TITLE: Calling C.P. Snow
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 08, 2010  2:19 PM
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BODY:
A lot has been going on at my university the last few months
to keep me busy.  With significant budget cuts and a long-term
change in state funding of higher education, we are beginning
to see changes across campus.  Last month our provost
announced a move that will affect me and my department
intimately: the merger of the College of Natural Sciences
(CNS) with the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (CHFA).
Computer Science will go from being one department among seven
science/math/technology departments to a member of a college
twice as large and at least that much more diverse.

The merger came as a surprise to many of us on campus, so
there is a lot to do beyond simply combining operating budgets
and clerical staffs.  I expect everything to work out fine in
the end.  Colleges of arts and sciences are a common way to
organize universities like ours, both of the existing colleges
contain good people and many good programs, and we have a dean
especially well-suited to lead the merger.  Still, the next
eighteen months promise to deliver a lot of uncertainty and
change.  Change is hard, and the resulting college will be
something quite different from who we are now.  Part of me is
excited...  There are some immediate benefits for me and CS,
as we will now be in the same college with colleagues such as
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-09.html#e2009-09-09T22_04_47.htm">
   Roy Behrens</A>,
and with the departments with whom we have been working on a
new major in digital media.  Multidisciplinary work is easier
to do at the university when they fall under the same
administrative umbrella.

We are only getting started on working toward the merger, but
I've already noticed some interesting differences between the
two faculties.  For example, at the first meeting of the
department heads in my college with a faculty leader from the
other college, we learned that the humanities folks have been
working together on a college-wide theme of internationalization.
As part of this, they have been reading a common book and
participating in reading groups to discuss it.

This is a neat idea.  The book provides a common ground for
their faculty and helps them to work together toward a common
goal.  The discussion unifies their college.  Together, they
also create a backdrop against which many of them can do their
scholarly work, share ideas, and collaborate.

Now that we are on the way to becoming one college, the
humanities faculty have invited us to join them in the
conversation.  This is a gracious offer, which creates an
opportunity for us all to unify as a single faculty.  The
particular theme for this year, internationalization, is one
that has relevance in both the humanities and the sciences.
Many faculty in the sciences are deeply invested in issues
of globalization.  For this reason, there may well be some
cross-college discussion that results, and this interaction
will likely promote the merger of the colleges.

That said, I think the act of choosing a common book to read
and discuss in groups may reflect a difference between the
colleges, one that is either a matter of culture or a matter
of practice.  For the humanities folks, this kind of
discussion is a first-order activity.  It is what they do
within and across their disciplines.  For the science folks,
this kind of discussion is a second-order activity.  There
are common areas of work across the science departments,
such as bioinformatics, but even then the folks in biology,
chemistry, computer science, and math are all working on
their own problems in their own ways.  A general discussion
of issues in bioinformatics is viewed by most scientists as
<I>about</I> bioinformatics, not bioinformatics itself.

I know that this is a superficial analysis and that it
consists of more shades of gray than sharp lines.  At its
best, it is a simplification.  Still I found it interesting
to see and hear how science faculty responded to the offer.

Over the longer term, it will be interesting to see how
the merger of colleges affects what we in the sciences do,
and how we do it.  I expect something positive will happen
overall, as we come into more frequent contact with people
who think a little differently than we do.  I also expect
the day-to-day lives of most science faculty (and humanities
faculty as well) will go on as they are now.  Letterhead will
change, the names of secretaries will change, but scholarly
lives will go on.,

The changes will be fun.  Getting out of ruts is good for
the brain.
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