New provost Janet McNew wants to shuffle the institution’s academic cards. The faculty reorganization committee is busy dealing hands because all bets have to be placed this month.
McNew has challenged the faculty to ante up because she feels that the current structure needs improvement.
“The University of Tampa is groaning under the weight of growth,” McNew said.
Most of that groaning has come from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS). Dean Joseph Sclafani says rapid growth has caused the current college structure to become imbalanced.
“The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is three times as large as the College of Business, and that is no way to run a university,” Sclafani said.
Former CLAS dean Jeffrey Klepfer agrees.
“UT has grown out of the structure that we had when we were half this size. It just can’t work,” Klepfer said.
As a result, the committee’s three proposals all focus on restructuring CLAS, keeping the College of Business the same.
Cathy Kessenich, chair of nursing, welcomes improvement.
“What we have now doesn’t make sense. The current CLAS system is very large and unwieldy,” Kessenich observed.
Kathleen Ochshorn, Associate Professor of English, said “good leadership in the new college system will help us grow in a sound way.”
But she worries about the cost of reorganization and how it will be covered.
“I would be most in favor of reorganization if I saw that plans were going to have increased budgets and budgetary control,” Ochshorn said.
McNew explained that the costs will be based on the college model and how it is organized, but she said it probably would not exceed the expense of fixing the current two-college system.
The provost said her top two priorities are facilitating better interaction between professors and students and creating more interdisciplinary and intercollege cooperation.
McNew says most universities form by what she calls “historic accident.” She encourages the UT faculty to take this opportunity to determine its own infrastructure, even if it results in some anomalies.
Klepfer wants to make sure that departments are stacked by relatedness and not by the number of faculty or students or courses in the department.
But size still matters.
The more mouths to feed, the fewer scraps each one gets. Departments in the same college will have to compete for its resources and attention.
McNew hopes that the reorganization will offer department chairs and class faculty better access to their deans and the administration, the funding sources. She believes that more organized colleges will make faculty needs better known.
While a larger department may be more difficult for a dean to manage, it might wield more power to influence the curricular issues or get more resources. However, the committee wants all departments to receive equitable resources regardless of their size.
Sclafani thinks that the process will be an equalizer. Klepfer says there will always be competition for resources, but he predicts that this reorganization will distribute money to each college in a balanced way, leaving no one college more powerful than the next.
This would make faculty happy, an important factor in university success according to Sclafani: “When faculty is better served, students are better represented, and everybody’s a winner.”
McNew says a clearer chain of command will lead to better accessibility for students. She also thinks belonging to a specific college instead of just a broad university will give students a sense of identity.
“This is just one more indication of how dynamic UT is,” McNew said.