Restructuring update: more schools

The chancellor is apparently now saying that he wants there to be at least 20 schools; in the latest released draft of his restructuring there were 18, including Medicine and Law. We have received word of two new schools in the works, in addition to the proposal for Computer Science.* We do not yet have a new, formal A9 proposal (unlike the case with Computer Science), so these are tentative. We will update when we get official proposals.

• The Department of Psychology will be removed from the proposed School of Social Sciences and allowed to form a School of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences, to be housed in a proposed College of Health and Human Sciences. Faculty currently in Psychology would be joined by faculty in behavior analysis and therapy.
• The Department of Technology will become a School of Technology in the (renamed) College of Science, Engineering, Technology, and Transportation (STTEM!).

Psychology is a large unit; technology is not. The rationale for who gets to retain their disciplinary integrity (by being promoted from department to school) and who does not (by being merged with others in a new school) is thus not clear.

We have also heard tell that there is discussion about changing the name of the proposed School of Homeland Security.

See the related (and updated) post on Restructuring Votes for the latest on that front.

Corrections and additions are welcome: dmj2@me.com.

*This presumably means that the count of 20 does not include medicine & law–as we’ve heard of three new schools on top of the 18 if medicine and law are included. The sixteen schools of the second version of the proposal would thus be joined by Computer Science, Psychology, Technology, and probably Transportation (split from applied technology). And there may be still more to come! In other words, the chancellor might end up proposing roughly half as many units as the number of departments we started with (42).