can we as faculty help them as without majors and students in our courses we all will suffer (and are already impacted). Does anyone here actually believe the college structure or who is Dean will advance the need for faculty hires and other resources at the department level, at a time when budget and declining enrollment are going to be the major factor in deciding allocation of funds for new faculty hires and other resources into colleges, departments and programs? Time to start focusing out time and energy, including posts and discussions here on this blog, on those issues and potential solutions - of which Deans and college structure are not. The Titanic is sinking folks and you are debating moving the deck chairs around and who is in charge.

T. Buttle said...

To Anonymous 2:04 PM/6:36 AM Thanks for sharing your opinion about how lack of structure and chain of command (and responsibility) in our public institution of higher education can help expedite the productive learning experience of our students while accomplishing our primary stated mission (academic excellence).

Anonymous said...

It’s been a rough week for UT, with the institution garnering newspaper headlines for all the wrong reasons. (UT enrolls 301 fewer students,” The Blade, Sept. 9, 2015 and “UT goes unranked again in magazine,” The Blade, Sept. 11, 2015)

As the new administration begins at UT, the university depressingly finds itself once again failing to meet projected enrollment goals for another school year, facing an apparent budget shortfall, and again unable to crack U.S News and World Report’s rankings of top universities.

How many presidents, vice presidents, provosts, assistant associate provosts and other assorted administrative hangers-on over the years have confidently and boldly stated that they had the plans, the strategies to solve the two issues, only later having to parrot a bunch of lame excuses for being unable to stop the downward slide? How many times have we watched these two issues unfold?

Frankly, it’s so many that it is not even newsworthy any more.

I suppose it was necessary for the vice president for enrollment management and online education to be offered up as a sacrificial lamb. But UT’s chronic enrollment problems and unexceptional national reputation were years in the making and will take years to correct.

UT’s most recent “branding” strategies directed by the Division of External Affairs—-highlighted by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for billboards in baseball stadiums and basketball arenas and fancy loges to entertain university friends--were mind-bogglingly ineffective if enrollment numbers are used as the assessment tool. Perhaps the use of an outside consultant to develop an enrollment strategy will yield better future results, as the new president indicated she plans to do.

The new president’s immediate, short-term problem is now to address the budget shortfall. Will she call the provost and tell him to halt some new faculty searches? Or will there be another round of employee layoffs, with the cuts, as always, coming from the bottom, from the non-academic staff? Some hapless custodians, clerks and groundkeepers with families, house payments, and medical bills will be blindfolded, given a smoke, and lined up in front of human resources’ layoff firing squad.

Of course, the new president will talk about how UT is a family, a community, and that everybody shares in the pain. But don’t look for any admirable gestures that might involve high-level university administrators and faculty members imposing austerity on themselves and giving up some of their lavish perks and comfortable salaries that frankly are at odds with UT’s mission of providing affordable learning opportunities.

As they say in the PR business, those are lousy optics for the new president and her new administration.

Anonymous said...

Lord spare us from more outside consultants!

Anonymous said...

The problem with the rankings and the last administration's branding was that once students got here, we were immediately found out. Students could not get classes in many majors. There were no faculty to teach them and nobody to advise them. We have gutted core low cost academic programs while chasing very expensive STEM programs. Where we did not gut the lower cost programs, we focused on lowering the cost to the point where quality suffered. We let entire programs wither away to nothing. Look at the mess in LLSS. You have a PhD program in history that has hardly any faculty to teach it. In political science, the last administration let 4 faculty members retire without replacement and they have lost their masters in public administration program. Good heavens. That is even a direct school to work applied job training program that connects the university to the city. Isn't that what Columbus and Washington wanted us to be doing? You can fool people for a brief period but reality always has a nasty habit of intruding.

Bloggie said...

Bloggie speaks. Regarding number of deans/colleges, a reliable bureacratic maxim is that busy work expands to fill the available space. So take one college, divide it in twain or into LSSer parts, and new the deans will huff and puff and otherwise justify their existences, bureaucratically expand, generate reports and events, but will in the end do no more real work than did the original unit. An example: in one organization that Bloggie observed, a travel audit function expanded from a part time employee at 20 hours a week to a full time director with assistants that produced an annual report showing how the department had saved the organization something like $60K. The report did not mention that it cost the organization well over a half million to achieve this "efficiency. "