A month into his doctoral studies, Martin Law learned his department would be merged.
Law was initially drawn to IU for his master’s degree because of its Department of Communication and Culture. Its reputation for collaborative research made it a perfect fit. He even decided to stay to earn his Ph.D. But soon after, he found out his program would change.
The reason was the creation of a new school, recommended by Provost and Executive Vice President Lauren Robel in February 2013. The Media School merger is one of several primary academic restructurings at IU in recent years, a time marked by immense change in the University.
The Media School will include the School of Journalism and the Department of Telecommunications, both of which will maintain most of their faculty and staff. The CMCL department will also be merged, but some parts will be left out.
One of the department’s three areas, Film and Media Studies, will be incorporated into the Media School. Only some faculty members of the other two areas of study — Performance and Ethnography and Rhetoric and Public Culture — will be joining the school. The rest will be dispersed.
For Law, it feels more like the program is being dissolved than merged, he says.
He came to IU expecting to collaborate with the three areas of the department to advance his research. Law will likely be able to take similar classes with the same faculty. But the classes won’t be held within a single department.
He sees opportunity in the Media School, but wonders what the merger might sacrifice for current students and faculty.
“What are you losing by melting these three departments down and turning them into something else?” Law said. “Do we just cut off the stuff that hangs out?”
Seeking efficiency
Within the last three years, IU has closed, created, renamed or merged seven schools.
The School of Continuing Studies shut its doors. The School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation adjusted its mission to become the School of Public Health. The School of Library and Information Science folded into the School of Informatics and Computing.
Two new hybrid schools formed — the School of Global and International Studies, which brought together parts of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Media School, which combined the School of Journalism and the departments of communication and culture and telecommunications.
At IUPUI, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and the Fairbanks School of Public Health were created.
Students on campus now will have seen more changes in IU-Bloomington’s academic structure than any previous generation.
These changes stem from the New Academic Directions report, commissioned by IU President Michael McRobbie in 2010. Its goal was to re-examine the academic structures on campus to make sure they were efficiently living up to IU’s core missions.
The report is riddled with references to the dire economic conditions the University faced since the recession hit. But Robel said the driving force behind the report was academic restructuring, not cost-cutting.
“None of these mergers were made with fiscal goals, they were more fiscal opportunities,” Robel said.
She said there was a disconnect between what McRobbie commissioned and what the committee presented. McRobbie wanted a focus on academic and programmatic restructuring, but the committee returned its report with a greater focus on economic concerns.
The University, at least at this point, doesn’t know if its gamble on restructuring will save money in the long run.
As many of the structural and programmatic changes are new or still in development, exact savings — or even costs — are nearly impossible to tell, said Munirpallam Venkataramanan, vice provost for strategic initiatives. And as budgets mesh and move across campus, comparing old budgets to new budgets is seldom apples to apples, he said.
There is a new need to increase efficiency, meaning using time, money and personnel more effectively, Venkataramanan said. It’s about doing more with the resources the University already has.
“The days when we don’t highly question education spending are behind us,” he said.
The mergers and new structures across campus illustrate the “efficiencies” New Academic Directions aimed to achieve. The report suggested new strategic structural innovations and the consolidation of administration in small academic units.
“When you have a small school you have the potential of diverting a great deal of resources away from the academic mission,” Robel said.
Robel further noted she does not expect a decrease in personnel who interact with students face to face. Rather, efficiencies are coming in the form of “back office savings,” or reduction in personnel who don’t directly interact with students. Attrition, or the practice of reducing personnel through retirements and resignations that are not replaced, will also help shrink schools as necessary.
While the overarching goals of the changes may be similar, each movement differs.
For the Media School, the merger is uprooting three well-established units. For the School of Continuing Studies, redundancies and outdated services were in need of restructuring. SGIS and the School of Public Health represented a shifting into 21st century needs and a desire to raise the profiles of each of those disciplines on campus. For the informatics merger, a struggling school was taken in by a stronger, larger unit.
These structural changes represent the opportunity for innovative change and the elimination of outdated or redundant services. At the same time, the changes have meant the redistribution of jobs and workloads, the separation from familiar colleagues and mentors or even the loss of an academic home.
School of Continuing Studies
Only a few months after the presentation of the New Academics Directions report, the University began taking action. One of the first moves was the closure of the School of Continuing Studies, which enrolled 4,000 undergraduate students across the state. The school was IU’s resource for adult or distance learners hoping to earn a bachelor’s degree by mail or, in more recent years, online.
Of all the changes resulting from the New Academic Directions report, only this closure noticeably saved IU money.
When the closure was announced, University officials said they estimated saving as much as $4 million. After making final totals, the University ended up saving about $3.96 million, Executive Vice President for University Academic Affairs John Applegate said.
The School of Continuing Studies was rarely visible on IU’s campus. The school did not have its own faculty — its courses were usually taught online by part-time graduate students.
Jim Johnson, currently the director for operations and student support at IU High School, was a former associate director within the School of Continuing Studies.
“People at IU didn’t understand how SCS worked,” Johnson said. “It didn’t fit in on campus.”
It became common for IU departments across campus to offer online classes. The School of Continuing Studies was no longer a central place for online education, Applegate said, and administrators didn’t see a need for it.
Human resources took the year that followed to help relocate jobs elsewhere on campus. Some of these employees moved to new positions in IU Online and other areas — positions the University would have needed to staff anyway, Applegate said.
But out of the 208 full- and part-time staff employed by the School of Continuing Studies before it merged, 56 employees no longer worked at IU the following year. Some took advantage of early retirement. Others could not find different jobs.
“The trick there is not to redistribute people for the sake of redistributing,” Applegate said.
University officials still hoped to shrink the total number of people employed. The closure eliminated the dean position for Dan Callison, who retired soon after, resulting in savings.
Students in the program were forced to either speed up their studies or transfer to other campuses. While most of the school’s degrees were moved into other schools, the online degree in Independent Studies was eliminated from IU-Bloomington.
A small niche of students took these self-paced online courses on a yearlong basis. For some students, Johnson said, a semester-paced course is just too much to handle. The closure eliminated this option.
Applegate said these students are welcome to seek accommodations through other channels at IU.
“They make compelling cases,” Applegate said, “but they aren’t compelling reasons to keep a school.”
School of Public Health
Though not explicitly mentioned in the New Academic Directions report, the segueing of HPER into the School of Public Health was motivated by modern health education needs.
Bloomington Faculty Council President Herb Terry said there was a desperate need for a public health institution in the state, and IU-Bloomington was the most appropriate university in the state to host such an institution.
The changes were largely internal and programmatic and placed an increased emphasis on health promotion and disease prevention.
Terry said he believes there was “substantial support” from the faculty in the move from HPER to the School of Public Health, which was finalized in late 2012.
Its restructuring also provided the University with the opportunity to access more federal research funding that is specifically earmarked for the study and education of public health issues.
The informatics merger
IU’s Graduate Library School was established in 1966 and later renamed the School of Library and Information Science. It has often ranked nationally as a top-10 school in its field in recent years.
The school had the smallest budget on campus. Within the last few years, library science enrollment declined nationally and at IU. Coupled with the competition for students from the former School of Informatics, the School of Library and Information Science was struggling.
New Academic Directions directed the small school to fold into the School of Informatics by 2013. It became the Department of Information and Library Sciences within the renamed School of Informatics and Computing.
The two schools were like “siblings who grew up in different environments,” said Debora Shaw, dean of the former School of Library and Information Science and now the department chair. The former school had about 12 faculty members, Robel said, many of which collaborated more closely with the School of Informatics than with library sciences.
It was clear the merger wouldn’t bring drastic savings like the closure of the School of Continuing Studies. The Department of Information and Library Science isn’t bringing in any profit for the new school — if anything, it’s costing the school money, informatics Dean Robert Schnabel said.
Student tuition fees brought in about $1 million less than budgeted for the department for the 2013-14 academic year. This put the department in the hole financially and caused it to use up some if its financial reserves, the school’s Senior Director for Finance and Administration John Tweedie said.
But the overall school is still financially healthy, thanks to steady enrollment in informatics programs and funds allocated by Robel. The merger has also helped the school avoid future costs.
Library and information science students who never had a career development department can now use these resources from the merged school. The merger also helped create a new graduate certificate in data science. The informatics school was able to avoid paying more to hire a Windows software professional it needed because the former School of Library and Information Sciences already had someone working in that position.
The merger may also lead to future savings. Shaw was demoted to chair of the Department of Information and Library Sciences within the informatics school. Though her salary actually increased, it is likely her successor, after Shaw’s retirement this month, will be paid less, Vice Provost of Faculty and Academic Affairs Thomas Gieryn said.
In short, mergers may not be cutting salaries right away. But years from now, schools could end up saving money with lower administrative salaries.
Research also brings in money. With more collaboration and a larger faculty, the school sees the potential for increased research grant funding, Tweedie said.
Eliminating the word “library” in an IU school title was painful for some nostalgic current and former students. Alumni will no longer receive School of Library and Information Science newsletters. Many students are still attached to the culture of the former school. In December, the school’s first graduating class decided to wear traditional lemon-yellow hoods, a symbol for the School of Library and Information Science.
School of Global and International Studies
The $53 million building under construction near the Herman B Wells Library is the physical embodiment of SGIS, though most of the academic programs and faculty resources it draws on already existed at IU.
The New Academic Directions report called for the creation of an international school that would better connect the resources that existed at IU.
Such a school, SGIS Associate Dean Maria Bucur-Deckard said, would raise the University’s international relations and foreign policy profile.
“It seemed like we had a lot of dots that we needed to connect,” Bucur said.
SGIS, approved by the trustees in August 2012, will incorporate teaching from more than 50 College units — including languages and cultural studies — and about eight other schools, including the Kelley School of Business and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
A new bachelor’s and master’s of science degree in Global Studies will be offered, and the combination of new and existing resources will create new academic pathways for students.
Bucur added that while many departments will be housed within SGIS, they won’t structurally change that much. But she does
foresee changes to academic and career advising, both areas in which the new hybrid school will employ its own personnel.
A desire to professionalize and collaborate will create the biggest changes for SGIS students. School requirements will mandate a minor in a professional school at IU, such as SPEA or the business school, bridging the liberal arts with practical experiences focused on specific careers.
“That’s a culture change for the entire campus,” Robel said of this combined focus. The hybrid structure of SGIS and the Media School will ideally help soften the sharp tension that has existed traditionally between professionalization and the liberal arts.
Bucur said the hybrid structure of SGIS will help achieve efficiencies mentioned throughout the New Academic Directions report. The hybrid within the College allows existing infrastructure, such as the budgetary office, undergraduate and graduate advisers and staff to avoid redundancies.
“It’s a new life form,” Robel said. “Can we take a set of astonishingly rich resources and make them visible to our students and accessible to our outside world?”
Media School
Discussion about restructuring the media and communication units on campus — the School of Journalism and the departments of communication and culture and telecommunications — stretches back more than a decade.
The plan to house the Media School in the College, Robel said, would save the school from employing the staff necessary to run a free-standing school, such as fiscal officers, tech staff and career services. By housing the Media School — and SGIS — in the College, the two hybrid structures can draw on existing College resources to reduce duplication of services.
Robel often models the Media School after SGIS, but the hybrids are in different in many ways.
But the Media School, with the challenge of changing the legacy of the School of Journalism and its independence from the College, posed a “high level of difficulty,” Robel said.
The merger, with its goal of combining three units, sparked months of active town hall meetings and impassioned responses from alumni, students and faculty.
By fall 2013, when various faculty committees began to outline new curriculum, programming and physical-space needs, it became clear that parts of CMCL would need a new home.
“The College has an obligation to find these people homes, but the devil is in the details,” Gieryn said. “I suspect we’ll lose some people through that.”
The Media School, the last of the seven primary New Academic Directions changes to take effect, will begin July 1.
A time of transition
When units merge, faculty, students and administrators are thrown into roles they never expected to serve. They’re forced to take time out of their teaching and research in order to plan curriculum, staff, names and buildings.
Many of these faculty members, like Communication and Culture Department Chair Jane Goodman, are planning a future school they will not be housed in. Goodman will most likely step down from the Faculty Advisory Board next year, she said.
When faculty advise mergers, they sacrifice time and teaching, but there is no alternative, BFC President Herb Terry said. These are the people who know the curriculum and purposes of schools best — who else would be qualified to define the future of a school?
Bonnie Brownlee, associate dean of the School of Journalism, serves on a number of committees that are helping shape the Media School’s future. It has been a slow process to understand the other merging units, she said. It’s not just a merger of classes and administrators — it’s a merger of theory, histories and cultures.
Despite optimism and a desire to create a new innovative school, students and faculty say it’s impossible to tell whether these academic mergers will be worth the time and effort.
But Martin Law thinks students should be willing to be a part of the process. He has been working an additional 10 hours every week on a graduate student advisory board.
Student concerns are crucial, Law said, and administrators need to be held accountable for putting student recommendations into action.
“If you’re going to ask for input, you should take that input,” Law said. It’s inevitable that these types of mergers will keep happening, he said, and for current students, they are often difficult to face.
Students like Law came to IU envisioning a certain type of education, and now, that image is changing.
“We didn’t sign up to be a part of a transition team when we enrolled,” he said. “It turns out it’s what we have to do.”
Follow reporter Matthew Glowicki on Twitter @MattGlo and follow reporter Samantha Schmidt on Twitter @schmidtsam7.
