College of Arts and Sciences to be created
Provost Headrick announces merger, committees will set direction for college

As expected, Provost Thomas E. Headrick has announced that the faculties of Arts and Letters, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences and Mathematics will be merged into a College of Arts and Sciences.

The college will be formally established by next summer at the latest.

"There's strong support for it (a College of Arts and Sciences) among a broad range of the faculty and the UB community," Headrick said in an interview with the Reporter, noting that the Faculty Senate endorsed the proposal in June.

"There's still a number of issues to be worked out, but we can work those out over the course of this coming year."

Creation of a College of Arts and Sciences was Headrick's favored option for the reorganization of the three faculties called for in his academic planning document released in mid-February.

In the document, Headrick outlined numerous reasons for establishing a College of Arts and Sciences. Among them: having a single dean overseeing the arts and sciences would correct what he has called a "fragmented approach" to undergraduate education and provide for better management of problems and coordination of issues among the various arts and sciences faculties and departments.

Headrick said he will form two committees to help bring the arts and sciences together.

The Founder's Committee, composed essentially of faculty members, will "help set the tone and direction for the college," he said.

It will be chaired by David Triggle, vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School.

The committee, which will serve for two years, will focus on faculty and governance issues. During the first year, the committee will "come to grips with some of the major issues of trying to form this college," including its direction, its mission, how it balances its various responsibilities and how the separate organizational structures and cultures of the three separate faculties can be brought together.

The committee is not to develop any "hard-and-fast recommendations" during this first year, Headrick stressed. Its charge will be to study the issues involved in forming the new college and working in the second year with the new dean to develop the actual governance structure and the details of the organization and administration of the new college.

"I want them (committee members) to come into that having given a lot of serious study and thought to those kinds of issues so that they are prepared to give counsel to the new dean in a constructive way," he said.

A search committee will be set up at the same time as the Founder's Committee to conduct a search for a dean for the new college, Headrick said.

In addition, another panel will be formed "built around the current three deans" of the arts and sciences facultiesÑlikely the Arts and Sciences Deans' CouncilÑto examine some of the administrative and financial aspects of the merger.

Headrick added he also may form a committee to examine the "justifiable concern" about possible differences in approach to tenure and promotion issues among the three faculties.

Promotion and tenure issues

"One of the things that would be helpful is if there was simply an explanation given of the ways in which promotion and tenure have been handled in the three faculties and then identification of ways, when these faculties are merged, that these issues can to be attended to," he said. This will help, "not only to maintain continuity, but also to ensure that some of the young faculty's expectations haven't been shifted by the change in organization, with respect to the tenure process."

Headrick said that the meetings of the hearing panel convened to gather input from the university community on the reorganization of the arts and sciences were "extremely helpful," adding that a lot of issues that were raised during these meetings will be addressed by the committees involved in the transition to a College of Arts and Sciences.

Headrick stressed that the hearing panel's function was to gather information on the issue and provide a forum for community members to express their views, not to provide recommendations.

"If there had been a ground swell of negative reaction (against a College of Arts and Sciences) with strong reasons that I hadn't thought about, obviously that would've had an impact on me," he said. "But there wasn't. If anything, there was a strong positive reaction to the idea."

Hearings produced alternatives

The hearings, the provost added, produced some interesting alternatives that "have suggested things to us about how we ought to organize certain aspects of the campus, particularly in the natural and life sciences, that are not foreclosed by putting together a College of Arts and Sciences."

He noted that the proposal presented to the hearing panel to create a School of Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering is premature at this time, but is a good idea for the long run.

"It clearly makes sense, and we ought to position ourselves in making this transition to move in that direction," he said. "But investing a large amount of money in additional administration when we don't have the faculty infrastructure yet to justify it, I think, would be a mistake....But the idea is a good one and one that clearly is going to be part of our forward plan."